Prior to getting accepted into library school, I spent my college undergraduate years studying British history. My studies pretty much ranged from Henry VIII to World War II, and to be honest, the Regency was never a particular favorite. It was okay, I guess.
Which should tell you how fun it was for me when Regency Everything took over historical romance, oh, just about the time I was rediscovering the sub-genre.
It didn’t take long for me to hit burn out. It got so bad that one more mention of Beau Brummell, Prinny, or the sucky lemonade at Almack’s was likely to push me right over the edge. The quandary, of course, is that I love historical romance—and with the Regency era going great guns, it meant a lot of authors and publishers were leaving settings they previously had made camp in to defect to across the pond.
What was a poor Regency-burnt-out reader to do? Well, I discovered the Harlequin Historical line. I firmly credit this category romance line for keeping me sane during the Great Regency Flood of the Aughts. Bless them and the horses they rode in on.
What I love about Harlequin Historical is that they routinely give readers a variety of time periods and settings every single month. Yes, they do publish books set in Regency England, but they also publish westerns, medievals, Victorians, and even less “marketable” eras and settings like Vikings, ancient Rome, the Caribbean, China, and Arabia.
Clocking in at just under 300 pages, readers can expect to find interesting historical detail, and a compelling romance within the pages of an HH. The sensuality level typically tends to sit around mainstream romance novel heat, about PG-13. However, there are some authors, namely a few of the western writers, who turn the thermostat down to around PG.
This line kept me in historical westerns when so many other publishers were abandoning them outright in favor for what was selling hot at the moment. Not only that, but during a time when digital publishing hadn’t completely taken off yet, this line was how readers found the occasional historical that wasn’t set in either America or England.
For all those reasons and more, I still find myself hopelessly devoted to Harlequin Historical. I owe them not only many hours of reading enjoyment, but my very sanity as well.
Recommended Reading:
Innocent in the Sheikh’s Harem by Marguerite Kaye
Surrender to an Irish Warrior by Michelle Willingham
From Waif to Gentleman’s Wife by Julia Justiss
The Last Rake in London by Nicola Cornick
Prairie Wife by Cheryl St. John
George “Beau” Brummell, watercolor by Richard Dighton (1805) via Wikimedia Commons
Wendy Crutcher, Fighting For Truth, Justice and the Right to Read What You Want
