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Historical romance, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love historical romance because it’s the subgenre of romance I found first, at an impressionable age. The local library held a used book sale every summer, and I’d stock up on ten-cent paperbacks that promised to transport me to the Highlands, or the high seas.

I love historical romance because it is so transporting, so unabashedly escapist. The adventures depicted are thrillingly different from any I could ever hope to have.

I’m in it for the pistols at dawn, the curricle races, the bare-knuckle boxing matches, the train robberies, the undercover spies, the orphans, the governesses, the scandalous gambling hells, and the extravagant house parties.

I love historical romance because it emphasizes joy, pleasure, agency, and interdependence, and can challenge assumptions that certain things are new.

Women enjoying sex. People flourishing beyond the gender binary.

There are limits to how much and in what ways we can identify ourselves with people who lived hundreds of years ago.

The terms we use for desire and who we are aren’t the same.

The norms and pressures aren’t the same.

Even so, I find it inspiring to read about ancestors, real and invented.

I love historical romance because it provides so many ancestors for readers to claim, ancestors who can help us look ahead and imagine even more possibilities for living and loving.

—

A Rare Find is my first Regency romance.

Like many romance writers with novels set during the Regency, I’m creating a version of Georgian England that owes a lot to Jane Austen.

Austen was a delightfully keen observer of village life, and of the mores and manners of the middle and upper classes.

Elf and Georgie come from that milieu. The Regency was a volatile, transitional period.

Slavery in Britain was abolished in 1807, only four years before the Regency officially began, and money continued to flow to those who owned and invested in Caribbean plantations.

The Napoleonic Wars raged, bringing unrest at home and loss of life abroad.

War was followed by economic depression, harvest failure, the Corn Laws.

The population in newly industrial cities boomed.

Elf and Georgie don’t play a part in any epoch-defining events, but larger historical forces and social expectations nonetheless shape their daily lives in the small (invented) village of Twynham.

Georgie and their friends, Anne, Rosalie, and Phipps, are all queer, although they couldn’t have called themselves queer in this way in 1818.

Elf finds out, happily, that she is too.

All sorts of people were happily committing all sorts of consensual sexual acts in the nineteenth century, but it wasn’t something you could talk about in public.

The Buggery Act of 1533 made sex between men punishable by death.

Despite this looming threat, molly houses proliferated in Georgian London, providing men who desired men with venues for trysts and parties.

Lesbian relationships were not illegal, perhaps because lawmakers didn’t imagine sex between women was possible (or else didn’t want to let the cat out of the bag).

The concept of “romantic friendship” emerged in the eighteenth century, describing the intense emotional bonds some women shared.

This concept created an allowance for female intimacy by framing it as fundamentally chaste.

Georgie and Anne both mention the Ladies of Llangollen, the era’s most famous pair of romantic friends.

Born into wealthy families, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby refused to marry men and left Ireland to live together in a picturesque cottage in Wales with a series of dogs named Sappho.

There they received visits from fascinated guests, including William Wordsworth and the Duke of Wellington.

The Ladies both exemplified and challenged the concept of romantic friendship with their domestic bliss, to which some visitors and journalists imputed a sexual component.

Anne is particularly eager to claim the Ladies as lesbians, quoting rapturously (and anachronistically) from Wordsworth’s 1824 sonnet.

She’s always on the lookout for women like her, and for unconventional relationship models.

During the Regency, women were expected to marry, and marriage was often the only acceptable and materially viable option.

Women did, however, by choice or circumstance, remain unmarried, and some of them found alternate living arrangements that suited them much better.

Rigid rules governed women’s attire and limited their opportunities for employment.

Georgie wears fashionable gowns but also likes to look the dashing gentleman.

This is part of why they’re drawn to the theater.

The theater in England has long provided a space of gender play, with men taking women’s roles in all-male companies during the Renaissance, and women performing in breeches roles from the seventeenth century on.

Writer and actress Charlotte Charke published an autobiography in 1775, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke .

Charke wore breeches on the stage, and from time to time dressed en cavalier in everyday life.

She worked in various male trades as Charles Brown and spent years cohabitating with a woman, the two calling themselves “Mr. and Mrs. Brown.” Charlotte Charke provides a well-known precedent for dressing in ways that challenge norms, one Georgie could have accessed through her autobiography.

Aspects of Georgie’s character are based loosely on Anne Lister (1791-1840), someone they wouldn’t have read about.

Anne Lister became a lesbian icon in the 1980s after historians decoded her sexually explicit diaries.

Finally, firsthand proof that participants in romantic friendships were sometimes more than friends!

Lister visited the Ladies of Llangollen in 1822, wore masculine clothing, and proved herself shrewd and business-minded as she ran her family’s estate.

The symbolic communion she took at York’s Holy Trinity Church with longtime partner Ann Walker in 1834 has been memorialized as the first recorded lesbian marriage in Britain.

Anne Lister is now even more firmly entrenched in popular culture thanks to the BBC-HBO series Gentleman Jack .

Georgie uses they/them pronouns among close friends.

This wasn’t a practice during the Regency, but it’s not impossible that a friend group would have hit upon the usage.

I wanted to show how a discussion of pronouns might have come about in the past to underscore the importance of respecting people’s pronouns today.

The English language doesn’t have a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun, which has led to grammarians and writers trying out they , it , and the generic he across the centuries.

Invented pronouns have also been in the running, including e/es/em (1841), ve/vis/vim (1864), ita (1877), and thon (1884).

Grammar books from the eighteenth century through the twentieth went with “he” for indefinite subjects, e.g.

, “The student forgot his books on the school bus.” The women’s suffrage movement challenged the inherent sexism of this choice, as did several waves of subsequent feminism.

Today, the singular they is recognized as correct usage by such grammatical gatekeepers as the APA, MLA, and OED.

All this is to say, conversations about gender-neutral third-person singular pronouns have been unfolding, in politically charged ways, for a very long time.

These conversations didn’t focus on the needs of trans and nonbinary people until the 1970s, when some began to use ze, hir, e, ve, and other new and old creations.

Feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan beautifully summarizes this history and the political implications of pronoun usage in her London Review of Books response to Dennis Baron’s book, What’s Your Pronoun? : Beyond He and She .

The Albion Society of Antiquaries is my invention, but it bears a resemblance to the Society of Antiquaries of London, founded in 1707.

I recommend Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Rosemary Sweet for anyone interested in learning more about these wealthy and eccentric devotees of antiquity.

Victorian archaeologist Sir Thomas Bateman uncovered numerous Anglo-Saxon graves in the Peak District and was known as the Barrow Knight.

His papers informed my research. Elf’s grandfather borrows certain characteristics from William Stukeley, an early Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Stukeley did important fieldwork at Stonehenge, but his later fixation on druid practices and beliefs—along with his adoption of the druid pseudonym Chynodax—undermined his credibility with his peers and future, more professionalized, historians and archaeologists.

British antiquarianism and archaeology have themselves a complicated history.

These fields contributed to the formation of enduring ideas about England’s origin and national identity, and their development was bound up with colonialism, racism, and cultural looting.

A Rare Find attempts to dramatize a few of the different points of view and priorities espoused by antiquaries at the time.

With Georgie’s help, Elf comes to think more critically and creatively about how knowledge is made, what stories get told, and why.

For people in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the Viking age began with the raid on the monastery at Lindisfarne in 793, and ended in 1066 with the death of King Harald at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the movements of the “Mycel haeten here,” the Great Heathen Army, through the kingdoms, but archaeological evidence has remained elusive and debates about the size of the army continue.

Only two winter camps have been discovered in England to this day, one at Repton in the 1970s and one at Torksey in 2013.

Making such a discovery in 1818, and becoming a female Fellow of an antiquarian society, puts Elf way ahead of her time.

Women weren’t admitted as members to the Society of Antiquaries of London (or the Royal Society, or many other learned societies) until the twentieth century.

Women were, however, making contributions to antiquarian studies long before this.

For example, Elizabeth Elstob published the first Old English grammar book in modern English (rather than Latin) in 1715.

Intellectually and materially supported by her brother in her scholarly pursuits, Elstob was burdened with debts upon his death, put aside her scholarship, and died a governess.

She was an advocate for women’s education, and her work bridges the divide between antiquarian and early feminist writing.

Women also participated in archaeological fieldwork, despite resistance to their involvement in dirty physical labor.

For example, songwriter and song collector Alicia Ann, Lady John Scott directed nineteenth-century excavations on her own estate.

Elf is ahead of her time, but she is inspired by her grandmother’s precedent, which had its corollaries in real life.