When you curl up with a romance novel, what do you expect to find in terms of the heroine’s appearance?

Here’s an early description of the heroine of my novel Burning Embers getting dressed:

Thankful that her fresh looks needed no artificial makeup, Coral applied just a tinge of transparent gloss on her lips and pinched her cheeks to add some color to them. Her mirror reflected eyes that were cornflower bright and shiny. Needing some practical traveling clothes for the journey, she had changed into hip-hugging, white cotton flared trousers that accentuated her long, shapely legs. The blue and white striped man’s shirt, ends tied in a big knot at the waist, enhanced the golden tan she had acquired sunbathing on deck and set off the slenderness of her figure.

But imagine, for a moment, that instead I had offered this description of Coral:

Having carefully applying every type of makeup in her collection – and there were many, to hide myriad blemishes and wrinkles – Coral pinched her cheeks roughly to add some color to them. Her mirror reflected eyes that were cornflower bright, but a little lacklustre, she thought. Needing some practical traveling clothes for the journey, she had changed into baggy black flared trousers that concealed her curvy legs. The blue and white striped man’s shirt, ends tied in a big knot at the waist, was large and designed to hide her pale skin, of which she was self-conscious, and her plump figure.

Quite a difference, don’t you think?

At first glance, one could assume that in writing a romance heroine who needs little makeup and has bright eyes and a slender frame to show off, I’m suggesting that this is the ideal of beauty. That the Coral in the second passage, with mention of blemishes and wrinkles and a curvier frame, is not beautiful and – the essential part – therefore not as attractive and loveable to a man.

Actually, whether curvy or slender, Coral is just as beautiful. What’s unsettling in the second passage is how Coral feels about her looks. She is layering on makeup to hide the imperfections she perceives and agonises over. She is negative about herself; no doubt her eyes are identical in both passages, but in the second Coral puts them down. She is rough as she pinches her cheeks, suggesting she does not treat her body with respect. And she dresses in baggy clothes to hide a physique that embarrasses her – incapable of appreciating her body.

I think a romance author can create a heroine of any look, of any shape. She can have any number of features that the common beauty ideal does not encompass – greying hair, for example, or scarring from an accident, or a small chest, or a large derrière. A reader will still love that heroine, and be swept away in a romance with her, as long as the heroine has good body image; as long as she is confident in her own skin.

We read romance to escape. We read romance to enter a fantasy world where magical feelings are common and heightened. We are quite willing to have real women in this sphere; as they really look. But we don’t want to wade through a book in which the heroine hates herself – because then how can she really find love? We don’t want the hero to rescue the heroine from her own low self-esteem; we don’t want her to hate the way she looks and only find positive body image through the reflection in her lover’s eyes. Ultimately, we expect heroines to have the occasional concern about looks, as we all do – but we want the love story to be about a union of hearts, not a matching of beautiful people. What we want is a Colin Firth type to tell the heroine ‘I like you, just as you are’, and for her to embrace that with a full and confident heart. Because true beauty lies in self-belief.