BRIDGERTON REVERIE

by Le Anne Lindsay, Editor

My friend Candi (formerly T&T contributor Candi’s Corner) is now an entertainment writer for BUSTLE. One of her first pieces features author Julia Quinn revealing how the incomparable Shonda Rhimes discovered her BRIDGERTON books. See link to article below.

I binged the series this past weekend and I’m still having a weird sense of PTSD from it. Don’t get me wrong, I delighted in the frothy, regency, costumed, romantic fun of it all. And reveled in everything Simon (Regé-Jean Page) I can just picture the casting call sheet: Looking for a gorgeous, black, rakish, imperious, charmer with a great butt. Boy! did they find their man 😍

Yet at the same time, the whole thing has made me wistful as it whisked me back to my youth, where from the age of 11 to nearly 30, I read a Shit-ton of romance novels. Starting with these lighter Harlequin Regency Romances which were always set in London’s High Society, the characters bound by the rules of “The Ton”. Thin paperback novels filled with fancy balls, carriage rides, scandals, and gentlemen callers, and oh, how I loved it so. But have you ever had something trigger you so that it feels as if your life is flashing before your eyes? Not literally, but in a sensory way.

My head filled remembering the girl I was who substituted these books for real dates on a Friday night. Who, whenever there was a free period in school immediately pulled from my purse the latest copy featuring a beautiful white couple dressed in elegant attire. Actually, I used to carry around two books for fear of finishing one and not wanting to wait to get home to start another.

I also read all the racier, Fabio standing over a wild vixen with heaving bosom type romance novels too, yet when Fifty Shades of Gray came out, it didn’t take me back quite the way Bridgerton has affected me. Although, I too felt then about E.L. James as I do about Julia Quinn, happy for their success, but I feel bad for all the romance writers who came before them, that never got their chance in the spotlight. Some, like Jude Deveraux and Joanna Lindsey with a 40-year fan following.

And me having been such a devotee, it’s hard not to think, what if I had blossomed into a Shonda Rhimes to bring this genre to the masses, along with imagining it with black characters being accepted as equal or better) than their white counterparts. [Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) so FIERCE and the Queen (Golda Rosheuvel) a Wanda Sykes look-alike, hilarious]. Then all those wasted hours of my life would have come full circle.

Oh well, this reverie is not going to stop me from watching season 2. But I just have one question, how could Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) have gotten so besotted that she left that priceless, royal necklace in the garden with nary a thought? I hope a servant found it and cashed it in for the good life.