Romantic friction
The historical romance author Julia Quinn, who wrote the books that inspired Bridgerton, talks about writing sex scenes, and the frustrating misconceptions around romance novels. Prudence Wade reports.
THE romance genre often seems somewhat looked down on in literature – which Bridgerton author Julia Quinn partly credits to the fact it’s dominated by women. “It’s very female – and women too, we tend to devalue the female,” says Quinn, who specialises in historical fiction and wrote the novels the popular Bridgerton Netflix series is based on.
“We might like it, but for some reason we don’t hold it up on a pedestal as much.”
The other reason is that it’s “a genre about emotions”, Quinn believes.
“That’s another thing we don’t seem to laud, like something about emotions is not as highbrow as a great quest, or tragedy, or really bad emotions.
“It’s like bad emotions are artier than good emotions.”
The 53-year-old American writer, also bemoans that some people think romance novels are just “mum porn”.
“If you want porn, if you want erotica, that’s great. But in romance novels, the sex scenes – you can’t just pull them out, because you’d be missing a part of the story,” she explains.
“With romance, if it’s done well, every intimate scene is there not just to be an intimate scene, but to move along the plot, to develop the characters or move along the relationship.”
Another common misconception she comes across is that all romance novels are the same.
“They’re not,” Quinn affirms. “In all, there are two things you have to do: your characters have to either meet or re-meet, and you have to have a happy ending – how you get from here to there is wide open.
“If you have a mystery novel, you’ve got to have a dead body and you’ve got to solve it. How you get from here to there is wide open. How disappointed would you be if you’re reading an Agatha Christie and at the end, Hercule Poirot was like, ‘That’s a stumper, I don’t know’.
“Many of them are very, very well written,” she adds of romance books. “You can easily find a bad one, but you can easily find a bad anything.
Despite not being held in the highest esteem in literature, there’s been a rise in romcoms across film and television.
With the Guardian suggesting 36 new romcoms are coming out this year on film and streamed TV – from Rye Lane to Love Again – the genre is positively thriving.
Then there’s the wild success of the first two seasons of Bridgerton on Netflix, with the recently released prequel Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story currently sitting in the top 10 on the streaming platform.
This surge in popularity doesn’t surprise Seattle-based Quinn.
“I think people want more happy endings than they realise they do,” she says.
“Which isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with the dark and edgy shows we also like to watch and books we like to read. But you can only survive on so many Scandinavian crime dramas.
“You need a little light in there too, and a little happiness. Sometimes it’s really nice watching or reading something, knowing you’re going to have a happy ending.”
Quinn published the first Bridgerton book, The Duke And I, back in 2000.
Two decades later it caught the eye of Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy creator
Shonda Rhimes, who turned it into a TV series with a diverse cast, some of it filmed in Yorkshire.
It revolves around the eponymous Bridgerton family and is set in the competitive world of Regency era London during the social season where marriageable youth of nobility and gentry are launched into society.
The first season debuted on December 25 2020. The second season premiered on March 25 2022. By April 2021, the series was renewed for a third and fourth season.
Now, Quinn has teamed up with Rhimes for their first joint book – a Bridgerton prequel which follows Queen Charlotte’s marriage and rise to power.
Young Queen Charlotte's marriage to King George of England sparks an epic love story and transforms high society in this Bridgerton prequel. The series premiered on May 4 2023 and consists of six episodes.
This is the first book in the Bridgerton series to reflect the diverse casting of the Netflix show, and Quinn worked a little differently for it.
Rhimes wrote the script for the series first, and then gave them to Quinn, who adapted it into the book.
“I had to break down the architecture of a screenplay and figure out how to rewrite it in prose as a novel. It’s a totally different thing.”
But she is enthusiastic about the experience, saying it “made me more involved”, as previously she “didn’t have anything to do” with the adaptations.
Plus, there are still the sex scenes fans are familiar with from the Bridgerton books and shows.
As for writing sex scenes, Quinn says they are “not what comes most naturally for me, [but] I wouldn’t say they’re immensely hard.
“For me, the scenes that write themselves are the conversations, or the funny big group scenes, because I really like writing dialogue – which is probably why when I do write sex scenes, the characters end up talking to each other a lot.”
‘You need a little light in there too, and a little happiness. Sometimes it’s really nice watching or reading something, knowing you’re going to have a happy ending.’
This is a logical continuation from Peter Ross’s previous book, A Tomb With A View: The Stories And Glories Of Graveyards, in that here he turns his attention to the building normally, but not exclusively, found in a graveyard: the church. It plays to Ross’s strengths in that he has eye for the curious detail, and a very empathetic manner.
The church, as we are often told, is not about the masonry or the pews or the stained glass, but rather about the people that make up the church. In his encounters in various churches and places of worship Ross invariably finds a way to let the people reveal themselves, as anxious, dedicated, inspiring, humble, firm in their opinions or just mildly eccentric.
But I should not swerve the issue, as it is central to this book. One often hears about a place being a “living, breathing church”, but more frequently these days one is likely to hear “last gasp”. Churches, far too frequently and far more regularly, will soon become a fellow denizen of the graveyard and not the sentinel keeping watch over them.
Some of the churches Ross visits are the superstars – St Paul’ Cathedral, or even the infamous modernist ruin of St Peter’s Seminary in Argyll and Bute.
Some are hidden away, but with fabulous stories, such as Holy Trinity in Stow
Bardolph which has a wax effigy that looks like a prop from Doctor Who, or St Peter and St Paul’s in Chaldon with its Bosch-like wall painting.
Perhaps the best glance into the method here is right at the start, when Ross encounters a pew box in St Mary’s Whitby with the legend “For Strangers Only”.
He arrives in most places as a stranger and yet effortlessly wins over the people to whom he speaks. In terms of style there is a clue in the reference to the work of WG Sebald. They are both melancholic enthusiasts, seekers for the numinous in a ruined world, and both have an air of being both bemused and transported at the same time.
These pieces do, however, amount to more than an anthology of “what I did on my church holidays if not Holy Days”. It seems to be a book that is taking the temperature of the nation, in more ways than one.
Part of the background in the ongoing pandemic, when churches were closed and human contact limited in most places, except perhaps SW1A 2AA. These sections deal with the functionality of the church, as a place of community, of respite and of consolation.
Another strand is a subtle investigation into where we are as a country, sort-of-post-Brexit. What do these churches symbolise and what do they tell us about the kind of country we are? The mentions of the war are significant in this regard; but so too is the granular sense of particularity. Churches have the capacity to root places, to make them feel individual and not corporate clones.
This extends even to those who do not attend; though I have been known to grumble when there is news of a local petition to save a church from closure (and this will be happening more and more) that it would not be closing if every signatory also came to a service.
Ross has always had a quiet charm, and it is perhaps displayed best in this book. It is serious, it has moments of levity, and he walks a very coy line around his own disbelief and its relationship to his fascination.
It is certainly not expedient or exploitative, a trawl for juicy human interest stories. Instead it is properly interested in humanity, especially in its complexity.