In both novels the loss of sight is indicative of a psychological problem, an inner hurdle that the characters have to overcome in the course of the story in order to reach their happy ending. Two of them explicitly deal with the loss of sight: Yours until Dawn (2004) features a blind hero, while large parts of The Bride and the Beast (2000) are set at night, and the darkness makes the heroine unable to see the face of the male protagonist. (1) One of the most popular and most beloved authors in the genre, she has written 22 novels to date. Teresa Medeiros is a bestselling American author of historical romance with over ten million books in print in more than 17 languages. Although the latter contains a number of similarities to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), a comparison with the Victorian classic shows that Medeiros rejects various dominant cultural stereotypes about visual impairment and disability such as the disempowerment and perceived helplessness of blind characters. While in The Bride and the Beast (2001) the inability to see is caused by darkness and leads to insight and (self-)knowledge, the hero of Yours until Dawn (2004) has been blinded in battle. How is disability, in particular visual impairment, used in romance fiction? The article explores the use of blindness and the loss of sight in two historical romances by American author Teresa Medeiros.
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