A look under the bonnet: why our fascination with the Regency era endures
The Regency, that narrow slice of history between 1811 and 1820, occupies a vastly disproportionate place in the British, and increasingly the global, imaginarium. Those nine years – when the future George IV reigned as prince regent owing to his father’s incapacity – have recently birthed a second series of the frothily preposterous Netflix series Bridgerton; a second series of Sanditon, based on Jane Austen’s unfinished novel; and a new film version of Persuasion, with Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot. The “Regency romance” literary genre, a bottomless well of Austenesque love stories, has produced a summer bestseller this year in Sophie Irwin’s A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting. Another, Suzanne Allain’s Mr Malcolm’s List, has been adapted into a film starring Freida Pinto, also out this summer.
You may think that the general favourite of Austen’s novels, Pride and Prejudice, would be owed a rest from adaptation after Greer Garson, Jennifer Ehle then Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennet; after the zombie version; PD James’s crime version; the Bollywood version; Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones version; the version; the hilarious Scottish stage version (, a West End hit that’s returning home to Edinburgh this autumn). But no: , a new Netflix series,
