What would the women of Bridgerton make of modern love if they suddenly found themselves transported from Regency England to post-Brexit Britain? Julia Quinn – real name Julia Pottinger – is the American author who wrote the Bridgerton books on which Shonda Rhimes based the phenomenally popular Netflix series. The third season has just arrived on the platform. She’s at home in Seattle when the Listener connects via Zoom. Ask her what the Bridgerton sisters, their friend Penelope Featherington – who is at the heart of this season’s big romance – and their ever-watchful mothers and chaperones might make of today’s online dating, hook-up culture, gender-bending and more casual attitudes to attachment, and she hesitates for a heartbeat.
“I don’t even know that they’d even be focused, at first, on dating if they arrived in the here and now,” she says, wry smile flickering across her face. “I think they’d be in shock. Different characters would react differently, of course, so I think Eloise especially might be like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can vote!’ and, ‘I can own things.’ I think they’d all be pleased that they could scratch themselves and if it got infected, they wouldn’t die.”
Once recovered, technology such as dating apps might appeal to them. “Penelope, for example, I think she would enjoy the ability to send messages back and forth before you actually have to meet a person. That opportunity to communicate with a prospective suitor or boyfriend or whatever you want to call it in writing first could be welcomed – especially for someone like me who, you know, often feels I can be wittier written than spoken.”
One can only imagine how much use the eagle-eyed and acute-of-hearing Lady Whistledown might make of social media, and the type of posts she’d tease “the Ton” with. But Quinn admits, when it comes to online dating, she wouldn’t know where to start.
She met her husband, Paul, an infectious diseases specialist, at Harvard University, where Quinn – then Julia Cotler – was studying art history. Graduating in 1992, Quinn says she didn’t know what to do next so enrolled at Yale to study medicine.
She already had a side hustle writing romance stories, something she did to break up long days of studying. Schooled in romance writing from reading series such as Sweet Dreams and Sweet Valley High and, later Jane Austen and the more contemporary but lesser-known Georgette Heyer, Quinn started writing her first novel aged 12.
The story goes that her father, disapproving of Sweet Dreams books, asked her to explain how they were maturing her reading so, she told him she was “studying” them to write her own book. She duly started, taking three years to finish it, only for it to be rejected when she submitted it to the publisher of Sweet Dreams.
But that rejection didn’t put her off writing. Within weeks of being accepted at Yale, her first two novels, Splendid and Dancing at Midnight, had been sold at auction. Months later, she was at Yale and a published author of three successful books with a choice to make.
She liked writing better but her pen name Julia Quinn – adopted because she thought she’d need a different name if she was going to be a doctor – stuck.
Most of her books have made it to the New York Times bestseller lists, she has won numerous awards for romance writing and, in 2010, was the youngest author to be inducted into Romance Writers of America’s Hall of Fame. There’s been a Time magazine profile and then, completely out of the blue, a call from her agent – 17 years after the first of the nine Bridgerton novels was published – saying producer Shonda Rhimes was interested in screen adaptations.
“It was a huge surprise, and honestly, the surprise wasn’t because the books had been around for a while; it was because Hollywood has not traditionally looked to romance novels for source material, and if they’re going to do a historical piece, surely they would just do Jane Austen for the 56th time? It never occurred to me that it might happen; the closest thing to it was Outlander [the time-travel romance novels by Diana Gabaldon].”
Asked if she as the author would be willing to cede creative control, as is standard, Quinn does not hesitate: “It’s Shonda Rhimes, and I’m not going to tell her how to make television.” Given Rhimes made her name as the showrunner on dramas such as Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice, it’s not hard to see Quinn’s point.
“I knew who she was, I knew what she’d done, so I trusted her.”
But Quinn had no idea of the scale of the series until she visited the set. “I remember my first set visit and seeing the costumes and recognising the characters. People kept saying, ‘It must be so crazy for you to see your characters come to life’ but it was less that than how huge it was. You get to the set or on location and there’s just hundreds and hundreds of people running around with clipboards.
“I can’t even tell what half of them do, but they all seemed very good at their jobs, and the production values were unbelievable. I remember calling my husband and just saying, ‘Well, they are not doing this on the cheap.’”
The success of Bridgerton led to a prequel, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, focused on the romance between Queen Charlotte and King George III. That meant Quinn had to write a novel based on the show, rather than the other way around.
“Shonda wrote the scripts, and I adapted them, so the story was truly hers. I’d never written something based on source material before, so it was an entirely different experience. A lot like solving a puzzle, which was really fun and used a different part of my brain.
“I tried to do a little bit of research on what was involved in adapting a script to a novel – as opposed to doing it in the other direction, which is more common. There was nothing, absolutely nothing.”
What there is now, though, is Bridgerton merchandise, from teas and biscuits to clothing and skincare products. This season, focused on the romance between Penelope Featherington and Colin Bridgerton, has led to a hay fever medication, “Polin”. “No, that’s not a misspelling of pollen,” trumpets the marketing, “#TeamPolin refers to the portmanteau of Bridgerton’s main characters …”
Quinn agrees it’s perhaps one of the more tenuous associations, and also a world away from Regency England. Why, as an American, set the books in Regency Britain? Especially when she’d been to Bath – Regency romance heartland – only once: during a gap year when she attended an all-girls Church of England boarding school in Gloucester.
The Regency period appeals, she says, because it’s a “sweet spot” in history, when the past is far enough away to give it a fairytale quality but close enough to the present that readers – and now viewers – can recognise characters thinking and acting in ways we might now.
“I contrast it with mediaeval times, when the world had a certain religiosity and mysticism,” she says, adding that’s harder for us to recognise and trickier to write. “Even if you have serious themes – because, let’s be honest, there were still a lot of wars going on and if you weren’t rich, it wasn’t fun – you can still write something that has a lighthearted tone to it.”
Although there’s been debate about the strength of “girl power” within her female characters, Quinn has tried to make them as complex and campaigning as she can while still befitting the time period. Older women, such as Queen Charlotte and the redoubtable Lady Danbury, have prominent roles; female friendship is uplifted and celebrated.
“I started writing in the mid-90s, when you could have a fabulous heroine, but the other main female character would then be some evil, awful woman, or there might be a sister, but it was the sister who needed taking care of. It meant there was this real sort of ‘virgin or whore’ paradox going on.
“One way to make your characters interesting is to isolate them in some way, but I do remember thinking that I wanted the women to have a friend, even if it was their cousin. I thought, ‘Let’s show women getting support from other women.’ And so that’s a theme, but I still think it’s fairly clear that the 21st century is a better time for women than the 19th.”
That said, Quinn acknowledges the fight for women’s rights needs to continue, especially with the repeal of the Roe vs Wade abortion decision in the US. She says she’s not so much surprised as horrified that her daughter, in her 20s, has fewer reproductive rights than she did.
Quinn’s strongest advocacy role is as ambassador for EveryLibrary, a non-profit that helps fight book bans in public school libraries in the US. While her own books aren’t in school libraries, Quinn says you don’t have to be affected by the bans or even an author to be concerned about them.
“I mean, people who have banned and burnt books in the past have never ended up on the right side of history, but it’s an area that, politically, I can speak to without people telling me to stay in my lane.”
Series three of Bridgerton is now on Netflix.
