If you have arrived here a little uncertain about what Regency romance actually is, do come in and sit down. I shall pour the tea, and by the time the pot is empty you will know precisely where to begin.

The short version is this: a Regency romance is a love story set in or around the British Regency, the glittering, anxious, beautifully mannered decade when the future George IV ruled in his poor mad father’s stead. Think candlelit ballrooms and muddy country lanes, dukes who behave abominably until the right woman declines to be impressed, and a great deal turning on a single dance, a single letter, a single look held a moment too long.

What I love about the genre — and I warn you now, I am hopelessly partial — is how much it makes of how little it permits. These were people who could not simply say what they felt. A gentleman could ruin a lady by standing too close; a lady could undo herself with one unchaperoned carriage ride. So everything is pressure and restraint, everything is meaning poured into the smallest gestures. It is the most romantic arrangement imaginable, really, because nothing is ever allowed to be easy.

The three flavours

Newcomers are often surprised to learn the genre comes in distinct varieties, and it saves a good deal of disappointment to know which you have in your hand.

The traditional Regency is the comedy-of-manners sort: witty, warm, light on its feet, and chaste in the bedroom. The pleasure here is in the sparring, the misunderstandings, the slow thaw. This is the tradition Georgette Heyer built and the one Barbara Metzger carries on so splendidly today.

The sensual or historical Regency keeps the frocks and the ballrooms but draws the bedroom curtain rather further back. The emotion runs hotter, the scenes more frank. Neither sort is better than the other; they are simply different evenings.

And then there is my own particular weakness, the Regency mystery, which folds a puzzle, a theft, or a body into the courtship. Romance and intrigue make excellent dancing partners, as it happens.

The tropes you will come to adore

Every genre has its beloved patterns, and ours are half the fun. You will meet the marriage of convenience, in which two people wed for entirely sensible reasons and then have the great inconvenience of falling in love. You will meet the reformed rake, that scandalous gentleman undone at last by genuine feeling. There is the enemies-to-lovers quarrel that fools no one but the quarrellers, the Cinderella in her shabby gown, the second chance for a love that went wrong years ago. Do not let anyone sniff at these as predictable. We do not read for the destination; we read for the exquisite, maddening journey of getting there.

Where to begin

If you want the headwaters, begin with Jane Austen, who was writing in the period itself and remains its sharpest observer. Then go to Georgette Heyer, who in the twentieth century turned all of it into the genre we now know. And when you are ready for living authors writing fresh stories in the tradition, you could not do better than the shelf we keep here at Histria: Barbara Metzger for wit, Joan Wolf for depth of feeling, June Calvin for a touch of the gothic, and R.J. Koreto when you fancy a mystery stitched into your romance.