Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency

Written by Bea Koch

Narrated by Rengin Altay

Discover a feminist pop history that looks beyond the Ton and Jane Austen to highlight the Regency women who succeeded on their own terms and were largely lost to history -- until now.
Regency England is a world immortalized by Jane Austen and Lord Byron in their beloved novels and poems. The popular image of the Regency continues to be mythologized by the hundreds of romance novels set in the period, which focus almost exclusively on wealthy, white, Christian members of the upper classes.
But there are hundreds of fascinating women who don't fit history books limited perception of what was historically accurate for early 19th century England. Women like Dido Elizabeth Belle, whose mother was a slave but was raised by her white father's family in England, Caroline Herschel, who acted as her brother's assistant as he hunted the heavens for comets, and ended up discovering eight on her own, Anne Lister, who lived on her own terms with her common-law wife at Shibden Hall, and Judith Montefiore, a Jewish woman who wrote the first English language Kosher cookbook.

As one of the owners of the successful romance-only bookstore The Ripped Bodice, Bea Koch has had a front row seat to controversies surrounding what is accepted as "historically accurate" for the wildly popular Regency period. Following in the popular footsteps of books like Ann Shen's Bad Girls Throughout History, Koch takes the Regency, one of the most loved and idealized historical time periods and a huge inspiration for American pop culture, and reveals the independent-minded, standard-breaking real historical women who lived life on their terms. She also examines broader questions of culture in chapters that focus on the LGBTQ and Jewish communities, the lives of women of color in the Regency, and women who broke barriers in fields like astronomy and paleontology. In Mad and Bad, we look beyond popular perception of the Regency into the even more vibrant, diverse, and fascinating historical truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hachette Audio
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781549123795

Reviews for Mad and Bad

[mickyfine · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The book describes itself as one that highlights women of the Regency period who go against the popular image of the staid, white, Christian women that appears in popular media. And it kind of does that but with some stylistic choices that baffled me. The author, Bea Koch, is a co-owner of the Ripped Bodice and so several of her chapters make references to depictions of the period in Regency romances, but gets too much into plot details of referenced novels in this reader's opinion for a book that's ostensibly history and not literary commentary. The writing style also felt a bit like an undergraduate history essay, highlighting a few women but then including a conclusion passage (with a paragraph heading of "Conclusion," which made me want to cringe). In more than one chapter, while discussing a single woman there is a paragraph break to discuss a tangentially related woman (with a paragraph heading of "Spotlight on X") and then goes back to the original woman being discussed with a paragraph heading "Back to X." It's a weird stylistic choice and would likely have been better served by a highlight block outside the body of the section. The content isn't bad but it could have been presented much better with stronger editing. That said the book does a solid job of introducing a variety of women who transgressed norms for the period and includes artists, women working in STEM, queer women, women of colour, and Jewish women. It's worth picking up the book to learn the names of these women and the outlines of their lives, but if you're looking for real biographies or histories, I'd look to the titles included in each chapter's recommended reading instead.

[thewestwing-864351 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book. The book is full of selected biographies of women from the Regency. I learnt much and have seen many of the ideas in regency romance books have been inspired by real life.

[oddandbookish · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I received this book for free from the publisher (Grand Central Publishing) in exchange for an honest review.

I love learning about awesome historical reading so I had high hopes for this book. Unfortunately, this book didn’t hit all the marks.

It was hard for me to get into this book at first because the book didn’t grip me. The book pretty much consists of short biographies of different women from the Regency period. For the first couple of chapters, none of the women grasped my attention. As the book progressed, I became more interested.

The main reason why the book didn’t fully capture my interest until later on was the writing style. The entries on the women are very basic. They don’t do a deep dive into their lives or offer much of an analysis aside from the obvious. If it was written in a more engaging way then that would have helped solve the issue. Also, I think the book would have worked better if it were a collection of essays. It would have been more powerful.

There were some things I did like. I liked that every chapter had a conclusion section. Doing that helped tie together the biographies of the particular chapter. I also liked that the recommend reading was included at the end of each chapter, making them easier to refer to. Lastly, I found the chapters on women in STEM and queer women to be the strongest.

Overall, the book had fascinating content but the execution left much to be desired.