The Flame and the Flower

The Flame and the Flower is a historical romance by the American writer Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, published in 1972 by Avon Books. It was her first novel.

The book opens in London, where Heather Simmons is an orphan with no money and no protectors, and follows her from a household where she is treated as a servant to the docks and then across the Atlantic with Brandon Birmingham, a planter from the American South. Their relationship begins as something imposed on both of them and is worked out inside a plantation household and the social rules that govern it. Woodiwiss wrote at length and without euphemism, and the novel helped set the shape that historical romance took over the following two decades, including the long length that its readers came to expect.

It was the first full-length romance novel to be published first in paperback rather than in hardback, and the readership it reached in that format showed publishers what a paperback original could carry. Avon kept the book in print and Woodiwiss wrote steadily for the same house afterwards.