What Not to Read
The misplaced critiques of Bridgerton
by Holly Genovese
“It was the usual sort of academic battle: footnotes at ten paces, bolstered by snide articles in academic journals and lots of sniping about methodology, a thrust and parry of source and countersource. My sources had to be better.”— Lauren Willig, The Deception of the Emerald Ring
In all corners of Al Gore’s internet, people have been writing, tweeting, ranting, and stewing about Bridgerton, Shondaland’s latest production. People are complaining about this adaptation of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton novels: It’s historically inaccurate. It’s too racially diverse (what?). It's fan-fiction, poorly written, derivative of Gossip Girl. (If anything, Gossip Girl, first published two years after Quinn’s first Bridgerton novel, learned a lot from Lady Whistledown’s society pages). It’s a poor Jane Austen riff.
To be clear, I don’t think you have to like Bridgerton. But it doesn’t seem like many understand what Bridgerton is, nor do they have a sense of its cultural significance.
In the 10th grade, I stumbled across a book, The Masque of the Black Tulip by Lauren Willig, in my local borders. I read it in one go, sprawled across the couch, immediately realizing it was the second in a series. I quickly read the other books in the series and wanted more. On Willig’s website she listed some of her favorite regency romance authors, including Georgette Heyer and Julia Quinn. Willig’s were always my favorite—framed as they were by a graduate student who wore Jimmy Choo boots and dated a handsome British man with a huge library.
After reading Heyer and Quinn, as well as many of the recommendations on Willig’s website, I understood where Willig came from, literally (New York) and intellectually. She had half a history Ph.D (just as I would, one day). She was writing Regency Romances (with mystery and a modern frame story thrown in), making references not to Jane Austen but to Georgette Heyer, Julia Quinn, and the Baronness Orzcy. She included (and still does) historical source recommendations on her website.
And like any genre or academic discipline, the Modern Regency Romance has a history, one often disparaged and ignored because of its audience, because of its lack of cultural prestige, and because of the problematics of the genre and its founder. In an episode of Darren Starr’s Younger, a show set amongst a very fictionalized New York publishing landscape, the fictionalized romance writer Belinda Lacroix says of the dismissal of the genre, “that kind of snobbery is just sexism in a tweed jacket. Men decide romance is silly and women feel embarrassed about reading it.” She follows her statement by asking about her Netflix deal, a seeming impossibility even in 2015.
But romance novels are huge sellers—cheaper than most paperbacks, available in grocery stores, Dollar Generals, and the occasional Wal-mart—and they are accessible to those who might not have a local bookstore or a Kindle. Though the Regency sub-genre isn’t the top seller anymore (people tend to prefer contemporary), these books are essential to the publishing landscape as a whole—financially, aesthetically, and intellectually. Yet adaptations are still missing.
The Regency Romance in particular, as a genre and form, was created by Georgette Heyer, a problematic but nonetheless thorough researcher and writer—beginning in the 1930s. Heyer has issues. Her papers reveal blatant anti-semitism and her early books follow many of the romance novels’ worst tropes: those involving domineering, controlling men. Her later books reversed this trend, as she famously tried to remove her early books from publication. Heyer wasn’t writing academic monographs, but she kept meticulous files on the time period—from historical events to fashion trends, Heyer knew the minute details of her subject, something historians writing during the time often didn’t bother with. Jane Austen was an inspiration to Heyer, but in setting alone. She was not someone Heyer emulated—she wanted to capture the time period in a vastly different way. While Jane Austen wrote barb-filled cultural critique, Heyer wrote romance.
Of course, Regency Romance novels dramatically changed by the time I picked up Willig’s books, then Julia Quinn’s, then a whole host of other exemplars. For the most part, the books got less historically accurate as time went on. They included much more sex, following trends in romance as a whole (and bringing to mind the scene inFriends when Joey discovers Rachel’s romance novel). But comparing Julia Quinn’s novels (and TV show) to the work of Jane Austen or holding the story to academic standards regarding historical accuracy is unfair.
It is also sexist. Many of those critiquing the racially diverse casting as being historically “inaccurate” didn’t seem to mind when Lin Manual Miranda did the same thing with actual slave owners (please read The Haunting of Lin Manual Miranda). Nor did they complain when Wyclef Jean showed up in Dickinson. There is certainly a need for books and TV shows created, from the start, with Black characters in mind. But Shondaland’s interpretation fits seamlessly into her own body of work: her racially diverse retelling of Romeo and Juliet (Still Star Crossed) and the even less realistic racial diversity of surgeons on Grey’s Anatomy (set in a city with a black population of 6 percent).
Netflix has made hyper-visible a genre often hidden, derided, and considered lower-class. By featuring the show on the home screen and debuting it on Christmas day, Netflix brought a Regency Romance novel onto the TV screens of those least likely to be aware of their existence: men.
Before critiquing Bridgerton for its racially diverse casting and historical inaccuracy, consider the history of the genre itself, and why it has taken 86 years for Regency Romance to get its star-treatment TV debut. It took two behemoths, Netflix and Shondaland, to make it happen. For it to be dragged—not for its interpretation, story telling, or horrid ending (we know, its rape, we read the book)—but because its not Jane Austen, “historically accurate,” and lets be honest—written for women, is to ignore the significances, contributions,—and real downfalls—of the work.
According to Megan Sweeney’s book Reading is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prison, romance novels are among the most popular books for incarcerated women. Books to Prisoners organizations across the country support this finding, citing romance novels as some of their most requested (and often denied) books. If some of our most vulnerable citizens are finding comfort, enjoyment, and worth in these books—regardless of the books’ accuracy or literary influences —we can’t deny their cultural significance or the significance of finally seeing an adaptation on prestige television. If we do, we confirm what many women, poor people, people of color, and romance readers have known all along: literature, and literary adaptations, are for the rich, the well-educated, those with the cultural capital to know what not to read.
Holly Genovese is pursuing a PhD in American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.