(单词翻译:单击)
The intellectual disdain for novels enjoyed by women often went hand in hand with a paternalistic sense of unease about how these kinds of stories might influence the innocent, unsuspecting reader.
知识分子对女性所喜爱小说的蔑视，往往伴随着一种家长式的不安感，他们担心这类故事可能会影响无辜、不知情的读者。
“Let us go into the houses of the poor, and try to discover what is the effect on the maiden mind of the trash which maidens buy,” Edward G. Salmon suggested in his 1886 essay “What Girls Read.”
爱德华·萨尔蒙在1886年的文章《女孩读什么》中建议:“让我们走进穷人的房间，看看少女们买的垃圾书对少女的心灵有什么影响。”
“We should probably find that the high-flown conceits and pretensions of the poorer girls of the period, their dislike of manual work and love of freedom, spring largely from notions imbibed in the course of a perusal of their penny fictions.”
“我们也许会发现，那个时代贫穷姑娘们的狂妄自大与虚荣做作，她们对体力劳动的厌恶，对自由的热爱，很大程度上源于她们在细读这类廉价小说的过程中吸收的观念。”
Salmon might have been onto something.
萨尔蒙可能已经发现了什么。
I’m not here to suggest that all, or even most, romance novels aspire to be highbrow endeavors (the works of E. L. James in particular are still the most brain-meltingly awful and regressive things I’ve ever read), or that a novelist’s popularity is a metric for literary accomplishment.
我在这里并不是要表明所有的、甚至是大部分的言情小说都有志成为高深的作品(尤其是詹姆斯的作品，仍然是我读过的最令人伤脑筋、最倒退的东西)，也不是要表明小说家的受欢迎程度是衡量文学成就的标准。
Or that no “literary” fiction these days devotes sexually graphic attention to female ambitions and appetites.
也不是要表明，如今没有什么“文学”小说会对女性的野心和欲望进行性别描写。
But it’s worth considering where so much of the anxiety over popular stories written by and for women, especially romances, might stem from.
但值得思考的是，这么多的对女性所写的或为女性所写的通俗小说，尤其是言情小说的担忧可能来自哪里。
The history of fiction is full of stories about men who do; their deeds, wars, journeys, heroic triumphs are the texture of the tale.
小说史上充满了这么做的男人的故事; 他们的事迹、战争、旅程、英勇的胜利是故事的主题。
In stories about women, by contrast, characters primarily are: The action lies in their inner lives, dreams, conflicts, desires.
相反，在关于女性的故事中，人物主要是：情节在于她们的内心生活、梦想、冲突与欲望。
“Admiration for the heroine of a romantic novel … is love for an idealized image of oneself,” Rachel Brownstein wrote in her 1982 book, Becoming a Heroine.
瑞秋·布朗斯坦在她1982年出版的《成为女主角》一书中写道:“对言情小说中女主角的崇拜……是对自我理想化形象的热爱。”
The subversive potential of so many works derided as trash is that they focus on female interiority, female pleasure, female aspiration.
那么多被嘲笑为垃圾的作品，其颠覆性的潜力在于，它们关注女性的内心、女性的快乐、女性的抱负。
The “notions” sparked by romantic fiction and Nancy Meyers movies alike are that women’s earthly desires—for love, for sex, for chocolate cake, for professional elevation, for pristine Poggenpohl kitchens with white-marble backsplashes—can and should be gratified.
言情小说和南希·迈耶斯电影所引发的“观念”是，女性的世俗欲望——对爱、对性、对巧克力蛋糕、对升职、对有着白色大理石背板的博德宝整洁厨房的欲望——可以而且应该得到满足。
How fitting, then, that many of the ideas this genre draws from were pioneered by a woman whom hardly anyone remembers.
这一类小说的许多思想都是由一个几乎没有人记得的女人开创的，这是多么相称啊。
So argues the historian Hilary A. Hallett in Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood.
历史学家希拉里·哈利特在《发现女孩: 埃莉诺·格林是如何创造现代爱情故事并征服早期好莱坞》一书中提出了上述观点。
