I have a soft spot in my heart for
historical fiction novels set in England during the Georgian and Regency eras.
Why? There are so many reasons, but I’ll condense them down to eight:
1. I
love stepping back in time.
Reading a novel set in the past is like discovering your own personal
time machine. I love being immersed in all the sights, sounds, and smells of a
time gone by, and experiencing, through the characters’ eyes, thoughts, and
feelings, what it was like to live in another era. The Georgian and Regency
eras are particularly appealing to me because it’s the time in which Jane
Austen lived and wrote. Jane
grew up during the Georgian era, which began in 1714 and spanned the reigns of the first four Hanoverian kings of Great Britain who were all
named George. The Regency (which we more readily associate with Austen) was a
brief sub-period of the Georgian era between 1811 and 1820, when King George III was
deemed unfit to rule and his son, the Prince of Wales, ruled as
his proxy as Prince Regent.
It’s such fun to read about the way people lived then, and to spend time with them in their
country houses, where even the poorest of the gentry class had servants to wait
on them. Nobody in Austen’s novels is ever seen doing anything we’d recognize
today as work. They ride horses, drive in carriages, play cards, play music,
sing, read, sew, embroider, draw, paint, hunt, take long walks in the
shrubbery, and dance at balls. Of course, it took servants to make all that
leisure time possible—but what fun it is to lose ourselves in what seems like a
lovely, fairy tale existence.
