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)
Image via Avon Books
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)
Image via Joy Revolution
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)
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