Daily News from New York, New York • 43

3 HOMELIVING Different titles, same story: a chaste heroine wins the love of a rakish man. Jennie ifemaine- f0, ISr Jennielremaine no no r- r-i 3 0DaU tfnDODSUD.lDFSlf Virginity is making a comeback in the book world ByJUDSON HAND I AT YOUR HEART OUT, Gay Talese. Your raunchy historv of the sexual revolution. "Thy Neighbor's Wife," may be a huge best seller, but it will have to chance" romances, in which the heroines, though virtuous, are of riper years. The market for romances seems to expand every day.

Readers of romances come from every level of society, according to Dell's Vivian Stephens. "One of our most faithful readers is a woman judge," she said. "There are also many younger women, many senior citizens and lots of women in between. There are even some men. One of our young women readers told me her father borrowed her Regency romances after she'd finished, but he swore her to secrecy "We have to be awfully careful about the authenticity of our historical detail.

Once recently we got letters from readers complaining that a dress that was described was of a style that didn't come until long after the Regency period. The same is true of food. If we say a dish was served at a banquet, it had better have been popular in the Regency period." But why the invariably virtuous heroines? Does it mean that out there in Middle America virginity is rampant? Not necessarily. "I think people want romance in their escapist reading, not sex," said Stephens. "They'd rather read about a couple holding hands and mooning over each other than about a couple jumping in and out of bed in five minutes.

There's something reassuring about holding the moral line. "If people want social problems, goodness knows they can find them on TV and in the newspapers. We of fer them an escape from reality." The romances, of course, have little to with real life or, probably, the sex lives of their readers. They are, rather, a reflection of yearnings for certainties in a world where nothing seems certain any more, a world in which all that was once forbidden now seems mandatory. In 1980, an author like Talese does not even shy away from specific descriptions of his own sexual escapades.

Readers of romances want to get away from raunch and lust and lose themselves in a make-believe world where everything has its place. In this make-believe world, a kiss is never just a kiss. Consider the last sentence of Lorena McCourtney's "Legacy of the Heart" published by Dell: "She lifted her face to his and his mouth crushed down on hers, claiming her, with a kiss that was both a symbol and a promise." On such a note, romance readers are willing to draw a discreet curtain across the stage of their Almost all writers of romances, like their readers, are women. The few men who do write them use feminine pen-names. "It's just wouldn't do for a male to be listed as author," said Vivian Stephens, editor of Dell's romance-oriented Candlelight series.

"Women aren't ready for it. It would hurt sales." "Jennie Tremaine," the author of "Lucy," and "Ann Fairfax," the author of "Henrietta," are pen names for the real-life Marion Scott-Gibbons, a Brooklyniiousewife who began writing Regency romances because she needed the money to pay the tuition of her son, Charlie, at St. Anne's School. She wrote her first Regency two years ago and now she writes for four publishers under four names. Regencies come easily for her.

She was born and brought up in Scotland and was a journalist in England, so she knows the scenes she writes about well. She's also an eager student of the period. Lately, she's been writing Edwardian novels, too. "I can turn out a romance in about three months, and I generally do," she said. "The Regency period was so colorful.

It was an age of practical jokers, of outrageous snobbery, of beautiful clothes for both men and women and of great entertainments among the rich. "Oddly enough, Regency women were no more chaste than the women of any other period. We make them virgins because that's what our readers want." DECADE AGO, "ripped blouse" romances, which were full of explicit sex and violence, LJmm were all the rage, and writers like Rosemary Rodgers made fortunes from them. Such books remain popular, but it's the chaste romances which are pulling ahead today. "It's not that people no longer go for the old 'lust in the dust' formula," said Tom Mahon, sales manager for Fawcett Books.

"It's just that this whole new huge market has opened up for books without explicit sex. The market, probably, has been there for many years, but we publishers just havn't exploited it to the fullest Now we're trying systematically to give readers what they want." Certainly, Regencies and Edwardian romances are everywhere today. There are whole racks of them at Woolworth's and similar stores and they are even best sellers in big bookstore chains such as B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. Pocket Books has just begun a new series, of romances and another publisher, Jove, plans a new wrinkle in the Regency line: It will introduce "second compete with a powerful trend in the opposite directiontoward the old morality.

In paperback romances, which are selling like crazy, virginity is all the rage. Not only is a man's wife safe from the lust of his neighbor, but his daughter as well. Nice girls are finishing first in these romances, which now account for one out of every nine mass-market paperbacks. The theme of the virginity books is almost always the same: the love of a good woman for a strong man. Usually, the heroine is very young, ambitious and clever.

She is always chaste. The man is usually a rather haughty aristocrat, a bit of a rake who gambles and has an extensive love life, but who also loves animals and children and is a closet promoter of old-fashioned virtue. In the end, of course, the woman marries him. Many of these romances are set in Britain's Regency period, at the beginning of the 19th century. Some, no doubt influenced by the "Upstairs Downstairs" TV series, are set in the Edwardian period just before World War and a few have contemporary settings, like the highly successsful Harlequin series.

What they all have in common is chaste heroines and an aura of naive romance. In the Dell paperback "Lucy," for example, the heroine is a servant girl who has the nerve to fall in love with Andrew, Viscount Harvey. Like most ladies' maids, Lucy has no money. She puts in with Hamis MacGregor, an old butler who just happens to have incredible luck at the baccarat table. She and Hamis team up, win a fortune at gambling, and, posing as father and daughter, rise in society until they meet the king himself.

Needless to say, Lucy gets Andrew in the end. Hamish embarks for America, where he makes a quick fortune on Wall Street. Some romances are pure vicarious wish fulfillment. In "Henrietta," a Jove paperback, the heroine is a confirmed spinster, the daughter of a country priest She inherits a fortune from her Aunt Hester and, Cinderella-like, moves to London, where she sets the fashionable world on its ear. Even the renowned heart breaker Beau Reckford, who discards women as if they were cigar butts, cannot resist her.

She makes an honest man of him. taniasies. I'J JliliJ iiVi.