The outstanding success of various popular culture manifestations, ranging from the blockbuster film Notting Hill (1999) to the recent media coverage of Prince Harry's wedding to the American actress Meghan Markle, reveals that romance plots play an important role in the (re)presentation of British and American relationships. These narratives display the idiosyncrasies of each of these countries at the same time as they suggest that love is enough to overcome disparities. Nevertheless, fictional attempts at a harmonious representation of affective coupling are frequently jeopardised by the singularities of the countries involved, whose cultural, ideological or economic differences emerge and compromise the relationship between the protagonists.

As in films and magazines, American mass-market romance fiction revels in this fascination with transatlantic relationships. The subgenre of historical romance, in particular, confirms the American attraction to all things British, and the genre's most notable examples perennially evoke the history, landscape and cultural mannerisms of England specifically. This chapter investigates this peculiar infatuation with English culture and settings, and suggests that it is rooted in a continuing desire to project a distinctive American identity. Most historical romance novels deploy an ideal of Englishness based on the rigidity of its class system, its welldefined gender roles and the decadent splendour of past colonial power. In this study, I argue that the romance genre perpetuates and advances the values that our collective imaginary associates mostly with the US, thus playing an important part in the configuration and projection of the American identity.

Lisa Kleypas's Wallflowers series is exceptionally suitable for the study of national identity in popular romance fiction. In these novels, the male protagonists are a most interesting blend of aristocratic Englishness and American capitalist entrepreneurship. More specifically, the heroes in the Wallflowers series are represented either as business-like lords or as gentlemanly businessmen. This results in an imaginative combination of Americanness, epitomised by the ideology of the self-made man, and the grandeur of patrician Englishness, mainly represented in the landed gentry. The following pages analyse Kleypas's (re)creation of a very specific image of the UK and of the US, through the study of the writer's casting of English and American identities.