Love is…
A Very British Romance with Lucy Worsley TV BBC Four, scheduled for Thursday 8 October
We think of romance as a ‘natural’ part of life. Too simplistic, argues Lucy Worsley. Many of our innermost thoughts and feelings are shaped by social, political and cultural factors that, unless we stop to think about them, we hardly even notice. This even applies to the notion of falling in love.
Worsley’s latest series takes us back to the Georgian era, a time when rules around courtship began to be rewritten. Prior to this time, marriage had traditionally been as much about money as finding a soulmate. But the 18th century was when the idea of ‘sensibility’, and particularly the idea people might acutely respond to the emotions of another person, began to become fashionable.
The rise of the novel was key here, because romantic fiction, in Worsley’s estimation, was “as revolutionary as a political manifesto” for the way it changed how people thought about love and marriage. Books by the likes of Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney and Jane Austen didn’t just offer escapism, they offered new ways of thinking. Accordingly, for Worsley, the most influential Georgian wasn’t Wellington or Nelson, but “Aunt Jane, spinster”.