For those of us in the local Harris Teeter, waiting to pay for our Cilantro Ancho Double Chocolate Milanos, a romance novel might be nothing more than a paperback with a painting of a bare-chested male model towering over a swooning raven-haired beauty.

These are the "bodice-rippers," weighty tomes that don't have the best reputation for, shall we say, literary merit.

"Romance will always have its detractors," says Caren Crane, an aspiring romance author and mother who lives, works and writes in Raleigh. "Those who feel romance isn't intellectual enough probably haven't read a romance lately. To me, there's something for everybody."

Something for everybody is right. That stereotypical supermarket paperback is a sample of more than a dozen categories and subcategories that have evolved and expanded with the popularity of the romance genre. In 2006, according to statistics cited by the trade organization Romance Writers of America, 26 percent of all books sold were romances, with $1.3 billion in revenue.

What accounts for the sales? A tried-and true plot, for one. A romance novel follows a predictable pattern: girl meets boy; girl loses boy; girl gets boy in the end -- emphasis on the "girl" and the "gets." Romance novels stand or fall on the strength of their heroines, and their happy endings.

Crane explains: "I really enjoy stories about people finding love and building a life together."

And there's another reason: longevity. In one incarnation or another, the romance novel has been popular for about 2,000 years.

The first century AD saw long prose works called Greek romances sell big. Previously, Greek mythology with its traditional characters had reigned supreme as popular entertainment, much like our movies today.

But the Greek romance starred the goddess and the hero, instead of the gal and the guy. The best known of these works is "Chaireas and Callirhoe" -- something like "Romeo and Juliet" meets "Pirates of the Caribbean" meets "The Princess Bride."

Chaireas and Callirhoe are teenagers from prominent families in Sicily. Their fathers don't like each other, but they finally allow the kids to marry. Then some of Callirhoe's disgruntled suitors persuade Chaireas that Callirhoe has been unfaithful, and he kicks her in the stomach, inducing a deathlike coma.

Callirhoe is buried, then saved by a gravedigger, then sold into slavery, from which position she inspires the passion of more than one Asian monarch. Chaireas pursues Callirhoe after discovering she is alive. Captured in Asia, he escapes and after many military exploits becomes a commander in the Egyptian navy. On one of his campaigns, Callirhoe is among the civilians he captures. The lovers recognize each other and live happily ever after.

This extraordinary document -- about as popular in the ancient world as romance novels are today, and as little respected -- survived by accident, in Egyptian desert garbage dumps. Schoolteachers, the literary gatekeepers of the medieval world, had little stake in the ancient supermarket papyrus-back; they were too busy conjugating amo, amas, amat.

But the romance story survived in the hearts of the people, and thrived. In fact, the English word "romance" derives from the French word "roman," which means a story told in the "Romance" languages of French, Spanish or Italian -- the vernacular, rather than academic and churchy Latin.

Popular bards known as troubadours -- both men and women -- brought the love story to medieval courts and spawned stories of "courtly" (romantic) love all over Europe. Lancelot and Guinevere, of the King Arthur saga, are the best known of medieval couples, but there are countless others on which such writers as Shakespeare drew.

Jane Austen, much imitated but seldom equaled, brought the romance novel into the drawing room, and cemented the happy ending as a must-have in the genre.

Many subgenres

Today, romance readers have a full range of options -- from suspense to mystery to science fiction -- set in all periods of time, including the future and parallel universes. Among the most popular of historical romance categories is the "Regency," which refers to the period when Jane Austen wrote.

"Contemporaries" are romances set in the present day or the immediate past, and these are the most popular of all, making up 40 percent of all romance novels sold. Nora Roberts is the biggest seller in this category, but my favorite author here is Rosamunde Pilcher, whose leisurely plots include loving descriptions of English country life.

Within the contemporary category is the now wildly popular "chick lit" subgenre, which features a sassy, young, urban career woman on the lookout for love, but already with considerable experience in the dating game and sometimes a less-than-optimistic attitude about it. "Bridget Jones's Diary" is the iconic title of this group of stories.

"Chick lit" has spawned other categories, including "mom lit" and "lady lit," about women at the next stage of life -- widowed, divorced, never married -- getting a new or renewed taste of love.

Caren Crane, our budding romance author, has written an as-yet-unpublished mom lit novel, "Kick Start," about a 39-year-old domestic goddess dumped by dear hubby for a "spike-heeled assistant DA." Said goddess decides to kick-start her new life by dating a younger man, much to the dismay of her friends and family in suburban North Raleigh.

Romance in Raleigh? Yes. In fact, there's a whole group of local authors, the Heart of Carolina Romance Writers, who boast New York Times best-selling authors Sabrina Jeffries and Liz Carlyle, and the multipublished Virginia Kantra and Claudia Dain. The group's newest success is Deb Marlowe, whose Harlequin Historical "Scandalous Lord, Rebellious Miss" has just hit the shelves.

So, Caren, dish. If there's romance in Raleigh, then there's got to be sex, too.

"It depends entirely," she says with a grin, "on the couple involved."

Erotic romance versus porn

There are romance novels where the sex is frequent and explicit -- and some, the Christian-themed "Inspirationals," where there may be none until marriage.

So how frequent is frequent? Are "erotic romances" just women's pornography?

There is a difference, writes erotica author Tracy Cooper-Posey: erotic romance still has a strong story, while in pornography, story is optional. "At its purest, the new erotic novel is a brilliantly written story with supernova sex," she explains. And "if you remove the sex, the story can't be told."

Of course, what a person uses a romance novel for depends entirely on her. "I have never 'fast-forwarded' through a romance novel to get to the sex scenes," a friend recently confided with a wink.

Whether bodices are ripped or not, the vast majority of romance today has to do with an ideal that goes beyond the sheets and back a long way: that true love is possible and to be desired, regardless of the difficulties involved.

Romance, by origin and inclination the literature of the people, makes a fundamentally optimistic statement about humanity. As Crane aptly observes, "Those are the stories that feel true to me."

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