Bridgerton Books and the Backstage of the Regency Setting

 

Jane Austen published her classic novel, Pride and Prejudice, in 1813 and nearly 200 years later in the USA, Julia Quinn, in love with the aura of love, romance, courtship, literature and cultural renaissance prevalent in the Regency period, traveled a long long way back to that very time and discover herself in the world of the earlier one she is deeply attached to by all her soul.

Julia Quinn could have ignited herself with the revolutionary zeal as orchestrated in Shelley’s ardent appeal to bring down a change to the world:

“O Wild West Wind………

Lift me as a wave, a lyre, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!.....

A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d

One too like thee: tameless, and swift and proud.”

              (Ode to the West Wind)

Or, as we have witnessed in Merry Shelley’s world shattering masterpiece, “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus”.

With the feministic note like that of Jane Austin and the dreamy atmosphere of love and romance prevalent in the very period, Julia Quinn being so tightly touched and repositioned to the very time, starts writing the Bridgerton Romance series and brings the era back to life so lively as to make the readers wonder about the real existence of the Bridgerton family in the real Regency Setting.

Once Julia Quinn gets herself settled down on the era, it was almost irresistible to avoid the melancholic tone like that of Keats’:

“Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs,

Where beauty can not keep her lustrous eyes

Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow”

                         (Ode to a Nightingale) 

Or the transcendental echo and the pessimistic sigh of the Romantics:

“As long as skies are blue and fields are green,

Evening must usher night, night urges the morrow,

Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.”

----(Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, by P.B. Shelley)

Let’s forget about the poetry of the Romantics ruling over the era; it was the time that was witnessing the emergence of novels as the new ruler of the literary world. It was ushering in a new world, new belief and the much anticipated radical change to literature with the hands of novelists like Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy or Emile Bronte. It was the time when literary interest was shifting from the upper class to the common people. The protagonists from the common and ordinary class were beginning to steal the limelight in the political, social as well the religious turbulence best understandable in the majestic opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going the other way….. ”

However, despite the disillusioned belief and a rather dilapidated socio-economic structure after the Nepoleonic war period, the Regency Period, which the Bridgerton books are based on, marks the bemused glory of literary, cultural and architectural advancement with the highly sophisticated taste of Prince Regent who later became the King George the 4^th and magnified the look of Great Britain with the Houses of Parliament, Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, Regent’s Park, Royal Opera House, the Pantheon, Mayfair, Pall Mall, Royal Parks of London, Ranelagh Gardens along with hundreds of  other architectural and cultural time-travelers.

 So, instead of digging deep the Tale of Two Cities, Julia Quinn chooses the earlier one  vivid in the glorifying visuals of the era, and embedded with wisdom, belief, light, and the spring of hope. Apparently Family life, celestial bonding of the siblings, love, romance, courtship and marriage in the setting of the great Regency period are the things our author Julie Pottinger deliberately tends to focuses on in her seductive Bridgerton Romance Series under her pen name of Julia Quinn. Considering her fervent enthusiasm and love for Romance novels since her very childhood days with Sweet Dreams and Sweet Valley High Book series, any other subject matter for her novels would have been utterly unbecoming. She didn’t spend her time on those romance novels with just the fancy of love and courtship and at the annoyance of her father. She had a vision and she had proved it by writing such a novel of her own in three years.

As one of the most widely read novelists in the historical Romance genre, in line with Mary Balogh, Jo Beverley and Loretta Chase, Julia Quinn brings to light the respectable Bridgerton family, consisting of a loving and widowed mother and the eight tightly-knit siblings in the Regency Setting. With the love stories of every eight brothers and sisters, Julia Quinn makes an elaborated series of Bridgerton Romance series with nine books published in the following order:

1. The Duke & I (2000),
2. The Viscount Who Loved Me (2000),
3. An Offer from a Gentleman (2001),
4. Romancing Mister Bridgerton (2002),
5. To Sir Philip, With Love (2003),
6.  When He Was Wicked (2004),
7. It’s in His Kiss (2005),
8. On the Way to the Wedding (2006), and
9. The Bridgertons: Happily Ever After (2013).

In each of the first eight books, Julia Quinn makes one among the eight loving siblings find their true love against all odds of the upper English Society in the truly Regency setting. The culminating book in the series, which was published seven years after the eighth one, was the second epilogues of the earlier love stories along with the story of the Violet Bridgerton, the caring, proud and beloved mother of the eight siblings: Anthony, Benedict, Colin, Daphne, Eloise, Francesca, Gregory and Hyacinth.