Regency-era romance redux
Lincoln Park native Bea Koch gives us heroines with depth
“Mad, bad and dangerous to know.” Those are the words that start Lincoln Park native Bea Koch’s first book, “Mad & Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency.” You may think that phrase applies to any pop culture villain, but here it centers on Regency England — yep, that era made popular by the words of Jane Austen and poet Lord Byron.
In the book, Koch gives us a look at the female gatekeepers (aka Patronesses) of Almack’s Assembly Rooms, a social sanctum for the elite. If you were in, you were considered part of the “it” crowd and granted access to the events of the season. They ran the membership lists of the club “with an iron fist and eye to the unwritten set of rules that governed the world of the aristocracy.”
But “Mad & Bad” goes beyond that. Readers learn that these women of the era were multidimensional: mothers who passed the family business of art down to their daughters; sisters who discovered comets; and mistresses who refused to be “typecast as the other women.” Within Koch’s pages there are both women of color and Jewish women who educated the wider populace about Judaism and brought kosher cooking to a wider audience.
If you’re wondering what makes the Regency era so popular and timeless, Koch reasons that it is “the struggle of a society ruled by a strict social code where in actuality the most famous and celebrated of the time are those who flouted the rules.” The women of the time were intelligent, talented and more.
“I have always read Regency romance novels, my whole life,” Koch, coowner of the Californiabased romance bookstore The Ripped Bodice, said. “One of the themes of the book is that there are these networks of women and anywhere you look, you might see one woman, but if you keep looking, you will find a network surrounding her. What I was trying to say is history has a problem — which is that we shine a spotlight on an individual woman and that spotlight is so bright that it dims the light on everyone around her. We really lose a lot of the connective tissue of real life for women.
“To me, the most interesting part of history is seeing a connection to my historical subjects. I’m always looking for women who are like me, women who are ambitious, women who have strong groups of friends around them, women who love their families. One of the things I wanted to do with this book was find as many women as I could. So, other women could have that moment of realization and familiarity and be like, ‘Oh, I connect to this woman, we have this thing in common.’ This woman is inspiring and groundbreaking, and I connect to that as well. I think I wanted to show both — that women can be groundbreaking, and they also had real lives and real friendships.”
We talked with Koch after the Sept. 1 release of her book. The following interview has been condensed and edited.
Q: Why now for this book?
A: Romance is such an expansive and expanding genre. There have been ongoing conversations for a long time about historical accuracy, specifically in the Regency era. And people have been questioning including characters of color, Jewish women and lesbians — women who don’t fit the white, Christian hetero mold — questioning whether their inclusion is accurate. The book was born from this place of “we love Regency romance novels so much. There’s also so much more history here. And we need to push ourselves to discover all these other women who existed who might not fit in our general perception of the era.”
Q: Any surprises discovered in your research?
A: A big surprise to me was Mary Seacole. I knew who Mary Seacole was. I knew that there was a Jamaican British nurse who worked at the same time as Florence Nightingale and that was the extent of what I knew about her. She was secondary to Florence Nightingale in the books I was reading. I loved Florence Nightingale as a child. She was one of my favorite historical women; I would read every biography I could find about her. And then I read Mary Seacole’s autobiography and I was angry. I was angry at myself for not having sought her out before I was researching and that I hadn’t questioned the narrative of this one white woman who’s saving all the soldiers. I love Mary Seacole. So many people are really responding to her story in particular, and saying: ‘Hey we should have learned this,’ she was a hero to the British soldiers. She wanted to help people so badly that she made it happen. Florence Nightingale had government support. Mary Seacole didn’t.
I think it’s important to talk about: Mary Seacole tried to join Florence’s group of nurses and was turned away multiple times, and Mary named the reason in her autobiography as racism. We kind of tucked that away like, “Oh, Florence wasn’t being racist.” But no, Mary Seacole said she was. Why are we continuing to undercut the story she told? I could talk about her for hours. I would love a miniseries of her because there are so many different parts of Mary Seacole’s life that I would love to see examined — one of them being her childhood. One of the things I love about Mary Seacole is that she’s very clear about her own ambition and belief in her own talents. I’m always looking for examples of that in history because it’s something that we’ve kind of been told doesn’t exist. But Mary Seacole’s mother was a doctor and taught her
everything she knew. Mary Seacole wrote about how she learned from her mother and sought out other sources as well and educated herself in any way she could in pursuit of a career. That, to me, is so familiar. Those are the women I know and admire now.
Q: You talk about race and religion. Do you want your book to be a jumpoff point for further romance genre discovery. Was that a goal of “Mad & Bad?”
A: That is absolutely the goal. I know some of these women might be familiar, some might not be. And that’s why I included the reading lists at the end of every chapter because these are just tidbits. I couldn’t go into as much detail about every single person I wanted to. But the Jewish chapter is very personal to me because I am a Jewish woman. That is something that I’ve always yearned to see in Regency romance novels: Jewish characters, not treated in anti-Semitic fashion. I’ve always thought that was interesting because there is a high society of Jews in Regency England, a community of wealthy Jews who are living almost a parallel life to the rest of aristocracy, which seems very ripe for a romance novel.
Q: Tell us about the mistresses chapter.
A: I loved writing the mistresses chapter — it’s the thing they all have in common. The other thing is that all those women were all writers. They all published in one way or another, and they all had artistic endeavors, like Emma Hamilton and her dance theater thing that she was creating herself. Or Mary Robinson, who was literally a poetry editor at a newspaper. They’re all amazing. So many of us love discovering history, and in this way, it’s not about battles or important men and what they’re doing, which is the part of history I kind of always skipped over. I was always like: What about their wives? What are they doing?
Q: The Ripped Bodice puts out an annual report, “The State of Racial Diversity in Romance Publishing, about representation within the romance genre. Do you think, given our current situation, that the next report will be better with diversity and inclusion?
A: I don’t think next year’s numbers will be as exciting as we hope. I think after the first year, when the numbers came out and were so bad, people were really shocked like, “wow, we didn’t realize it was this bad,” which, of course we knew it was this bad. If you listen to any Black woman in romance or any other woman of color in romance, they would tell you it’s this bad. Next year, it will be the fifth year of the report, and you would think five years gives publishers plenty of time. We say, “Here are the numbers if you would like to do better, we’d encourage you to try to do better.” Readers want more of it. Every year, since we’ve been open, they’ve been 70% -80% dominated by women of color. So, if we’re the only bookstore selling romance and now we have Tinley Park’s Love’s Sweet Arrow, we’re saying our readers want more characters of color, written by authors of color. Why are they not responding? If there’s money on the table, what’s keeping the publishers from responding? I think systemic racism is the answer. We saw publishers put out statements (on the current social climate). OK, but let’s see some (expletive) movement in the numbers. It’s not rocket science, and they know that. You have to put more books out. Readers aren’t dumb. They can see where publishers are putting their money.
Q: Any ideas for your next book? Possibly a book for every era in the romance genres, every 10 years?
A: Nothing would make me happier. There is another “Mad & Bad” I have in my head. Many of the national parks were championed by women, in particular my beloved Joshua Tree was the brainchild of a woman named Minerva Hamilton Hoyt. She was a socialite, the wife of a doctor in Pasadena, and she got President Franklin D. Roosevelt to make Joshua Tree a national park. A lot of other national parks had women who were behind the push for that area, like the Everglades. I would love to do a “Mad & Bad” Women of the National Parks.
Bea Koch and Danielle Dresser of “Fresh Fiction” recently held a virtual conversation that can be seen at lovessweetarrow.com.