The Agony and the Candlelight Ecstasy
Vivian Stephens Kicked Off the Sexy Contemporary Romance Boom in 1980 with Dell's Candlelight Ecstasy
In December 1980, Vivian Stephens launched a new line of contemporary category romance at Dell: Candlelight Ecstasy. The line pushed the envelope when it came to sex and sensuality on the page.
But how sexy are they? And how do the books hold up in 2023?
In part 1, I’ll cover the history of the Candlelight Ecstasy line and why I think it’s so interesting. In part 2, I’ll share recaps and my impressions of the books I read in the line. I’ve had a surprisingly high success rate!
(Sorry for all the two-parters - by the time I get the context out, Substack is always yelling at me for writing too much!!)
The Agony of Collecting Romance
I probably don’t talk about this enough outside of my Instagram stories, but I’m a vintage romance collector.
My desire to collect and read older romances has grown as I’ve been diving more into the history of the romance genre, which is motivated by a desire to better contextualize the things I’m observing in romances coming out today.
I started collecting Candlelight Ecstasy about a year ago when I bought some big random lots of romance for cheap on eBay. As I read more about the line, I started seeking out individual titles to round out the collection, and one day I realized I had about 90.
And, up until a month ago…I still hadn’t read any of them.
Now, I do not believe I will ever read every book I collect. I like having them for lots of other reasons and I’ll get into that more at a future date.
However, the time finally seemed right for me to make my way through some of this collection and draw my own conclusions about the books instead of just reading about them in other sources. So that’s what I did!
But first, let’s talk about the historical context for this line and why I think it’s interesting.
The History of Candlelight Ecstasy
The Candlelight Ecstasy line was pitched by Vivian Stephens, who started at Dell in 1978 as an associate editor on the Candlelight Books line. Candlelight published formulaic romances that failed to leave much of a mark in reader’s minds, and from various accounts, it sounds like as soon as someone at the top realized it existed, it would have been on the chopping block due to unimpressive sales or market interest.1
“It was a department no editor wanted to be bothered with,” [Stephens] said. “Nobody explained anything to me because no one knew and nobody cared.”
—Vivian Stephens, Texas Monthly September 2020
Vivian Stephens Helped Turn Romance Writing Into a Billion-Dollar Industry. Then She Got Pushed Out
Stephens wasn’t satisfied with the status quo: she conducted her own consumer research by observing romance buyers and talking to them about what they wanted. What she learned aligned with own instincts that there was an opportunity for Dell to capture the cultural zeitgeist by offering sexier romances that reflected the lives of American women at the time, who were increasingly entering professional roles and rethinking courtship, marriage, sexuality, and what would bring fulfillment in life.
That was when Stephens began looking for writers who could create female characters of substance. “What does a heroine have to offer a worldly man if she’s not experienced in bed or on the job?”…
Stephens wanted to update the model with women whose experiences more closely resembled her own.
Her first such book as an editor, Morning Rose, Evening Savage [by Amii Lorin]… sold so well that within eight months Stephens was editor in chief of Candlelight. In 1980 she pitched her bosses on a new, sexier line called Candlelight Ecstasy, which launched in December.
Vivian Stephens Helped Turn Romance Writing Into a Billion-Dollar Industry. Then She Got Pushed Out
“Vivian suspected that readers, like she, wanted to go beyond the threshold of the bedroom door, not necessarily in terms of explicit sexual description, but in terms of passion and emotional satisfaction.”2
According to Love Lines, a consumer-focused book about romance published in 1983, the first two Candlelight Ecstasy books sold out within a week, promoted solely through word of mouth.
The first two books released in December 1980 were by Amii Lorin, who had proven out the formula in the Candlelight Books line, and Jayne Castle (aka Jayne Ann Krentz), an author with a few books under her belt on other lines.
It’s generally accepted that when it came to category romance lines, Candlelight Ecstasy was the first to “consummate sex without interruption.”
By 1982, Dell reported that the line was selling 30 million copies a year. This was right smack in the middle of the Romance Wars (1980-1984), in which the newly-formed Silhouette was fighting to challenge Harlequin’s dominance and both companies were investing millions in advertising.
Harlequin, Silhouette, and other publishers were creating new category romance lines at a frantic pace, and they definitely took note of the consumer response to the sexier Candlelight Ecstasy line. More on-page sensuality with characters engaging in pre-marital sex started appearing on page and on bookshelves, and readers were eating it up.
Stephens was also a ground-breaker when it came to racial representation in traditionally-published romance: she made a concerted effort to acquire and publish authors of color writing characters of color.
The marketability of so-called “ethnic” romances had been questioned, but Entwined Destinies by Rosalind Welles (the pseudonym of Elsie B. Washington, a Black journalist) featured a Black romance and sold 40,000 copies on its first run with Candlelight Romance in 1980.3 The book is often credited as the first-known category romance published by a Black author with two Black main characters.
Stephens continued her efforts to publish authors of color in the Ecstasy line
Golden Fire, Silver Ice by Marisa de Zavala (the pseudonym of Mexican-American author Celina Rios Mullan), credited as the first Latinx category romance with two Mexican American main characters.4
Web of Desire by Jean Hager (who is “one-eighth Cherokee”), which features two Indigenous American main characters.
The Tender Mending by Lia Sanders (the pseudonym of Black authors Angela Jackson & Sandra Jackson-Opoku5), the first Candlelight Ecstasy with Black characters.
In 1983, Dell failed to value Stephens enough to match the salary offer she received from competitor Harlequin, and so Stephens left for the much more prestigious role. At Harlequin, Stephens launched Harlequin American romance, but the end of the romance wars also brought an end to her new job: Harlequin let her go amidst their acquisition of Silhouette.6
By the way, if you’re interested in this era of romance, you may be interested in this episode about a romance documentary from the 1980s.
The Ecstasy of Finally Reading My Collection
Because I am a giant nerd, I keep track of my romance collection in a relational database I built in Notion. I imported every single title and keep track of the ones I have in my collection or want to target for my collection, and also my reading status.
As you can see in the screenshot below, there are 533 total books in the Candlelight Ecstasy line, and I own 17% of them (91). The next column is what % of that 91 I have actually read. As of today, that stands at 15%, which is a total of 14 books.
Up Next:
In part 2, I will share recaps and my impressions of the 14 books I’ve read from the line so far. I’ve had a surprisingly high success rate…stay tuned!
I’m toggling between a few sources here: the 2020 Texas Monthly article by Mimi Swartz and the 1983 book Love Lines by Rosemary Guiley, which includes contemporary interviews and perspectives from Stephens as well as others working in publishing at the time.
When I did my research on the Romance Wars of the early 1980s (presented at IASPR 2023), I read lots of contemporary accounts in newspapers and industry publications like Publisher’s Weekly that hit on other aspects of the story in more detail. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to mostly refer to Love Lines for older perspectives because I get the sense that Guiley was using a lot of the same primary sources I read.
Page 76, Love Lines by Rosemary Guiley
Browne Pop Culture Library tweet c. 2019 showing clippings from a 1982 Romantic Times issue about “ethnic romance”
Steve Ammidown has more about Lia Sanders here and I also found both Angela Jackson and Sandra Jackson-Opoku quoted in this Chicago Tribune article about a writing group at OBAC, a center that grew out of the national Black Arts Movement.
There’s more to this story - Jayashree Kamble has been investigating and has recent and forthcoming publications about it.
It's so cool to see how you're collecting, keeping track of, and speaking about these books. 💖 Do you see yourself completing your collection by owning (or reading) all 500+ books?