Tacky, yet glorious

The fine staff at AbeBooks have put together a loving, if slightly tongue-in-cheek, guide to the cover art styles of vintage romance novels. "Romance novels", the author insists "...like their science fiction counterparts, have been done zero favors by designers of cover artwork." Personally, I love these covers (so deliciously lurid!), but I realize my taste is not always universally shared.

One quibble: The author says that nurses were a romance novel staple, but I'm pretty sure that was mostly because of Betty Neels. Ms. Neels was an English nurse who married a Dutch doctor and moved to Holland... and then she went ahead and wrote well over a hundred novels, an amazing number of which are about English nurses who married Dutch doctors and moved to Holland. I don't know about those other authors, but it seems like they were part-timing the nurse thing, and were just as likely to write books about women who were A) teachers, B) suddenly-impoverished former heiresses, or C) opera singers, which leads me to this story, which is incredibly cool, and I think the AbeBooks author would have done well to mention.