As long as there have been novels, there have been novels whose purpose is to give the woman reader - preferably lying on a sofa, preferably eating chocolates as she reads - a romantic thrill. First the plot frightens her out of her wits; then it takes her in its loving arms. This is a noble function for writing, most women's lives being strikingly short on perfect love, lush settings, or intense thrills.
But though the needs the novelette addresses appear to be timeless, the women who read them are a changing constituency. Mills & Boon won't do for the third-level-educated, gym-going woman of today, juggling her career and her domestic responsibilities with brisk competence. When she finds the - rare - time to read, she wants a novel more like a crunchy, nutty, yoghurt-dressed salad than a truffled fondant. And in England, at least, a whole race of women novelette writers has sprung up to meet that demand.
Sally Beauman is just one of a group that might include Penny Vincenzi, Lisa Appignanesi and Rosie Thomas, who have moved from lucrative journalism to immensely more lucrative bestsellerdom. But she's the one of the moment. Her latest blockbuster, Sextet (Transworld, £15.99 in UK), was for weeks near the top of the British bestseller list, selling about 20,000 copies a week.
Obviously, she's doing the Higher Trash right. Her Girton education shows up in expected ways - a rather recherche quotation from D.H. Lawrence's Edgar Allan Poe as an epigraph, a plot containing many a knowing reference to Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, characters who quote Dante and Coleridge and who say things such as that a movie is "a cross between Tarantino and Henry James". But more importantly, she has noted and faithfully reproduces the atmo spheres and events of the classic Gothic novel. The story is modern, and revolves around an American film star, her director ex-husband, the Englishman who is scouting for locations for the director's film of Wildfell Hall, and the fashion journalist the Englishman falls in love with.
But the proceedings are absolutely rife in threatened children - no fewer than three sons of three mothers are variously threatened in the course of the action - rat-noises behind wainscotting, knife-wielding nannies, ghosts, inexplicable messages on answering machines, spells, terrifying tapes delivered in the post, and so on and so forth. The climax to these themes, in a creepy apartment building on Central Park modelled on the Dakota, has all the scream-content the heart could, and continually shows that it does, desire.
But horror plays a different part in women's escapist literature than in men's. It is there not for its own sake, but to make the snatching of true love from its jaws the more poignant. The yellow-eyed crazy who has a knife to the throat of the kidnapped child she is dangling over a ten-storey-high stairwell has a twisted passion for the director who, in turn, has an unbreakable erotic bond with his bisexual ex-wife. The fashion-journalist, Lindsay, "loves" Rowland the remote and sexy editor, even though her adoration gets her no further than touching his sweater, when she's had too much to drink.
His friend Colin, however, is a different matter. Colin has only to meet Lindsay to love her, wholeheartedly and come what may. The most strongly felt part of Sextet, and the most inventively handled, is old-Etonian Colin's wooing of Lindsay. And, frankly, it is a wooing many a girl would give all she has for. Colin is extraordinarily handsome in a kind of Bruce Chatwin way - though he's not conscious of his looks, and his tweeds and hand-made shoes are old and worn casually. Lindsay thinks he is just a film location manager from somewhere in rural England who happens to have an American aunt in the (haunted) apartment building on Central Park. In fact - though he doesn't dare tell her for fear of frightening her off - he is Lord something or other, and the heir to an exquisite stately home and thousands of acres, and is a multi-millionaire to boot from the American side. She's horrified when he takes her to dinner in a very grand New York restaurant and says things to the waiter like "We'll stay with the champagne for the moment. Then the Le Montrachet DRC, I think. The nineteen seventy eight. If you'd bring it with the fish." She tries to go halves. But she does fall in love with him, and rejects the sexy editor (who finally realises he loves her, too) before, one moonlit night, Colin takes her to Shute where the great entrance hall has an owl in it, and a little hedgehog his father the Earl or whatever has rescued . . . This scene is a bravura wallow in sentiment and class envy.
Colin has proved his love, because he must have an heir, whereas Lindsay - like many of her readers, I imagine - is 41 and perhaps past it. But - guess what! She does get pregnant, and doesn't it turn out to be twins, a boy and a girl! Thus this novel can end with the scene a great many women must most deeply want to assure - a pregnancy welcomed with the utmost joy, the outcome of which will be protected by a good man's love and a lot of money. Perhaps Sally Beauman and the others who write novelettes for the thinking woman are quite knowing about this, and schematically build in babies, small animals and Jacobean manor-houses. But it reads as if these perennial dreams have been approached with an innocent zest. Sextet is too long, a structural mess, and basically a load of rubbish. But it believes in itself. And it is in a great tradition.
Nuala O'Faolain is an Irish Times columnist