Bridgerton and its fans owe much to the moderate success which met the publication of Jeffery Farnol’s Edwardian frolic My Lady Caprice (1907): this modicum of success led Farnol to a writing career, and he followed My Lady Caprice with the bestseller The Broad Highway (1910). This opens with a will setting up a love triangle which will be familiar to many a reader/viewer of Bridgerton: “the sum of five hundred thousand pounds, now vested in the funds, shall be paid to either Maurice or Peter Vibart aforesaid, if either shall, within one calendar year, become the husband of the Lady Sophia Sefton.” As with the rest of Farnol’s oeuvre, The Broad Highway has largely fallen out of cultural memory, but it is noteworthy for inspiring the teenage Georgette Heyer to write her first novel. Heyer’s The Black Moth (1921) is set in the mid-eighteenth century, and is the first of her Georgian novels. These are most often elided with her Regency novels (strictly these began with Regency Buck [1935]), as part of one long Regency-like continuum. Her bestselling thirty-plus Georgian and Regency novels set the slightly sardonic tone, provided the framework, consolidated the characterisation, and firmed up the inheritance and marriage plots of what we now call the Regency Romance, and which are at the heart of Bridgerton.

The Regency Romance sits slightly alongside the popular romance genre.  With a focus on love and often marriage, many can be read as popular romance.  We can see this with the work of such writers as Barbara Cartland, whose 700+ novels firmly established a particular version of the Regency, adding what we might called aristo-porn with its erotic couplings (albeit staid by Bridgerton standards). But the Regency Romance also functions as historical fiction, with the spectre of Jane Austen looming. Heyer, in particular, was a meticulous historical researcher. The gendered politics of genre are writ large here, in terms of the romance as “women’s fiction”.  Nonetheless, there is a chain of Regency continuity between Austen (and let’s not forget poor Farnol), Heyer and Cartland, which remains largely unexamined. Another chain in this link was forged with the publication of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton novels in the early twentieth century, and then the global bonkbuster release of Shondaland’s slightly modernised small screen adaptations of the same from 2020 onwards.

There are intriguing questions here about historical adaptation and the flex of modernity and authenticity: the pebbling of modernity of Bridgerton has been much remarked, with its classical renditions of contemporary pop music, its updating of language, tone, and its sprinkling of social justice throughout in terms of race and gender (yet rarely class – the question of servant labour is usually played only for comedy). The generic parameters of the popular romance, however,  very much remain the organising principles of the narrative: the plots centre on a Bridgerton sibling finding ‘the one’, even if (as with Anthony initially in Season Two) they had not believed always in the power of love.  Their mother’s unswaying belief in true love as giving purpose – a true love that will always conquer all, and ultimately also in a socially-acceptable way – is a mantra that has been drilled into her children. This pulls nicely into the syncretic amalgamation of the love, marriage and inheritance plots of the Regency Romance (and of Austen). The romantic logic of Bridgerton is that true love must always come from within one’s own class: thus we knew that Eloise’s fancy for the printer Theo Sharpe, despite their common interests in women’s rights and social justice, would come to naught in Season Two, as would Anthony’s relationship with opera singer Siena Rosso in Season One.

The romance of Season Three of Bridgerton was that of Penelope Featherington and Colin Bridgerton, or Polin (with the social media sphere working extremely hard to replicate the celebrity-imbued aura of portmantesque couplings such as Bennifer and Brangelina).  The reveal at the end of Season One that Penelope was occasional narrator and society gossip writer Lady Whistledown set the scene in Season Three for the misunderstanding that – following the rules of the romance genre – inevitably followed Polin’s realisation of their mutual desire. How and when would Penelope reveal her writing career and wealth to Colin, and how could Colin forgive Penelope for the impertinence and the secrecy; and, more importantly, for having a writing career, when that is all he has ever wanted – at least since returning from his most recent sexual exploits expedition to the Continent? Penelope finds Colin’s diary in Episode Two (“How Bright the Moon”) and reads of how the most beautiful women can be found in streets and cafes of Paris. Colin’s voice takes over the narration, to detail his sexual exploits: “In these moments alone, as my fingers trace freckles from cheek to collarbone, or as I watch the way starlight dances across skin, I marvel at how one can feel such intimacy, but also such great distance.”  Colin enters the room, and in the minor kerfuffle that ensues about her reading the diary, his hand is cut by glass; the binding of this wound by Penelope leads to one of their first erotically charged exchange of glances.

The move from the public space of Paris to the private space of the bedroom in his writing reverses an earlier move in the episode when Colin leaves a private threesome with two sex workers – “It has been wonderful, ladies” – to arrive late for a public meeting with Penelope to work with her on her flirting so that she might procure a husband.  The erotics of desire are nothing new for Bridgerton – charged glances, the titillation of touch and (decorously) explicit shagging; these have been the bread and butter of the series since Season One. But the shadow of Whistledown – with its refractions of labour, writing, and the public sphere – on Polin shifts the parameters of these relationships, in ways which the ensuing seasons may struggle to accommodate. After wrapping his wound – a vulval gash on his writing hand – Penelope tells Colin that “your writing, it is very good.” Her positive assessment of his abilities is largely ignored by Colin (and surely a surprise to the viewers).  Penelope is a bestselling and highly sought after writer; Colin’s accounts of his travels are still seeking a publisher. When he goes to ask Cressida Cowper in Episode Eight (“Into the Light”) to not reveal Penelope’s identity as Whistledown. Cressida astutely states that “you sound as if you are jealous of her.” He weakly responds he is not, before pleading for mercy on the basis of Penelope being a wallflower and lonely.

The penultimate scene at the be-bugged Featherington Ball has the Queen revealing Whistledown’s identity, and Penelope publicly stating her case. The Queen’s public sanctioning of Whistledown means that the Featheringtons and Bridgertons remain unsullied socially, while Colin tells Penelope he is proud to stand by her side, although he ominously says that the future will have challenges.  The final scene has all three Featherington daughters with their babies, revealing the real politics of the marriage market of the ton in terms of securing property and inheritance in a drive to futurity (as with the other two married Bridgerton siblings).  While Whistledown’s latest missive is circulated through the room for all to read, Colin’s book Travelling With Myself is read by only men, and the earlier scenes of his brothel visits, and his demonstrating of his superior sexual knowledge with Penelope, suggests that this is a book – as Benedict implies when taking it from his younger brother – about sexual escapades (indeed, likely about threesomes, as several of the Bridgertons have a penchant for these).

While much has been made of Bridgerton being female-centred in terms of heterosexual desire and women’s gaze – see the languorous shots of men’s hands moving under women’s clothes and up thighs – this is a text which remains wholly imbricated within the politics of the romance genre.  The function of marriage to ‘the one’ is to produce more children for the ton and for the exchange of economic capital in the form of women’s bodies – as Portia Featherington asserts about her granddaughters marrying well – as in Farnol’s The Broad Highway.  No matter how many classical renditions of Madonna songs, the promise of modernity remains a distant one.  And now, Dearest Gentle Reader, I leave you with a question: how much bonking is too much bonking?  Do we want or need to see all the Bridgertons engaged in staircase shags and carriage fingerings?  There are significant questions of gender and genre here: the category of ‘quality television’ has often been used for cop and hospital dramas, or for high fantasy, which have been historically aligned with masculinity. The success of glossy melodrama and domestic crime shows like The White Lotus and The Perfect Couple puts pressure on Bridgerton to move beyond the bonking, possibly, in terms of its focus on female desire and the gaze, and in terms of women’s voice and women’s labour.  Season Four will have a lot of emotional and epistemological ground to cover in order to respond to this pressure successfully.