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What Is A Historyscope?

Westerners are not only known as history ignoramuses, but double dumbass history ignoramuses when it comes to Romance novelist history. Since I'm the one-and-only Historyscoper (tm), let me quickly bring you up to speed before you dive into my Master Historyscope.

List of Romance novelists.

All those women left back home during all the military fun add up to a big year for the ding-dong Bronte (Brontë) Sisters, who live in a lonely parsonage in Yorkshire England with their brother Branwell and build their brains to epic proportions? On Oct. 16, 1847 Charlotte Bronte (1816-55) (eldest sister) pub. her 2nd novel (the first, The Professor was rejected, and is later pub. posth.) Jane Eyre: An Autobiography under the alias Currer Bell, about a meek, plain (not beautiful, so Bronte can make a moral point?) orphan governess, raised at Gateshead and sent to horrible Lowood School by her mean guardian aunt, becoming governess at Thornfield Manor, where she falls in love with her tormented, mysterious and tragic employer Edward Rochester (whose creole wife Bertha died in a fire), after which she moves in with the Rivers family in Marsh's End (Moor House), then Morton, where her fish-cold clergyman-cousin St. John Rivers proposes to her, after which she reunites with and marries Rochester at his Ferndean House; the first novel written by a woman from a woman's point of view?; "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day" (first line); in Dec. Anne Bronte (1820-49) (middle sister) pub. Agnes Grey under the alias Acton Bell; a bankrupt minister's daughter becomes a governess to wealthy spoiled children of the Bloomfields and Murrays, then marries a man who loves her for herself and lives happily ever after; one of George Moore's favorites; in Dec. Emily Bronte (Brontë) (1818-48) (youngest sister) pub. her only novel Wuthering Heights under the alias Ellis Bell, about the doomed love between the sinister Byronic hero and Liverpool foundling Heathcliff (1764-1802) (son of the Devil?) and his beautiful foster sister Catherine Earnshaw (1765-84) on the Yorkshire Moors, and how he screws her up after she dumps him for higher class Edgar Linton (1762-1801) in 1783, causing her to go mad and die during childbirth on Mar. 20, 1784, while he elopes with her sister Isabella Linton (1765-97) in Feb. 1784 and mistreats her, causing her to escape to London and give birth to son Linton Heathcliff (1784-) before dying in 1797, after which Catherine's daughter Cathy (1784-) marries Linton Heathcliff in Aug. 1801, and he dies in Sept., then Heathcliff dies in Apr. 1802; meanwhile in 1801 newcomer Mr. Lockwood of Thrushcross Grange gets housekeeper Ellen "Nelly" Dean to tell him the whole story so he can write it down; "Wuthering being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather"; written in an interlocking fashion like Matryoshka dolls.

In 1908 Mills and Boon pub. house is founded in London, England by Gerald Rusgrove Mills (1877-1928) and Charles Boon (1877-1943) as a gen. publisher, going on to concentrate on romantic novels in the 1920s and 1930s; in 1971 it is acquired by Harlequin Enterprises of Toronto, Canada, with 500+ titles a year, growing to 100 a month after the advent of the Internet and ebooks; hit titles incl. "The Dark Stranger", "Staff Nurses in Love", "The Loved and the Feared", "Consuming Passion", "Sister at Ryeminster", and "Theatre Sister".

In 1922 Edgbaston, Birmingham, England-born Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland (1901-2000) pub. her first novel Jigsaw, which becomes a bestseller, followed by a torrent of 723 books pub. by 2000, making her the #1-selling novelist on Earth and the Queen of Romance; she is created dame in 1991. On May 21, 2000 she dies in Hertfordshire after selling 750M-2B copies of 723 books in 36 languages, and leaving 160 unedited mss. at her 400-acre estate Camfield Place.

In 1968 Hampstead, London, England-born Jacqueline Jill "Jackie" Collins (1937-2015) (sister of actress Joan Collins) pub. her first novel The World is Full of Married Men, which Barbara Cartland calls "Nasty, filthy and disgusting"; it is banned in Australia and South Africa, making it more popular and launching her all-bestseller career? She does, er, dies on Sept. 19, 2015 in Beverly Hills, Calif. of breast cancer after pub. 32 novels, all NYT bestsellers (500M+ copies in 40 languages), with eight filmed.

In 1973 New York City-born (Roman Catholic) Danielle Steel (Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel) (1947-), daughter of a German Jewish immigrant father and Portuguese immigrant mother pub. her first novel Going Home, laundhing her romance drama novel career. She goes on to sell 500M+ copies in the next 30 years and 800M copies in the next 70 years.

On Mar. 20, 1992 Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct (Carolco Pictures) (TriStar Pictures) debuts, written by Joe Eszterhas, becoming the breakthrough role for Meadville, Penn.-born former model Sharon Yvonne Stone (1958-) for her beaver-glimpsing leg-crossing scene during a police interrogation (shot without her knowledge?), in the role of Calif. crime novelist and serial killer Catherine Davis Tramell, who likes to tie up her johns incl. Det. Nick Curran (Michael Douglas), knife them, then tell about it in her bestselling novels, then beg to be taken in sansa panties to show she's got nothing to hide; Jeanne Tripplehorn plays bi murderer Dr. Beth Garner, pissing-off the LGBT crowd; #9 movie of 1992 ($118M U.S. and $352.9M worldwide box office on a $49M budget).

On Sept. 5, 2018 romance novelist Nancy Crmpton Brophy (1950-) of Portland, Ore., known for writing about spousal murder in "How to Murder Your Husband" et al. is arrested for murdering her chef hubby Daniel Brophy.