Three stories to celebrate the centenary of the British publishers of romantic fiction, Mills & Boon, are cross-cut.
In 1908 Mary Boon, from a wealthy family, and recently married to the lower class Charlie, supports him financially when he and his business partner, Gerald Mills, start a publishing house specializing in brightly-packaged, inexpensive and easy-to-read fiction. Charles' innovative idea is that the readers will also be the writers, actually being invited to submit their own plot-lines for publication. When the First World War breaks out Charlie enlists in the Royal Navy and Mary runs the publishing house herself. She is aware of the lack of passion in her own marriage when she accidentally witnesses a married male employee having sex with a female colleague. On Charlie's return she has become a much more forceful character and it is her idea that Mills and Boon specialize in love stories aimed at the female reader, telling her husband that "Women need romance."
In the 1970s Janet, a clumsy,much put-upon secretary, accompanies her elderly, widowed mother to hospital for the latter's hip replacement and she develops a crush on the handsome doctor performing the operation, ultimately making a fool of herself by stalking him and gate-crashing his party where she falls into a hot-tub. On the plus side, she creates a romanticized version of them both,with herself as the glamorous Nurse Violetta Kiss and him as a saturnine love object, mourning his late wife and whom she seduces in his shower. The resultant novel that she writes about them is accepted by Mills and Boon and she is offered work as a staff writer for them.
In 2008, Kirstie, a buttoned-up, thirty-something college lecturer specializing in the history of fiction, lives with her reliable but dull partner, Nick, and finds herself attracted to the aggressively sexual Jake, a 23-year-old student who never seems to wear a shirt. After sparring with him in class, she succumbs to a spot of passion in the college library with him, and starts to make herself look more glamorous. Ultimately she leaves Nick for him, knowing that the age gap may provide difficulties but accepting, as Mary Boon had commented some ninety years earlier, that women need romance.
From Wikipedia:
The first thread revolves around the establishment of Mills & Boon itself, and the relationship between Charles Boon (Daniel Mays) and his wife Mary (Jodie Whittaker). Despite the youthful idealism that saw him establish the company with his friend and win his wife's love, and the nature of the stories he oversees from hopeful authors, Charles is himself ironically blind to Mary's repeated attempts to inject passion into their relationship. This constant inability to realise—or at least acknowledge—the emotional needs of his wife or to consider her and their son as significant in their own right is a constant plot point, finally leading to a confrontation between husband & wife following Mills's death from cancer at the end of the 20s. This in turn results in the epiphany that, along with an infusion of cash from a longtime employee who replaces Mills as a partner in the business, transforms the company into a single genre publishing house focusing on populist romance novels from the female perspective.
The second moves to 1974 and follows the fictitious Janet Bottomley (Olivia Colman), a dowdy typist who lives with her mother and is an avid fan of Mills & Boon stories. When her mother has to go into hospital for a hip replacement, she becomes infatuated with the arrogant surgeon handling the case. At first this inspires her to write a manuscript translating the infatuation into a hospital romance, but as she continues to write she begins to stalk him, culminating in an embarrassing confrontation at his birthday party. Soon afterwards however, she receives the welcome news that Mills & Boon have accepted her manuscript. Even more welcome is the astonishing amount the book will earn her, allowing her to quit her job to write full-time under the name Raquel Pretty.
The third involves the fictitious Kirstie (Emilia Fox), a 30-something university English lecturer in 2008 teaching a unit on modern romance using the output of Mills & Boon. Jake (O.T. Fagbenle), a university student in his early 20s acting on his long distance infatuation with her enrolls in the unit and soon begins forcefully courting her. Initially confused and repelled, Kirstie soon realises that he displays passion for her and for life that she can no longer find with her current partner Nick with whom she is about to purchase a house. Challenged by Jake in and out of class, she finds herself giving into her desires and has an affair with him which she eventually confesses to Nick. Ironically, her partner's desire to "get through this" spells the end of that relationship as Kirstie walks out due to the same lack of passion that led to the affair. Following a confrontation in class during which Jake sums up the prevalence of heroines seeking rape/forceful sex from their suitors in many modern romance stories as an excuse for women to have passion without the responsibility of guilt, she commits herself and the two become a couple for however long the passion lasts.
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