The perpetual allure of the Regency era can be chalked up to many things, including its links to Jane Austen, the lengthy careers of writers like Georgette Heyer and Marion Chesney, and the inherent eroticism of absolutely nobody ever getting to bone. I believe the latter is the reason Barbara Cartland gave for writing so many Regency romances. (Do not fact-check this.) It’s a particularly elegant fit for romance, which, more than any other genre, depends upon clearly defined rules. Likewise, the Regency elite—or at least the version of them that survives in popular memory—were closely bound by rules of conduct, modesty and virtue. By dint of a book being set in the Regency, the reader already knows many of the beats it will follow; by dint of its being a romance, we know that the central characters will fall in love and live happily ever after. When the ending is a foregone conclusion, the pleasure lies in the iteration.

Romance and SFF made for uneasy bedfellows, until they didn’t. Paranormal romance has long been a robust presence in the romance genre (JD Robb’s In Death series has been cited as the longest-running current SFF series), but SFF has tended to view kissing books with gendered suspicion. We’re currently witnessing an explosion of speculative romance, as editors at major SFF publishing houses take on authors whose voracious love of both genres shines through in their work (Tasha Suri, Jessie Mihalik, Freya Marske, too many to name!), and fantasy and SF romance by both traditionally published and self-published authors flourish on BookTok.

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