Genres
Regency romance
A subgenre of romance novels set during the British Regency (1811 to 1820) or early 19th century, with its own plot and stylistic conventions.
Regency romance is a subgenre of romance novels set during the period of the British Regency (1811 to 1820) or early 19th century. It is a distinct genre with its own plot and stylistic conventions rather than a contemporary story in period dress: common elements include the ton and the social season (carriage rides, morning calls, dinner parties, routs, plays, operas and balls), marriages of convenience, false engagements, mistaken identity, class differences, and the peerage rank system driving the marriage mart. Traditional Regencies favor intelligent, fast-paced dialogue with very little explicit sex.
The genre descends less from Jane Austen than from Georgette Heyer, who wrote more than two dozen Regency novels from 1935 until her death in 1974, in the novel-of-manners tradition; the more sensual Regency Historical branch is the modern split. The engine underneath is mapped in how to write romance, inside the research frame of how to write historical fiction.