She’d be like ‘I can vote!’: Bridgerton author on what characters would make of modern life
Romance rules: Regency life, as portrayed in Bridgerton, revolved around the eternal quest for love and marriage, says author Julia Quinn (right). Photos / Supplied
What would the women of Bridgerton make of modern love if they suddenly found themselves transported from Regency England to post-Brexit Britain? Julia Quinn – real name Julia Pottinger – is the American author who wrote the Bridgerton books on which Shonda Rhimes based the phenomenally popular Netflix series. The third season has just arrived on the platform. She’s at home in Seattle when the Listener connects via Zoom. Ask her what the Bridgerton sisters, their friend Penelope Featherington – who is at the heart of this season’s big romance – and their ever-watchful mothers and chaperones might make of today’s online dating, hook-up culture, gender-bending and more casual attitudes to attachment, and she hesitates for a heartbeat.
“I don’t even know that they’d even be focused, at first, on dating if they arrived in the here and now,” she says, wry smile flickering across her face. “I think they’d be in shock. Different characters would react differently, of course, so I think Eloise especially might be like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can vote!’ and, ‘I can own things.’ I think they’d all be pleased that they could scratch themselves and if it got infected, they wouldn’t die.”
Once recovered, technology such as dating apps might appeal to them. “Penelope, for example, I think she would enjoy the ability to send messages back and forth before you actually have to meet a person. That opportunity to communicate with a prospective suitor or boyfriend or whatever you want to call it in writing first could be welcomed – especially for someone like me who, you know, often feels I can be wittier written than spoken.”
One can only imagine how much use the eagle-eyed and acute-of-hearing Lady Whistledown might make of social media, and the type of posts she’d tease “the Ton” with. But Quinn admits, when it comes to online dating, she wouldn’t know where to start.
She met her husband, Paul, an infectious diseases specialist, at Harvard University, where Quinn – then Julia Cotler – was studying art history. Graduating in 1992, Quinn says she didn’t know what to do next so enrolled at Yale to study medicine.
She already had a side hustle writing romance stories, something she did to break up long days of studying. Schooled in romance writing from reading series such as Sweet Dreams and Sweet Valley High and, later Jane Austen and the more contemporary but lesser-known Georgette Heyer, Quinn started writing her first novel aged 12.
The story goes that her father, disapproving of Sweet Dreams books, asked her to explain how they were maturing her reading so, she told him she was “studying” them to write her own book. She duly started, taking three years to finish it, only for it to be rejected when she submitted it to the publisher of Sweet Dreams.
But that rejection didn’t put her off writing. Within weeks of being accepted at Yale, her first two novels, Splendid and Dancing at Midnight, had been sold at auction. Months later, she was at Yale and a published author of three successful books with a choice to make.
She liked writing better but her pen name Julia Quinn – adopted because she thought she’d need a different name if she was going to be a doctor – stuck.
Most of her books have made it to the New York Times bestseller lists, she has won numerous awards for romance writing and, in 2010, was the youngest author to be inducted into Romance Writers of America’s Hall of Fame. There’s been a Time magazine profile and then, completely out of the blue, a call from her agent – 17 years after the first of the nine Bridgerton novels was published – saying producer Shonda Rhimes was interested in screen adaptations.