The following excerpt from The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800  by  Lawrence Stone describes the timeline during which English marriages switched from traditional modes of arrangement and exchange of dowry, to romantic love as primary influence on relationship formation. This change, finds Stone, was stimulated by the rise of female-authored romance novels in the 1700s and their wide dissemination.

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Note: A central link between these female romance writers and thier medieval forebears can be found in the English work Le Morte d’Arthur (1470) which was a retelling of medieval romantic tales by the English knight Sir Thomas Malory. Its influence on women’s novel writing in the 1700s, its broader impact on the romance genre, and the 19th-century Arthurian revival, helped to shape the literary landscape for women writers.