Where Is My History in Regency Romance?

There are apparently Black earls and dukes in the ton, not to mention young women from the sub-continent on the marriage mart, and they seem to intermingle with white British citizens and raise no eyebrows. Even Queen Charlotte has mixed-race ancestry in this world and we get to see her travails and her impact on British society in the spin-off Queen Charlotte.

We quite like this world and we can’t wait for it to return to our screens in 2024 with our own Lady Whistledown getting her long-awaited turn in London’s ballrooms and pleasure gardens.

(11 Tips for Writing a Regency Romance.)

For much of the Regency period, England was at war with Naploeon’s France, leading to high taxes, unemployment, and inflation that unequally impacted the poor. Added to that, poorer folk in England had to make the near-impossible choice between the hardship and probable death that awaited them in the wars versus the poverty and hunger their family would face if they didn’t enlist.

But one of the glaring things about the 1800s that almost all Regency romance novels ignore are the often-violent histories of colonialism and slavery.

It was because of histories of colonialism and slavery that there were around 50,000 people of color in Britain by the mid-1800s. If we read real histories by authors like William Dalrymple, we see mixed-race children of Englishmen of the East India Company with their Indian or Caribbean wives and mistresses. We see lascars from the colonies who would work on East India Company ships and then be let loose to fend for themselves in the not-always-kind streets of London. We see nannies from the Caribbean who would accompany their “charges” on long sea voyages and then be left to build a life in England if they could.

Typically, we see these challenging histories in literary works like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Zadie Smith’s more recent novel The Fraud. And we see the glaring class divisions in England in works by Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy. We see the violence of colonialism in fantasy novels by Rebecca Kuang and Tomi Adeyemi. But romance novels are thought of as frothy and fluffy. They’re fun and cute but apparently not the place for real history. What, then, is the place of Black and brown authors in historical romance?

I fell in love with Georgette Heyer’s high jinx, laugh-out-loud, witty Regency world when I was a teenager. I’d already read her contemporary mysteries by then and loved her witty repartee, but my first glimpse of a tattered copy of The Talisman Ring in a secondhand bookstall in the foothills of the Himalayas made me look again.

The book cover showed me a woman in a sumptuous bright blue Marie Antoinette-style dress and headgear, standing in stables, holding a pistol and a lantern and ready for high adventure. I fell in love with the genre with one read of this book. The wit, the adventure, the smugglers, the passion that was all the wilder for being understated, her hallmarks were all there to be devoured.

Check out Amita Murray’s Unladylike Rules of Attraction here:

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Heyer’s romances formed my ideal of wit and historical romance, yet as an author it was a door that was permanently closed to me and I couldn’t see myself in it. I couldn’t write from the POV of a white female protagonist. But where were the brown women in Regency England? How could I explore histories of colonialism and slavery in a world that refused to acknowledge them?

Yet my grandparents were the product of this colonial history. They were active in the anti-colonial movement in India, yet were also educated in universities and colleges established by the British, both in India and then later, in the 1950s, in London. Their bookshelves were chock with Dickens and Hardy and the Bronte sisters. Where were their stories and my history in Regency romance?

It was Rhimes’s take on the Regency world that finally opened the door, or at least a window. My Unladylike series of novels has all the fun, wit, and high passion of a Heyer-esque Regency romance. It has quite a lot of the sexiness we associate with the Regency because of Bridgerton and its spin-off Queen Charlotte, and the novels of Mary Balogh and Lisa Kleypas. It also introduces the reader to characters of color.

In my newest novel, Unladylike Rules of Attraction, Anya Marleigh, the daughter of an East India Company earl and his Indian mistress, wears Regency dress and plays the sitar in Queen Charlotte’s court. She falls in love and hate with Damian Ashton, whose relatives not-so-fondly refer to him as the urchin thief from Jamaica.

As often happens in my novels, there’s quite a lot of fun to be had in the bedroom. There’s mixed-race romances and high adventure. There are tea dances and soirees and ball gowns galore. But there are also rat baiting pits and slums, highway men and smugglers. There are lascars and nannies from the colonies. We touch on backstories of colonialism and slavery that impact our protagonists.

This reimagined world allows authors like me to dive deep into the fun and froth of Regency romance that has often only been open to white authors but with a look into the real and quite complex histories of class and race of the 1800s as they really were.

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