Romance readers find Rosenthal's contributions both fulfill and transcend their genre. While satisfying the requirements of the form in full, Rosenthal's work also exhibits some features typical of literary novels but infrequently found in genre romance. Her approximately "Regency-set" historical romances are unusual in the genre for their (relatively) unvarnished depiction of the period and its inequalities, violence and physical hardships. Themes are developed in a symbolic dimension, though not so substantially as to distract from the dominant obligations to storytelling. The generically necessary softening of depiction of the life of servants and the working class generally is moderated and presented with a certain awareness of the elitism of the genre's formulae, her secondary but richly drawn labouring class characters limning the reality of ordinary lives that cannot be presented without fatally overshadowing the core romance.
The men’s coats, the tight pants, the boots. Georgian architecture. Adam rooms. Wedgewood. I think of all that poise and balance as coiled-up energy waiting to burst forth as the industrial revolution and the nineteenth century British Empire....There are ways in which I don’t like the Regency at all, for its snobbery and political reaction. Which is also a good reason to write about a period -- a love-hate relationship can be an extremely productive and interesting one.
The Slightest Provocation involves the lovers in the Pentrich uprising, allowing Rosenthal to layer atop the standard generic use of the era as fantasy scenery a critique of its real social relations from an openly progressive point of view. "A wonderful, challenging, envelope-pushing, smart and astonishing book" according to one of the leading Romance Review weblogs, the novel discovered the potential for serious social critique in what is often seen as the most escapist of popular fiction forms, the wish-fulfilling love story, developing an extended analogy between the political dilemma of liberty vs. security as it was felt in the period (echoed in ours) and the delicate tensions and interdependence of freedom and responsibility, self-will and restraint, in the erotic and emotional experience of the principal couple. A further analogy at work between the government provocateur playing upon working people's real grievances and desires in Britain after the Napoleonic Wars and the role of the erotic novelist herself in manipulating the pre-existing longings of her readers is one instance of a concern treated in all her books: the art of seduction and the ethics of the seductive arts.
Almost a Gentleman, featuring a cross-dressing heroine, takes inspiration from real women of the period who dressed in men's clothes to enjoy men's freedoms.
The Bookseller's Daughter, set on the eve of the French Revolution and informed by the scholarly work of Robert Darnton and his study the
Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, considers seriously, if always in the utopian spirit of romance and fantasy, links between political, aesthetic and sexual liberty. Her most recent novel, 2009 RITA Award winner
The Edge of Impropriety, inspired by the Countess of Blessington's portrait and life, touches upon nationalism and imperialism in the course of elaborating the more common romance themes of trust, mutual understanding, and intimacy.