Essential Reading
Behind every great author is an avid reader.
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Heyer wrote from the 1930s into the 1970s. Although she is best known for being the definitive expert on Regency romance, her early works were set in the Georgian period and she was an equally prolific murder mystery author. My favorite of her Regency novels is Frederica followed closely by Black Sheep, but every Heyer novel is a cut above the rest.
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One cannot describe oneself as a reader of Regency romance without reading Jane Austen’s body of work. While her most famous novel remains Pride and Prejudice, my own favorite is Persuasion, about an enduring love lost and found once again.
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Dickensian London is set just after the Regency, but the plight of the poor and working classes is meticulously documented in each of his classic tales. While A Christmas Carol is a seasonal favorite for many, Great Expectations is my own favorite classic.
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Written in 1749, Fielding’s classic novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, was an early comic novel recounting the life of Tom Jones.
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Lady Caroline Lamb wrote Glenarvon after her torrid affair with the notorious Lord Byron left her heartbroken and disgraced from polite society.
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Lord Byron was a notorious rake and acclaimed gentleman poet of the Regency era. No study of Regency romance could be complete without perusing an anthology of his work, including his more infamous poems such as Don Juan or Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
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Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the earliest feminists who bucked the strictures over women of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One of her better known works, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, illuminates the oppressive feminine status in Georgian England and demonstrates the great debt females owe the brave women of her era who dared to speak out and make their voices heard.
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Blake was an artist and poet in turn-of-the-century London. A collection of his poetry demonstrates the dualist style of the romantic period and captures the mood of the Regency period.
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Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote and published a series of poems in their joint collection titled Lyrical Ballads that prompted the beginning of the Romantic Age.
Stipple engraving of Jane Austen by Cassandra Austen, published 1870
Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie circa 1792
