You never know with women?

Wrong. Harlequin Romance, a robust Canadian publishing company since 1949, has based its success on finding an answer to the Freudian question: "What do women want?"

Sixty years of steady business would suggest that Harlequin knows what a number of women want, at least for their reading pleasure.

A look back at Harlequin's six decades offers a condensed social history of love. The first pregnancy storyline arrived in the 1960s. The late '70s saw a surge of sexual content, partly in response to the 19th-century S&M-fests penned by Rosemary Rogers, a scandalously popular author at rival publisher Avon. Harlequin cover model Fabio, all oiled chest and blond mane, debuted during the excessive 1980s. (The images in which Fabio commandingly clutches an adoring, half-naked woman are iconic examples of what is known in the industry as "the clinch.") The '90s saw some retrenchment into recognizably ordinary lives — heroes and heroines were often ranchers, pediatricians and cops in contemporary small-town North America. Increasingly, romances featured blended families, with single moms reconnecting with high school crushes or widowed fathers silently yearning for nurturing nannies. On these covers, the clinch is replaced by the potent hormonal cocktail of a handsome man holding an infant.

The new millennium has seen a surge in specialization at Harlequin, especially when it comes to sex. The "level of sensuality" can range from "kisses only," as one website ratings guide puts it, to responsible romps within the context of a relationship, to the burning combination of romance and erotica that is sometimes called "romantica." Demand for the prim, modest romance is also on the rise. Harlequin's "inspirational" line, Steeple Hill, is billed as "wholesome Christian entertainment that will help guide women to purposeful, faith-driven lives."

Within the last decade, Harlequin has developed lines geared to African-American and Hispanic women and teens. The younger, hipper Red Dress imprint launched in 2001, a response to the success of chick-lit books like Bridget Jones's Diary. The heroines are sassy, single girls in the city, often less concerned with Mr. Right than Mr. Right Now. ...

It's not just the books that have changed. Attitudes to the books have also shifted, suggests Pauline Greenhill, a professor of women's and gender studies at the University of Winnipeg. In the 1970s, Greenhill suggests, most academics maintained that romances were "the opiate of the masses, in the most heinous anti-feminist way." This changed with Janice Radway's 1984 book Reading the Romance, in which the author interviewed 42 female fans in a Midwestern American town. The results challenged the dismissive notion that romance readers were dupes of the romance industry. Says Greenhill, "These women weren't passive consumers, they certainly didn't mistake the books for real life and they were very discriminating. They had clear ideas about what constituted a good romance, a bad romance, a mediocre one."

What I want to know is which fervid imagination coined the expression "bodice-rippers" for a particular genre of Harlequin romances. Whoever thinks that expression is odd or excentric should survey a random group of women to see which ones have watched a particular scene in "The English Patient" over and over again, thanks to the support of their DVD player.