About Bridgerton & Romance Novels

Where do you get exactly what you want, all of the time, without being made to feel badly about it?

A couple years back I devoured every novel in Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series within a matter of weeks — far before I had any inkling a Netflix version was on the way. (You can only imagine how I responded when that news arrived!)

I’ll admit that I felt a flutter of shame (maybe “embarrassment” is a better word) for pouring through those books in record time, for enjoying them as much as I did, for getting sucked into a romantic trope that is (or at least was), in my opinion, completely unrealistic, nothing more than fantasy, and only enticing because of the steamy sex.

Harsh, I know.

(That inner dialogue and critique did not keep me from reading more — or from binging on both seasons.)

What is it about these stories that draws us in?

I have a few ideas…

So do others:

As early as 2013, an article in The Atlantic endeavored to show “how romance novels came to embrace feminism.” A few years later, the author of an article on the genre in the online women’s magazine Bustle characterized romance novels as some of the perhaps “most rebellious books…