Since the inception of the modern (read: sexually explicit) romance novel in 1972 with the publication of Kathleen Woodiwiss’s *The Flame and the Flower *amid the second wave feminist movement, a debate has waged over whether the romance novel is a viable force for feminist progress. According to detractors, the form entrenches the sexist cultural norm that, as Ann Barr Snitow characterized it in 1971, “pleasure for women is men.” Fifty-some years later, the romance has still not fully escaped the shadow of this criticism.

I bring up the 1970s and the origins of modern romance to illustrate what might appear a curious dynamic in the whole romance discourse—namely, how the genre takes fire from both sides of the political aisle. From Snitow’s time up to the present day, feminist literati will tend to poo-poo romance’s literary merit (Snitow’s contemporary Ann Douglas is considerably cattier on the issue) while scorning the centrality of marriage plots and all they suggest about women’s dependent status; conservative voices, on the other hand, may trivialize the hobby of romance reading for its girliness or suppress the books for their sexually explicit content. But considering its origins, having been born amid the cultural liberalization and immediate backlash of the 1970s and 1980s—a conflict which never fully resolved—romance’s seeming friendless-ness makes slightly more sense. It’s not *just *popularity painting a target on its back. Rather, romance’s popularity represented—and still represents—a powerful potential influence, and ergo a cause for universal consternation: on the one hand, it might renegotiate our society’s gendered politics of desire—and on the other hand, it might not.

So the debate has waged from the ’70s up to the present. Much like the romance heroine, its heights are passionate and intelligent. Janice Radway’s 1982 Reading the Romance, responding directly to Snitow and her camp, records the insights of romance readers into the needs and interests the genre was serving for them; the Black Romance Has a History podcast discusses the boom of Black romance writers in 1994 and interrogates the romance genre’s incapacity to imagine certain classes people as loveable; Andrea Long Chu explores how Sally Rooney’s oeuvre portrays love and literature as parallel instincts inherently fraught by convention and commodification; and just this June, Tiffany Fritz argued on this site for how N.K. Jemisin’s *The Fifth Season *uses sex scenes to thematize its characters’ experiences of dehumanization and liberation. The nadir is also quite low. Naturally, the emergence of the romantasy genre—so popular, and so girly—has flung yet more fuel on old smoldering fires of resentment and given rise to an attendant cottage industry of social media criticism that generally consists of rehearsing a given book’s plot, pausing occasionally to roll one’s eyes to camera.

But to some degree, romance’s boosters and critics (even the haters) often have the same aspirations for the genre, to uplift its subjects and readers into the humanizing light of love. There is only disagreement on how well this is being achieved. If there is a point of near perfect agreement among the romance reading community, it is that a proper romance concludes in an HEA, a “Happily Ever After.” Who and what formulations may be included in the HEA have grown more inclusive as romance and culture writ-large have been pushed toward becoming more progressive. I can’t speak to absolute numbers, but there seems to be a greater emphasis on the presence of queer, asexual, and polyamorous dynamics in recent years. John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build a Nest In, a romantic fantasy with a central asexual couple, received a 2025 Hugo nomination, and the ultimate Best Novel winner, the fantasy mystery The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, features a queer protagonist.

And yet. I feel that even this progress has not completely given the lie to Snitow’s old claim. Pleasure for women may have diversified from just “men” to a slightly wider range of options, but by and large there is still a drive toward being part of a couple (or in rarer cases a polycule) as the definitive feature of the HEA. Happiness is predicated on romantic fulfillment. We are, here at Reactor, all spec fic readers, and it is speculative fiction’s bailiwick to expand our sense of possibility. When it comes to Happily Ever Afters, there remains to ask one obvious question: what about being alone?

Well, what indeed about that? Are we able to imagine it being as satisfying and fulfilling as the romantic couple?

Enter Ursula Le Guin with her novelette “Solitude,” published in 1984:

After a long time she said in Hainish, “I agree. I have no power over you. But I have certain rights; the right of loyalty; of love.”

“Nothing is right that puts me in your power,” I said, still in my language.

It’s probably safe, I think, to presume most readers on this site are at least somewhat passingly familiar with Le Guin’s work. She is one of the most famous writers of science fiction and fantasy as well as just one of the most notable figures in English letters of the twentieth century. By 1994, she had already published what are now her two most well-regarded works, *The Left Hand of Darkness *in 1969 and *The Dispossessed *in 1974, not to mention 1973’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a canonical, iconic work of sci-fi short fiction. (There, see how redundant all that information was to you?) But Le Guin was also by 1994 well into a feminist reexamination of her earlier work, precipitated by the critiques of those earlier novels’ representations of gender, and it is in this context in which her project in “Solitude” is best understood.

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The Unreal and the Real

Ursula K. Le Guin

Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

Originally published in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine, “Solitude” is in many respects a classic coming-of-age story—with one key twist. One of Le Guin’s Hainish tales, it relates the life of Ren, daughter of an ethnologist for the Hainish Ekumen (if you don’t happen to be familiar with Le Guin’s books, think Star Trek’s Federation and you won’t be too far off) who is part of a team tasked with studying the population of the planet Eleven-Soro. The problem is that the Sorovians, who live exclusively in “dispersed villages” and refuse to answer any questions, present an especially intransigent case. Observers are either driven off with violence or treated as social pariahs—one is labelled by the locals “Aunt Crazy-Jabber”—for trying to learn things.

“There’s no way,” she told my mother, for an adult to learn anything. They don’t ask questions, they don’t answer questions. Whatever they learn, they learn when they’re children.”

Aha! said my mother to herself, looking at Borny and me.

So Ren and her brother are deputized to learn about the Sorovian way of life along with their mother, Leaf. They spend years living in a village, known to the locals as an “Auntring,” learning about the peculiar hermit-like culture that encompasses the whole society. When Leaf talks, generally derisively, about the local people, Ren tries to explain to her that “there aren’t any people here now. There are persons here now.” Leaf does not appear to understand.

All Sorovian adults live in individual dwellings, women in the Auntrings and grown men in nearby satellite dwellings. Upon reaching puberty, Ren’s brother Borny even accepts being driven out of the village, against the objections of their mother, to join a “boygroup” and research the rituals of male adolescence. When he returns, Leaf declares that they have gathered enough data and requests an extraction. Only, Ren does not wish to go. She says she wants to stay on Soro. She says she wants to be a person.

As with much of Le Guin’s writing, the core tension in “Solitude” is philosophically driven rather than plot-driven, and revolves in this particular case around the disagreement that Ren and her mother have over the appeals of Sorovian life. And while she is structurally the antagonist of the story, Leaf’s perspective, it must be said, will probably resonate more with readers. Given the certainty that you are reading this on the internet, I can predict with equal certainty that you, reader, would find Sorovian society as dull and as lonely as Leaf does, lacking in companionship or even just most of the things we would recognize as culture: no TV, no video games, no podcasts, no restaurants, no schools, no art galleries, no theatre—some communal singing circles, but certainly no Beyoncé’s *Cowboy Carter *World Tours—and also, most saliently to the readers of this site, no books!

This dearth of culture and industry is an outgrowth of the Sorovian mandate to independence. Adults on Soro will not even enter one another’s houses. Tricky to cooperate on a project, like, say, running a printing press, when everyone is going their own way, to say nothing of how a Sorovian might object to the concept of having an editor. For Leaf, this cultural prerogative produces not just the desired solitude but real loneliness. Soro is defined for her by its lacks, more in regards to the nature of human connection than technological amenities. It is Ren’s, and by extension Le Guin’s, project to persuade us that this intuitive read on Sorovian life is wrong.

There’s a phrase they repeat on Soro: “Avoid magic.”

Leaf interprets this expression as superstition, the local yokels’ reaction to the ruins they find of their planet’s previous technological age. Word to Arthur C. Clarke. But Ren is emphatic that this interpretation is entirely wrong: “‘But technology isn’t magic, I said. […] ‘The *people *were. They were sorcerors. They used their power to get power over other persons. To live rightly a person has to keep away from magic.’” (Note: Le Guin uses the spelling “sorcerors” throughout “Solitude.”)

This is the crux of the misunderstanding that shapes Ren’s story, what is meant by “magic,” and relatedly the distinction Ren draws between “people” and “persons.” Our teacher, she explains:

The key, of course, is the word “tekell,” which translates so nicely into the Hainish word “magic,” an art or power that violates natural law. It was hard for Mother to understand that some persons truly consider most human relationships to be unnatural; that marriage, for instance, or government, can be seen as an evil spell woven by sorcerors. It is hard for her people to believe magic.

Here is the ideological kernel of Sorovian life that informs their practice of solitude. All coercion, “magic,” is unnatural, and they perceive far more interactions as being coercive than the Hainish (or we readers, as “people”) tend to. Indeed, they are so sensitive to “magic” as to come across really rather paranoid; yet it seems Le Guin’s project in “Solitude” to persuade us that they are also meaningfully correct, if not about the proper way a person ought to live then at least about how ubiquitous is magic.

This idea is demonstrated most poignantly when Ren is removed for a time back to the Hainish ship with her family, a vessel that is filled with “sorcerors,” i.e., people: “People around me, people with me, people pressing on me, pressing me to be one of them, to be one of them, one of the people.” She likens her experience among the Hainish to her brother Borny’s time in the “boygroup” on Soro. Of course, Ren is perfectly rational in understanding how totally materially different their two experiences have been. Borny was alone, exposed to the elements and to violence from other boys and men. When he returns safe and decides to depart to study in a Hainish school, we can only approve, even be relieved alongside Leaf. By comparison, Ren remarks how:

I was cared for, clothed, fed so richly I got sick, kept so warm I felt feverish, guided, reasoned with, praised, befriended by citizens of a very great city, offered a share in their power, which they saw as humanity. He and I had both fallen among sorcerors. Both he and I could see the good in the people we were among, but neither he nor I could live with them.

In acknowledging the good of the Hainish way of life, and not submitting to it anyway, Ren proves her Sorovian aversion to magic is not superstition (ideological and naive) or paranoia (pathological and naive). It is, rather, about deciding who and what will inform what makes her life meaningful. Ren makes the choice that it won’t be the powerful Hainish style of humanity, that would make her, her mother urges, “ten times the woman you could ever be on Soro.” To able to decide for herself, to “make her soul,” she must avoid magic. Like government. Or marriage.

Which brings us back to the romance novel.

Whether or not it is really worth avoiding—and there are many robust arguments already in existence that it is not—the magic, or influence, or coercion Ren describes is real. Being one of a people informs not just what we are obliged to do, like pay taxes, or not park on the street without a permit on weekdays between the hours of 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., but what we believe we want.

This explains some of the allure of the romance novel’s mandate to deliver the HEA. Love and, generally, being in a couple is not merely something we want but a kind of social culmination, very often marked by literal ceremony. If a union is wanted for its own sake, which I heartily allow, then it comes too with the not-inconsiderable bonus of social approbation. Not just the pleasure of pleasure, but the pleasure of success, of successfully being one of them, one of the people. As Radway’s study of the romance in the ’80s identifies, the romance genre is not itself blind to this dynamic, but is conscious of crafting the fantasy of the woman having things both ways, getting both the love she wants and the security and approval marriage provides in her society. What the feminists of the second wave then oblige us to ask is how much we would really want the former without the latter. To which Le Guin replies, How would you know? First, you would have to avoid magic! Which is pretty damn hard.

Lest we appear to be ending on the cheery note of “not believing too easily in love,” perhaps we should all take several steps back, for perspective. It is likely a mistake, first of all, to read “Solitude” too literally (as people are sometimes inclined to do with Le Guin’s more famous “Omelas”) as making an unalloyed case for the Sorovian lifestyle. Ren’s tale ends on an ambivalent note, satisfied with her choice to remain on Soro, but at once reconciled to the fact that she is “of two worlds; I am a person of this world, and a woman of my mother’s people. I owe my knowledge to the children of her people.”

Moreover, while Le Guin’s canon displays a strong anarchist and individualist through-line, she was not against complex societies per se and, indeed, not at all against the monogamous romantic couple. Her work contains one of the more stirring defenses of the political importance of love stories. Rakam, heroine of “A Women’s Liberation” in the 1995 collection Four Ways to Forgiveness, reflects on her choice to close her account of experiences of enslavement, emancipation, and activism with her love story: “What is one man’s and one woman’s love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens.”

…which rips. Tattoo it on the back of my eyelids. But then, how to square Ren with Rakam?

There is another phrase they repeat on Soro: “Be aware!” As pithy and opaque in meaning as “avoid magic” (and as roundly mocked by Leaf; “Be aware of what?”), it is an equally central Sorovian ethos. Awareness is the one thing they cultivate in abundance in all that solitude. Ren practices being aware as a child on Soro, and she practices it still in the time she is on the Hainish ship. When she is finally a liberated adult and the novelties of adventure start to wear thin—“another hill, another river, another man, another day”—it’s the exercise of awareness that allows her to rekindle an appreciation for life and for living:

By solitude the soul escapes from doing of suffering magic; it escapes from dullness, from boredom by being aware. Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It may be irritating, but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can do, I think.

This, as much as anarchism, is quintessentially Le Guin—her committed attention to the negative space of human experience, moments that are not so momentous, experiences not so neurochemically intense. Such things, which constitute by a vast margin the stuff of life, account for the agreement between Ren and Rakam, whose life stories are testaments to the significance of little things, like a person’s desire, like being a person.

It seems fairly plain that at this point in her career, in the mid-Nineties, Le Guin was still grappling with ideas of the second-wave feminist movement, even as the project’s political momentum had been pretty effectively halted. The title of “A Woman’s Liberation” offers an unsubtle nod to this preoccupation. “It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom,” her Rakam decides, appropriately for a character who has escaped from very literal bondage, sexual exploitation, and gendered political repression. But through Ren’s story, Le Guin argues that there are further bonds on women’s and all people’s lives, restraining not the body but the mind. Ren calls them “magic.” It is hard for her mother’s people—and likely for most of us—to believe in magic. That’s what makes it such a good trick.

It’s not that I want to accuse the romance genre of playing a trick on us all—it’s just that I’ve come to sincerely believe that that’s what it’s doing. It is not an unkind or unpleasant trick! Even the Sorovians call love songs “the great good spells.” Even those of us who don’t necessarily desire romance may still appreciate a romance novel. I certainly do. And it is inarguable that the Happily Ever After makes for both a satisfying plot culmination and a useful pole in the arbitrary game of setting genre boundaries. If there’s one recurring theme to be found in defenses of the HEA, it’s that readers want to know, within a reasonable margin of certainty, what they’re getting from a book. This is an entirely reasonable demand, especially given that at the end of the day, most readers, myself very much included, read not as a nebulous exercise in self-betterment but as a hobby, for pleasure.

I am all for keeping the HEA, so long as we don’t pretend that it is a feature without ideological content (how could the most regular feature of a genre *not *be?), that it is without suggestive power, that it could never put us in the binds of magic. If the romance can be included in the feminist intellectual project (and it can), its influence cannot be totalizing. We need more pleasures, and more than just pleasure, to navigate ourselves to a worthwhile and happy life.

There are, fortuitously, other genres with their own genre mandates. Science fiction’s remit, one it shares with feminism, is to propose different ideas, to imagine different possible livable lives. This may not always come with the same narrative satisfaction or comfort of romance’s HEA. Indeed, Ren’s story ultimately rejects any such narrative culmination to life as she realizes that “there is no fulfilment,” at least while life goes on. The ending Le Guin gives her is not marked by achievement, or defeat, or any kind of emotional or circumstantial benchmark, but rather the decision itself to share her story, so that all of us hearing it would know and be aware of another way one can live her life.

While Le Guin wrote “Solitude” some thirty years ago, its message is timely now. In a period of cultural contraction, of media homogenization and an ongoing campaign of book banning, we are obliged in response to embrace more stories, not fewer, about difference and uncertainty. Perhaps that is why I’ve been struggling somewhat with the Happily Ever After lately: its ubiquity combined with its nigh Newtonian narrative certainty that forecloses on the possibility of finding or liking something you did not expect and had not been trained to hope for. At the end of “Solitude,” Ren transmits her tale across the endless voids of space, but here in the real world I’m gratified that it reaches us still, across a mere few decades. It gave me something I didn’t already know how to want.