When Mimi Matthews’s surgery to repair a neck injury ruptured more than a decade ago, her world changed. Her planned career in law? Out of reach. Her passion for horseback riding? Out of the question. With her neck ever-present, Matthews was navigating an uncertain future with limitations she never expected.
But this traumatic injury gave her something else: a love of writing, which she has since turned into a successful, best-selling historical romance novelist. “It was definitely what got me back into writing,” Matthews says. “Every book I’ve written was written in bed.”
For Matthews, writing romance is a way to process the complex emotions that come with living with a disability. Reading the genre “reaffirms my belief that everything is going to be okay, and that everything I’m going through has meaning. I think romance is incredibly valuable in that sense,” she says.
Matthews isn’t the only one who finds comfort in the genre and its happy endings. Our media landscape isn’t known for positive portrayals of people with disabilities. But in romance novels, disabled characters are often portrayed as authentically human beings, worthy of love and intimacy. They have great hookups, epic love stories, and amazing sex. And as the romance genre becomes more diverse, more nuanced portrayals of disability are hitting the shelves.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s worth pointing out that romance novels haven’t always been the best at depicting disability. For decades, the genre has portrayed physical disabilities as barriers to love, particularly in historical romance novels about scarred war heroes. According to Sarah Wendell, co-founder of the site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, the trope was often used in stories as a shortcut to emotional growth for the protagonist.
Wendell says that disability has often been seen as a character trait, perhaps a bit too heavy-handed. “It’s been used to make characters who are behaving badly in other ways sympathetic, and… that in itself is a form of ableism, because it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re only sympathetic because you’re missing a body part,’ or ‘You have emotional issues.'” But things have changed in recent years. “I think we’ve moved from this idea of, ‘Your disability is part of the conflict,’ to, ‘Any disability is actually just part of the character,'” Wendell says.
Such is the case with Erica Ridley’s upcoming Regency novel, Hot Earl Summer, which tells the story of its axe-wielding heroine, Elizabeth Winchester, who deals with debilitating chronic pain and decides to defend her castle from power-hungry aristocrats. Ridley says she approaches writing about disability the same way she does about any diversity. “I wanted to write about gay characters who weren’t insecure about being gay,” she says. “I feel the same way about disability… it’s a part of who I am, just like any other aspect of my culture or religion.”
Ridley also points out that the traditional publishing industry hasn’t always been open to disability romance. [writing about] “The only way to publish is to publish rich, white, able-bodied, aristocratic novels.” So what changed? According to Ridley, the industry’s discourse only changed when the self-publishing boom revealed there was a market for diverse romances.
And as the market has expanded, so has the variety of disabilities we’re seeing on the pages. “In the last decade or so, we’ve started seeing a lot more neurodiversity,” says Jayashree Kambre, an English professor who specializes in popular romance novels.
Bestselling romance novelist Helen Huang wasn’t keen on making Stella, the protagonist of her first romance novel, “The Kiss Quotient,” autistic. She was surprised that people didn’t feel that way. “It was shocking, to think that it would be extraordinary to write about an autistic woman who wants to live her life like everyone else,” Huang says. In crafting the story, she drew on her own life experiences as an autistic woman. “When I wrote this character, I didn’t see myself as being so outlandish or brave because she comes from such a familiar place,” she says.
And yet, for Huang, writing Stella was an act of self-love: “It was very healthy for me at the time to write an autistic female character, to portray her sympathetically, rather than as an infantilized character to be pitied.”
Romance novel readers resonated with this; some had been yearning for years for positive portrayals of disability and neurodiversity in the books they loved. But that longing can also translate into pressure to only portray difference in a positive light. Matthews says she has felt that pressure: “I think sometimes able-bodied people who are so keen to champion disability representation are so desperate to insist on a level of acceptance that they fail to acknowledge the lived experiences of people who have been traumatized. [are] For example, “I am unhappy. I have lost something.”
Though the genre has made great strides toward more nuanced representations of disability, romance between two disabled characters is still rare, and that’s what author Hannah Bonham Young was looking for when she drafted “Out on a Limb,” about a woman with a limb disability, Win, and her dream man, Beau, an amputee.
Bonham Young says it was important to her to write two disabled characters with very different life experiences. “I wanted to make a point that the disabled experience is diverse,” she says. “Unfortunately, I think that even with the best intentions, romance stories where only one of the main characters is disabled and needs attention can sometimes come off as a bit preachy or like a how-to guide on how to love a disabled person.”
Ultimately, Bonham Young would like to see more romances in which disability is treated as a normal part of life. “I hope we can continue to ride this wave of more sensitivity, more nuance, less perfectionism,” she says. “We are messy human beings who have disabled bodies, who make mistakes, and who fall in love.”
In a society where disabled people are rarely given protagonists, making their love stories visible is powerful. Wendell agrees: “The message of love is that you are worthy of love. You don’t have to conform to some external standard to be loved. You can be loved just the way you are.”
If you’re interested in romance novels featuring characters with disabilities:
Mimi Matthews recommends The Arrangement by Mary Balogh
Erica Ridley recommends Alyssa Cole’s “Can’t Escape Love”
Hannah Bonham Young recommends Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert
Helen Hoang recommends Chloe Liese’s work
Jayashree Kamble recommends The Spymaster’s Woman by Joanna Bourne
Kalyani Saxena recommends The Winter Companion by Mimi Matthews
Kalyani Saxena is a journalist and writer who writes on romance and fantasy. She is an avid reader and is constantly on the quest for that perfect adversarial-to-romantic story arc.