Okay, we need to talk about Regency romance. Walk into any bookstore right now and the historical romance shelf is buckling under new arrivals, most of them with a shirtless lord on the cover and a viscount in the title. That’s a lot to wade through, so we did the wading for you.
The titles below make up our permanent starting lineup for anyone new to the genre. Some are certified classics you probably already have opinions about; the rest are the ones we hand to anyone who claims historical romance isn’t for them. Every last one of them is guaranteed to make your petticoats flutter.
‘The Rakess’ (2020)
Seraphina Arden is a scandal, by design. She takes lovers on her own terms and is finishing a tell-all memoir about the powerful man who ruined her, with the profits earmarked for the women’s rights movement she keeps getting arrested for. When she retreats to her family’s abandoned house on the Cornish coast to write, her new neighbor turns out to be Adam Anderson, a widowed Scottish architect with two children and a career he cannot afford to lose over matters of reputation.
Scarlett Peckham writes the gender-flipped rake premise with real teeth. In The Rakess, Seraphina isn’t a fixer-upper waiting for a rich man to unlock her potential; she is, as Cher would say, the rich man in this equation, and Adam has to decide whether he can live with what she wants for herself. The book is filthy and unusually smart about what it’s doing, and it never once asks Seraphina to apologize for the space she takes up.
‘Queen Bee’ (2023)
Amalie Howard’s YA Regency, Queen Bee, has one of the best pulpy premises going for it: The Count of Monte Cristo, but with debutantes and better dresses. Three years ago, Lady Ela Dalvi’s best friend Poppy betrayed her over a boy and got her exiled from society. Now Ela is back, disguised as a mysterious heiress, and out for social annihilation. The complication is the marquess she fell for as a teenager, who has been carrying his own version of that story for the same three years.
We love Ela precisely because she is furious… but also wrong about nearly everything, and Howard writes her with more moral complexity than most YA books even attempt. The ballrooms are lush, and Howard doesn’t condescend to her reader’s age for a single sentence. If you love a proper Bridgerton revenge arc, this one delivers.
‘Bringing Down the Duke’ (2019)
It is 1878, and Annabelle Archer has just talked her way into Oxford’s Lady Margaret Hall, the university’s very first women’s college. She joins a suffragist cell whose newest strategy involves lobbying and, ideally, seducing influential Tories into supporting the Married Women’s Property Act. First target: Sebastian Devereux, Duke of Montgomery, who has been ordered by Queen Victoria to hand the Tories a win and is quietly trying to earn back a family castle his father lost on cards.
Author Evie Dunmore is doing scholarly work here. The suffrage politics in Bringing Down the Duke are researched down to the pamphlet copy, and the romance never papers over the class chasm between a duke and a country vicar’s daughter. Sebastian cannot let himself want Annabelle without betraying the queen who owns his political future, and Annabelle cannot let herself want Sebastian without betraying every woman in the movement. Dunmore refuses to let either of them wave those stakes off, which is why the romance is so deliciously tense.
‘The Viscount Who Loved Me’ (2000)
Widely considered the best of the Bridgerton novels and correctly so, this is Anthony’s book, which means, it’s really Kate Sheffield’s book, and that’s where its greatness lies. Anthony decides he needs a wife and settles on Kate’s younger sister Edwina as the diamond of the season, without accounting for the older-sister energy about to blow up his life.
Anthony is haunted by his father’s early death and running from the shadow of it in the worst possible ways. Kate arrives to protect Edwina, sees through him inside a chapter, and then makes the awful mistake of falling in love with the exact man she was warning her sister about. If you’ve only seen the Netflix adaptation, you should know the Pall Mall scene alone is worth the paperback.
‘If You Deceive’ (2007)
Buckle in. The third and best of Kresley Cole‘s MacCarrick Brothers trilogy should come with a warning label. It’s angsty and operatic, with a hero who, Cole, is willing to do something borderline unforgivable in the middle. Ethan MacCarrick is a scarred Highlander who has spent a decade nursing a grudge against the man who ruined his life, and when he tracks the man’s daughter Madeleine to a masquerade, his plan is to seduce her and vanish.
Madeleine, however, is not the naive mark Ethan was counting on. She is a bankrupt aristocrat picking pockets in Paris to survive, and completely uninterested in playing victim in anyone’s revenge fantasy, especially not one hatched by a man she is beginning to actually want. The book is emotionally brutal and shameless about its steam. And if you like your rakes made to grovel for every last inch of the eventual reconciliation, Cole delivers.
‘The Duchess Deal’ (2017)
Meet Emma Gladstone, a London seamstress who is owed money for a wedding dress the client will not be needing. That client is George, Duke of Ashbury, whose fiancée broke off the engagement when he came home from the Napoleonic Wars with burn scars across half his body. When Emma turns up at his front door wearing the unpaid gown to demand her wages, he responds by proposing to her instead.
Tessa Dare is our reigning queen of the Regency rom-com, and The Duchess Deal is her at her most polished. The whole romance turns on Emma flatly refusing to treat Ash’s scars as a tragedy, which forces him to figure out what to do with a wife who is not afraid of him. It is a comfort read that respects your intelligence, which is a harder trick to pull off than the genre usually gets credit for.
‘Lord of Scoundrels’ (1995)
If you ask a romance reader for the single best historical romance novel of the last 40 years, half of them will name this one. Sebastian Ballister, Marquess of Dain, is a half-Italian aristocrat with a lonely childhood and a wall of self-loathing so tall you can see it from Devon, and Jessica Trent is the 27-year-old bluestocking who arrives in 1828 Paris to pry her idiot brother out of Dain’s orbit and instead ends up shooting the marquess in the arm.
Loretta Chase writes Dain as a character rather than a lustful prop. He’s cruel and funny in the same breath, with a tenderness that catches him off guard more than anyone. Jessica gives as good as she gets and then some. The book is unusually smart, and it has earned every accolade thrown at it.
‘The Grand Sophy’ (1950)
When Sophy Stanton-Lacy arrives at her aunt’s London townhouse in 1816, she has been raised on the continent by a diplomat father with unconventional ideas about what a young woman should know. Her cousin Charles Rivenhall, who has been keeping the family solvent through his father’s shredded finances, would strongly prefer she left everyone’s private business alone.
Georgette Heyer basically invented the modern Regency, and The Grand Sophy is the strongest argument for that legacy. The prose is bone-dry funny, and the romance is the delicious mess of Charles slowly realizing that the cousin driving him up the wall is the only woman he has ever met who is his equal. Some parts of this haven’t aged well, but the romance is still romancing.
‘Slightly Wicked’ (2003)
Judith Law’s stagecoach overturns on the way to her aunt’s estate, where she is being sent to become an unpaid companion for the rest of her natural life. Rannulf Bedwyn, the rakish third son of a formidable ducal family, happens to be riding by and offers her shelter under an assumed name; by morning they have spent an unforgettable night together with no plans to repeat it. They part expecting never to meet again, and then Rannulf turns up at Judith’s aunt’s house a week later to court Judith’s beautiful cousin.
Mary Balogh is a master of the class-clash Regency, and this one uses the awkward second meeting to do real work. Rannulf has to stop trying to charm Judith and start convincing her that a night she has spent the last week trying to forget is worth building a real life on, and Judith has to decide whether she can risk hoping for one. It is the second book in the Bedwyn Saga and a natural on-ramp for anyone new to Balogh.
‘Pride and Prejudice’ (1813)
Yes, we’re including Pride and Prejudice. It’s the reason most of these books exist, and on reread, it’s still the sharpest, funniest of the bunch. Elizabeth Bennet is the second of five sisters in a family with no money and a mother desperate to marry each one of her offspring off. Mr. Darcy is the wealthy, aloof friend of her sister Jane’s suitor who insults her within five minutes of meeting her.
Look, nobody has ever caught up to Jane Austen on comedy. Every line of her dialogue is working overtime, and Elizabeth and Darcy are still, two centuries in, the couple every other writer in this genre is trying to write. If you last read this in high school, read it again as a grown up. You’ll find a new appreciation for it.
Pride & Prejudice
- Release Date
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November 23, 2005
- Runtime
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127 minutes
- Director
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Joe Wright
- Writers
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Deborah Moggach
