Hello friends,Today we continue the conversation with fabulous sisters Leah and Bea Koch, co-owners and founders of The Ripped Bodice, the romance-only bookstore in the Los Angeles area. They also work with Sony Pictures in the development of romance-to-screen adaptations. Bea Koch is the author of Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency, which was published during the pandemic. In the first part of our conversation we talked about Regency women, romance, racial diversity in romance publishing, history, and so much more. And our conversation continues - in this edition, Leah and Bea talk with me about feminism and the romance genre and what it all has to do with Austen and with our lives today. Also, we got their favorite Jane Austen novels, some of the interesting retellings they love, and some of their favorite films and characters from Austen and the Regency era. Enjoy this excerpt from our conversation. Plain JaneLet me ask something: You two are young and feminist, and bring ... in some ways, diversity, and also, you're very, very well educated. You've got fancy degrees … But you love romance. You love romance reading, you've always loved romance reading. So what draws you to romance? And also, do you feel like you are a typical romance reader? Are you an example of readers of romance? Leah Koch  Very much. .. I think you have to spend - pre-pandemic - an hour in our store to sort of just see the parade of humanity that that comes through. I think that's something really valuable that the store offers that's just really different. I mean, obviously, not everyone's going to sit in the store ... people-watching. But I just feel like for so long there was this notion that romance readers are white women in their 60s - and not that they don't read and love romance, we have many wonderful customers of that age - but  … to me the biggest thing that's wrong about the stereotypical romance reader is age. We really see 12 to 90 …  just the entire entire age spectrum, whether that's young people getting interested in young adult books and sort of reading their first books that have kissing in them, or … one of the things I hear all the time is, “I just graduated from whatever, high school, college graduate, law school ...Now I get to read for myself again, and I'm going to return or start romance.”Bea Koch  I hear that all the time. I think it's what's so amazing is to hear what's bringing people to romance now is what brought us to romance as young women. And that is that these books center internal thoughts of the characters. And as young women as young people - I'm sorry, this is not a gendered thing, but I will speak from my own experience as a woman - you're told your emotions are too much all the time. Don't be so loud. Don't be so emotional. Don't fall in love. That's the wrong thing to do. You're getting all of these signals from society that you're too much. And romance is about all that too much being like the best part. Yeah, emotion is the best part of a romance. And I always think of the movie Inside Out. Sorry, like, I’m off on another tangent! But when I saw Inside Out as an adult - it wasn't available to me as a child - I was like, “What an amazing movie for kids to have now, to be able to talk about all their emotions and really feel like that's important.” And to me as a young woman, my romances - [and] the relationships my friends were having - that was my whole world. And so to find a whole genre where that was the most important thing and was so central and never denigrated, it made romance so important to me. And I love to hear new generations finding it for that same reason.Plain Jane So you're bringing me now to a little bit of Jane Austen. So something that Jane Austen did that's so powerful is to center this interior life, feelings of a woman. She also made damn sure to make it a very intelligent woman  - her heroines are the smartest people in the room. And Jane Austen is always there letting you know h