I would like to recommend as background What is the history of the romance genre? When did it become its own thing? What works influence it?...but let's move on a bit from there.

Harlequin Enterprises, was founded in Canada in 1949 and began publishing romance novels in the United States in 1957. At that time, the American market already had a voracious appetite for romance fiction, mostly in the form of pulp magazines and comic books, but paperbacks were the latest trend, and they expanded enormously as the decades progressed.

During the pulp era, there were already "celebrity romance" writers in the same way there were famous genre writers of all stripes - but the genre itself tends to an ephemeral quality, with many individual works and writers quickly rising to prominence only to fade and be forgotten within a generation. Laurie Powers in Queen of the Pulps quotes Amita Fairgrieve (41):

I'm editing Love Story Magazine--the new Street and Smith publication--the first issue appeared July 25. (Perhaps this notice ought to go among the births!) I shall be glad to have any modern Mary J. Holmses or Bertha M. Clays communicate with me either by letter or interview. They are our Shakespeares.

"Bertha M. Clay" started out as the pseudonym for Charlotte Mary Brame; but under Street & Smith it went on to be a "house name" under which many different writers (male and female) were published, until the "new Bertha M. Clay Library" ran to over four hundred volumes, published and republished, over the course of 47 years. Charlotte Mary Brame herself wrote over 200 romance novels; a veritable superstar in writerly terms.

But was Brame a celebrity? Bertha M. Clay became a figure in her own right, with an image that was advertised on various media, a familiar name in many households; if Brame achieved anything like that recognition, it was much more short-lived. So while there absolutely were tremendously popular and successful romance novelists in the late 19th and early 20th century (and even earlier, if you count Jane Austen & co., and there's no reason not to), the issue of celebrity becomes problematic.

Looking at the 1980s in particular, two things become notable. First, there are a couple of stand-out talents that "broke away from the pack" of regular romance writers. Barbara Cartland and Danielle Steel are two of the best-selling fiction writers of all time, writing predominantly in the romance genre, and although both of them were writing before that period, it was in the 1970s and 80s that they began to see more success and attention for their work. Cartland wrote 23 novels in 1976 and earned a Guinness Book of World Records entry.

It's really difficult to define success as separate from time and opportunity: Cartland and Steel stand out as successful not just because they were prolific, but because they sufficiently profitable and savvy to get good agents and deals with publishers. They did a lot of promotion, appearing on TV, getting their books on bestseller lists (which usually meant hardback rather than paperback), and all of this kind of attention feeds back into sales, which drives more attention.

(You can see this same kind of thing going on today: a book hits the bestseller list, and that in turn drives interest in the book because hey, it hit the bestseller list. Whether the book is good or better than another isn't a major consideration: exposure helps drive sales.)

Cartland in particular managed her media image by often appearing in a specific recognizable outfit (pink dresses, blonde wig, heavy makeup). Many of the "celebrity romance novelist" stereotype characters you see are often based, at least to some extent, on successful writers like Cartland presenting what people wanted a successful romance novelist to be and look like.

Another opportunity that the late 70s/early 80s afforded was adaptation. Danielle Steel has had dozens of works adapted to film and television, and has written novelizations of successful films. That kind of cross-media marketing hasn't really been possible to the same extent in prior decades, but really took off in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. You can see the success for that kind of approach in the works of Nicholas Sparks, because while many people might never have picked up one of his books, they probably recognize some of the films based on his books like A Walk to Remember (2002).

Of course, Cartland and Steele are standouts, not representative of the whole market. I started out talking about Harlequin because by the late 1970s, Harlequin dominated the romance market, and despite the massive volume of novels they were publishing to fill a huge demand, they could get picky. It wasn't a monopoly per se - anybody could write and publish - but Harlequin occupied so much bookstore shelf space and had a sufficiently slick distribution and promotion set-up that they could (and did) act as a kind of gatekeeper. It was a rare writer that could really break out to something like fame in that kind of marketplace.

But of course, some did. Nora Roberts wanted to write for Harlequin, got rejected, and then started writing for Silhouette, which had started sniping some of Harlequin's rejected talent. Roberts earned enough success that she got the attention of larger, non-genre-specific publishers like Bantam and Putnam's. Pamela Regis gives a snapshot look at her rise in A Natural History of the Romance Novel, and she categorizes Roberts (but not Cartland or Steel) as one of the "canonical" writers of 20th-century romance literature...

...which comes back around to the nature of celebrity. Cartland and Steel were (and are) enormously popular in terms of number of books sold. In their heyday were close to household names - the kind of romance writer that you could see on the television, whose books were adapted to film and television, who had their names listed in the Guinness Book of World Records and title after title, week after week, month after month, year after year on the New York Times Bestsellers List.

...but where are they going to be in fifty or a hundred years? Profitability and success don't ensure enduring fame. We start to see "celebrity" romance novelists in the 1980s less because that's when romance writers became notable but because you've got some real breakout stars in the context of bestseller feedback loops starting to synchronize with spreading national television networks. It's not that there weren't popular romance writers before, but in the 80s they started to get more notice and attention.

That being said, critical opinion on a lot of their work has been dreadful. Danielle Steel entire bibliography has been critically panned, many of the plots are recycled, and especially with the most prolific writers, plagiarism seems to be...less uncommon than you'd think. It's hard to say how many of those romance writers will still be read in the future, or how much impact they've had on the shape of the romance genre as a whole.

So you have writers like Georgette Heyer, who was never a "celebrity" in the sense of Cartland or Steel, but she was hugely influential in the subgenre of Regency romance (for good and ill, as many historians who focus on the Regency period (1811-1820)) in genre-defining ways that still influence writers of today. So she missed out on being the celebrity romance novelist of the 80s (Heyer died in '74, so no great surprise) there, but she'll probably be read long after Steel is forgotten.

Which is true of a lot of authors. Robert W. Chambers today is remembered almost exclusively for his early weird fiction, especially The King in Yellow (1895), but during his lifetime was hugely successful and popular with general fiction and romance novels like The Gay Rebellion (1913), The Restless Sex (1918), and The Rake and the Hussy (1930), which are basically completely unread and forgotten today. He was absolutely something of a small-scale celebrity as a writer in the 20s, sold lots of books, was serialized in the slick magazines...but the cultural impact shifted, and his books have a very ephemeral quality to them now, almost entirely forgotten.

How fleeting is fame!