Abstract: This article examines how the Anglo-Indian author “Victoria Cross” (Annie-Sophie Cory) challenges mononormativity – the normalised idea that monogamy is the “right” or even “natural” form of romantic love – within the framework of popular romance fiction. Cross not only describes or recreates contemporaneous constructions of romantic love but deploys her fictional writing to render romantic love visible in its constructedness and its entanglements with gendered and, in some cases, racial power structures. In doing so, she takes account of the ways in which love operates in the service of white heteropatriarchy, but also explores love’s potential for liberation. While Cross’s narrative challenges to gendered, and to a certain extent also racial, constraints on love in middle-class Victorian morality have received considerable scholarly attention, the degree to which Cross defamiliarises and contests compulsory monogamy has, as of yet, remained unexplored. In many ways, as this article demonstrates, Cross anticipates current debates in critical love studies.