page_title: Literature of Birmingham
section_title: Genre fiction
hierarchical_section_title: Literature of Birmingham / Regency and Victorian literature / Genre fiction
caption_attribution_description: English: Dame Barbara Cartland
context_page_description: The literary tradition of Birmingham originally grew out of the culture of religious puritanism that developed in the town in the 16th and 17th centuries. Birmingham's location away from established centres of power, its dynamic merchant-based economy and its weak aristocracy gave it a reputation as a place where loyalty to the established power structures of church and feudal state were weak, and saw it emerge as a haven for free-thinkers and radicals, encouraging the birth of a vibrant culture of writing, printing and publishing.
  The 18th century saw the town's radicalism widen to encompass other literary areas, and while Birmingham's tradition of vigorous literary debate on theological issues was to survive into the Victorian era, the writers of the Midlands Enlightenment brought new thinking to areas as diverse as poetry, philosophy, history, fiction and children's literature. By the Victorian era Birmingham was one of the largest towns in England and at the forefront of the emergence of modern industrial society, a fact reflected in its role as both a subject and a source for the newly dominant literary form of the novel.
context_section_description: The romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, who was born in Edgbaston in 1901, was cited by the Guinness Book of Records at the time of her death as the world's bestselling living author, with over 700 books to her name having sold 900 million copies. Also notable as a romantic novelist was Jeffery Farnol, who was born in Aston in 1878 and first found work as a Birmingham brass-founder. He wrote over 40 novels that combined regency romance with swashbuckling adventure, becoming an influence on George MacDonald Fraser, Jack Vance and Georgette Heyer, and forming "a link between the major writers of the 19th century and the popular romancers of the present".
  Charles Talbut Onions: Birmingham born and educated, he was a prominent etymologist who worked on the Oxford English Dictionary and was general editor of its shorter version.
  Sax Rohmer, author of the Fu Manchu thrillers, was the pseudonym of Arthur Henry Ward, who was born in Birmingham but pursued his writing career in London and then New York.
caption: Barbara Cartland
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