Beyond ‘Bridgerton’: 3 Steamy, Summery New Historical Romances

Most historical romance is solidly grounded in what I’ll call textbook history, where many narratives have been shaped by victors, politics and cultural currents. But this is the tyranny of convenience. At its most vital, historical romance also resurrects ephemeral yet utterly timeless truths: the sensations of the body beneath the clothing, the agonizing decision to burn letters brimming with illicit love.

These kinds of secrets are what Isabel Luna is searching for in ISABEL AND THE ROGUE (Berkley, 352 pp., paperback, $19), the second in Liana De la Rosa’s series about a trio of Mexican sisters in early-Victorian London. The books are slantwise Regencies, reinterpreting London through the lens of the French invasion of Mexico and the women’s attempts to garner support for the ousted Mexican president.

Isabel Luna is neither as polished as her elder sister nor as pretty and provocative as her younger. She prefers books to ballrooms and is anxious to find some way to earn her neglectful father’s approval. What better way to make use of a forgettable face than by a little light spying? When everyone ignores you in the ballroom, you might as well abandon the ballroom to riffle through desk drawers and uncover vital correspondence between conspiring peers.

But Miss Luna is not the only person skulking around the house. Sirius Dawson is a Crimean War veteran who works for the Home Office, where he is attempting to uncover malign French influence on British peers. He’s appalled to see that Isabel has been cast into dangerous intrigue with no protection. And the more he watches, the more appalled he gets — not just at the risks she’s taking, but at the idea that anyone could overlook her. The two aren’t on opposite sides of an international conflict, per se, but Isabel’s determination to return to Mexico dooms their love from the start.

De la Rosa presents politics and history not as lists of bills and battles, but as things that upend lives and bruise hearts. And since people under pressure have been known to take impulsive risks (the library sex in this one is extremely ill advised!), it’s intensely dramatic.

A similar kind of alchemy happens in Joanna Lowell’s glorious A SHORE THING (Berkley, 368 pp., paperback, $19), where — brace yourself — the recent invention of the safety bicycle leads to a summertime coastal road race as a widowed botanist and a trans painter-turned-mechanic try to outspeed a group of irritating penny-farthing riders. No, I’m perfectly serious, and it’s lovely.

Kit Griffith is thrilled to live as himself for the first time in out-of-the-way Cornwall; this pleasure is almost enough to make up for the fact that his will to paint has deserted him. Which is bad news for the well-traveled widow and botanist Muriel Pendrake, because she’s determined to have Kit illustrate her upcoming lecture in New York. Somehow, via romance shenanigans, this can only be resolved via a multi-day bicycle competition.

Every scene in this book is a treasure: a stolen kiss on a lonely road, a rescue during a sudden flood, jokes about seaweed and terrible men. It’s marvelously specific in time and place — and about queerness as a range of experiences: who can hide, who can mostly pass but have queer encounters on the side and who has to rebel against the world just to have space to breathe.

Finally, in Alexandra Vasti’s NE’ER DUKE WELL (St. Martin’s Griffin, 352 pp., paperback, $17.99), Peter Kent is a radical duke, born in New Orleans and with a tendency toward abolitionism. He also has two young illegitimate siblings in dire need of care; finding an unimpeachably respectable wife is the surest way to ensure he’s granted custody by the courts. His friend Lady Selina Ravenscroft offers a list of eligible brides — but doesn’t include herself, as she secretly runs a ladies’ library filled with sexually explicit volumes. Some of these are erotic, some are educational — and all of them would ruin her if the truth were to get out.

So Peter must marry someone else, no matter how much his heart soars when Selina walks into a room. And Selina has to let him go, no matter how jealous she gets to see him flirting with the diamonds of the ton.

This is a gem of a Regency, with dazzling banter and more than the usual amount of charm. Nearly everyone is hiding something, because when social rules are so rigid nearly everyone has something to hide. Because everyone carries their own secret as a burden — Peter not being able to publicly claim his siblings, Selina not being able to openly discuss her work — scandal becomes an immense source of power.

Which, coincidentally, is the greatest secret of historical romance: that this frothy, sexy, self-referential genre tells us so much about our modern selves.