Ann Herendeen
Ann Herendeen is an American author of popular fiction. Herendeen's novels are notable for their queering of the traditional romance novel.
Background
A native New Yorker and lifelong Brooklyn resident, Herendeen graduated with high honors in English from Princeton University. She also holds a Master of Library Science degree from Pratt Institute.''Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander''
Herendeen's first novel Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander, was initially issued by a subsidy publisher with the subtitle A Bisexual Regency Romance, in 2005. Harper Collins released a slightly altered version of the book in 2008 without that subtitle. Herendeen's atypical Regency Romance introduces a central same-sex love story into a Regency-set tale of a marriage of convenience which otherwise obeys many of the conventions of genre romance. The heroine Phyllida, an author, offers the hero a quid pro quo of "irregular" liberty in marriage - his sexual freedom for her literary and professional freedom. The novel delivers the generically required account of the development of the couple's erotic and tender bonds through trials to deep and permanent commitment, while Phyllida's authorship supplies Herendeen's text with a common metafictional feature of postmodern genre romance: a novel-within-the-novel, exploring forbidden sexuality in the fashionable manner of the era. Passages of Phyllida's fiction are rendered as pastiches of the great Gothic tradition the language and conventions of which are at once mocked and relished.According to Herendeen:
McDaniel College's Pamela Regis, author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel, brings forward Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander as evidence against what she contends is the myth of the genre's fundamentally socially reactionary nature. In her article in the new edition of The Cambridge History of the American Novel, Regis argues:
''Pride/Prejudice''
Herendeen's second novel Pride/Prejudice is a slash fiction contribution to the immense catalogue of mash-ups, sequels, fan fiction, retellings, updatings, spin-offs and homages to Jane Austen's celebrated novel. Pride/Prejudice narrates Austen's original story unearthing the "forbidden" intimacies between Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley and between Elizabeth Bennet and Charlotte Lucas. Salon's reviewer Laura Miller noted that Herendeen's language in Pride/Prejudice is the most successful of the Austen derivatives in "approximating Austen's style without aping it."The novel was 2010 Lambda Literary Award finalist in the category "bisexual fiction" category.