POPULAR CULTURE AND THE VERY LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

One of my goals in this chapter is to argue that long-eighteenth-century scholars must consider how the period we study becomes depicted in current popular culture—and in turn, consider how this media informs and shapes people’s sense of the history and the period’s legacy. It is tempting for scholars to think that, as “experts” in long-eighteenth-century literary and cultural history, we hold the reins, so to speak. We do not; we should not. At the same time, I want to shed light on popular culture that is helping to challenge dominant narratives, both within and outside of academia, about the long eighteenth century.

In recent decades, the dominant eighteenth-century pop cultural narrative has been shaped by the Austen industrial complex. There are distinct limitations to viewing the eighteenth century through this lens, especially when it comes to topics of race, gender, and sexuality. Attempts to open up Austen’s worlds are often met with disbelief and hostility from a certain subset of Austen devotees, who tend to levy accusations at such adaptations of historical inaccuracy that too often reinforce hegemonic and supremacist projections and value systems. Take, for example, the backlash to the 2019 ITV adaptation of Austen’s unfinished final novel, Sanditon. The show substantially developed the character of Georgiana Lambe, the Black West Indian heiress who is only passingly referenced in Austen’s manuscript. In an article detailing the racist backlash to Sanditon, Amanda Rae-Prescott cites a fan lamenting the possibility that the second season of the show will replace the main love interest of the first season (played by the white actor Theo James) with “ ‘a coloured hero. An insult to historical reality.’ ”⁶ This irate fan does not acknowledge—or probably even recognize—the extent to which their perception of “historical reality” has likely been shaped by popular culture indebted to Austen and her legacy. Gretchen Gerzina has demonstrated that, by the later eighteenth century, a “thriving and structured black community” of at least fifteen thousand existed in London.⁷ Yet, representations of the eighteenth century in recent popular culture have done very little to expose Austen fans like the one quoted above with reasons to question the limitations of their view of “historical reality.”⁸ Indeed, the extensive “longing” of and for the eighteenth century is at the heart of Eugenia Zuroski’s coda, which concludes this collection.

Despite the fact that Austen herself remained unwed, her novels—and numerous adaptations of them—have also helped entrench ideas about the centrality of heteronormative companionate marriage in eighteenth-century Britain. As D. A. Miller observes, “the realism of [Austen’s] works allows no one like Jane Austen to appear in them. Amid the happy wives and pathetic old maids, there is no successfully unmarried woman.”⁹ The creators behind the relatively recent Austen “biopics” Becoming Jane and Miss Austen Regrets, which both explore the possibility that Austen experienced (straight) romantic love, seem to have missed this memo. (Suggestions that Austen might have had any queer inclinations have not been given any screen time and have been met with considerable derision.)¹⁰ Perhaps this is because the genre conventions of romance that Austen helped to create still dominate today, especially in the form of romance novels.

It is not a coincidence that present-day romance publishing has its origins in historical romance novels, and particularly in romance novels set in Regency England. Fantastical tales of rich men reformed and poor women elevated by companionate marriage—stories that have their origins in long-eighteenth-century novels like Pamela and Pride and Prejudice—have helped to shape how Anglophone readers think about the structure of romantic stories.¹¹ And, indeed, one can find many best-selling historical romances published in the last five or so decades that seem indebted, consciously or not, to the narrative beats and expectations shaped by writers like Samuel Richardson and Austen, and reinforced by the surge of Austen adaptations that began in the 1990s. Romance publishing is not, of course, comprised solely of Regency romances; these days, especially with the advent of Kindle Universe, one can find countless romance subgenres that cater to every imaginable interest, and some that reveal the previous limitations of one’s imagination.

Yet, the Regency romance remains a stalwart subgenre in romance publishing. Take, for example, the supremely popular Netflix series Bridgerton, which was adapted from a bestselling Regency romance series by Julia Quinn. Bridgerton rewrites both history and Quinn’s series in order to include Black aristocrats in early nineteenth-century British society. Detractors of Bridgerton note that while the show has been celebrated for its diverse cast, its plot requires a radical rewriting of history to integrate Black people into Regency aristocracy.¹² Yet the series remains silent on the source of these aristocrats’ wealth. As Mira Assaf Kafantaris et al. point out, “The pleasures that the series promises … rest on the materiality of Regency Britain, the lavish and inordinate wealth of which came directly from its colonized territories, primarily via enslaved people’s labour and the looting of India.”¹³

Unlike Bridgerton, which reimagines the inclusion of Black characters without actually grappling with issues of race, empire, or class (or, thus far, much queerness), Waite’s novel offers a more plausible if nonetheless idealistic view of what long-eighteenth-century queer lives and loves might have looked like. Along with other writers of queer historical romance, she is dealing with the same questions that have vexed fiction writers from the start: how do you tell stories about people who might not have actually existed but who could have existed? Who controls the terms of what is a plausible story to tell?

ROMANCE, ( UN)REALITY, AND ANACHRONISM

Even though Waite was contracted, as is often the case in romance publishing, to write a trilogy within the same fictional world, The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics reads in some ways like it was written by an author who feared she might not get another chance to write queer historical romance. The novel luxuriates in the possibilities for world remaking that are opened up by the embracing of queerness. Writing as what Henry Jenkins terms an “aca-fan,” I find it difficult to balance my genuine affection for Waite’s novel with the adoption of some kind of critical distance—a challenge that is further complicated by the stigma romance novels still face within academia. Waite’s novel is not subtle in much of the work it is doing. In this sense, I would argue that it shares something in common with eighteenth-century proto-feminist novels like Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), which use the novel form for an explicitly didactic purpose. Waite, of course, is writing from a very different time and place, and within a genre (the romance novel) that prioritizes pleasure above didacticism—though we should not assume that they are mutually exclusive.

In the world of The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics, queer romance—and especially one set in a time when people understood gender and sexuality in different ways than they do today—looks subtly but fundamentally different from a straight one. At the same time, Waite is also attentive to the privilege that protects her characters from the threats faced by other queer people of the time. Lucy is middle class; Catherine is wealthy and titled; both are white cis-women.¹⁴ Lucy, it is clear, has long understood her sexuality, although the novel is careful to communicate that queerness in early nineteenth-century Britain was not discussed or understood in the terms used now. For Catherine, however, discovering her queerness is a revelation, both about herself and her understanding of the world: “A lady-love could assert no authority over Catherine’s finances, or claim any rights in legal matters. Should desire wear itself out, separation could be done privately and discreetly, requiring no Act of Parliament to make it official … It was shocking how perfect a solution it was. She wondered everyone didn’t think of it. Then again … maybe quite a few of them did, and Catherine just hadn’t noticed.”¹⁵ Catherine’s late husband, we learn, was emotionally abusive and married her in large part for her fortune. Queer love—which offers the possibility of a relationship without either the legal strictures of marriage or the patriarchal confines of a heterosexual union—is therefore especially liberating for her. This passage also resonates with José Esteban Muñoz’s articulation of queer utopianism—a concept that is threaded throughout this larger collection. Here, Waite emphasizes Catherine’s dawning awareness that queerness might be all around and simply overlooked by those who do not know what to look for.

This sense of the possible simultaneous prevalence and invisibility of queerness also shapes recent work in historically oriented queer studies. As historian Jen Manion argues in Female Husbands: A Trans History: “Histories of earlier periods are less legible as explicitly ‘queer’ histories,” both because “our contemporary belief that gender and sexuality are identities that individuals articulate has dramatically skewed our view of the long-ago past” and because, “until relatively recently,” most legal cases did not explicitly address queer relationships, “diarists and letter-writers self-censored and wrote in euphemisms and analogies,” and “family guardians and archivists would further purge evidence that might scandalize a reputation when offering papers to a historical society.”¹⁶ Such silences, euphemisms, and expurgations mean that “historians continue to argue that the absence of such evidence constitutes its nonexistence,” which Manion compellingly argues “reveals the limits of historical method and the lie of objectivity.”¹⁷ Yet, even Manion acknowledges that the history they have wrested from the archives is not one that “tell[s] a ‘feel-good story.’ ”¹⁸ While Manion’s focus is specifically on the figure of the “female husband” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture, the attention to narrating “a very painful past” resonates with much of the work done on queer melancholia and in pop cultural representations of queer love stories ranging from accounts of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial for gross indecency to Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, to Céline Sciamma’s 2019 film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Stories about queer love do not have a great track record for ending happily, and to the extent that one can find such stories in the archive, the evidence seems to reinforce that.

The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics is not, however, just a story about queer love. It is also a romance novel—and, as such, it has particular generic responsibilities that seem potentially at odds with the limits of the archive. While the romance reading community—and romance Twitter in particular—is notoriously given to any number of disagreements, almost all romance readers will agree that a romance novel requires an HEA (happily ever after) in order to be considered a romance novel.¹⁹ While an HEA no longer requires marriage, it does require the romantic protagonists to be alive and together at the novel’s close.

In her author’s note to That Could Be Enough, a 2017 novella about two Black women falling in love in 1820s New York City, Alyssa Cole (who is herself Black and queer) turns to the archive as a place to bolster her story’s happy ending. She explains that her characters joyfully committing to each other at the end of the novella “is not anachronism in the name of happily ever after: queer people have always existed, and though society has generally excelled at making their lives difficult and dangerous, there were people who lived as openly as they could and were accepted within their communities.”²⁰ What particularly interests me in this author’s note is Cole’s defense that she is not being anachronistic. Cole in fact ends her note by citing the academic books she consulted to strengthen her case.

In discussing anachronism, Jacques Rancière examines how historians who represented anachronism as a “sin” drew—in a partial and misleading way—on the techniques of literary modernism to produce a kind of “homogeneous time that leaves its mark in the same way on all individuals, situations, perceptions, and thoughts” and thus “tried to rule out the possibility that anybody could escape his or her own time.”²¹ Yet, Rancière cautions against those who would reclaim anachronism “in terms of a return of the repressed or the anticipation of a future to come” as such approaches “are containing discontinuity within a plot of continuity.”²² For Rancière, anachronism cannot have a telos or be seen “as the fulfillment of a collective subject’s destiny.” Instead, the kind of anachronism that Rancière embraces is part of an “emancipat[ory]” project that centers on “changing one’s manner of inhabiting time.”²³

Rancière’s interpretation of the emancipatory potential of anachronism thus troubles the issue of anachronism as it relates to historical romance novels. On the one hand, I am interested in how the authors of queer historical romance are putting important pressure on what readers of historical romance (and academics) often think is possible in the past, especially when it comes to stories about queer people and people of color. On the other hand, as Rancière elucidates, anachronism has a liberatory potential that resonates with queer temporalities. As Jack Halberstam argues: “Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction … what has made queerness compelling as a form of self-description in the past decade or so has to do with the way it has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space.”²⁴ How does such an approach—an understanding that queer ways of being defy linear, progressive time—relate to the generic expectations of the romance novel and the demands of the “happy ending”? The phrase “romance novel” itself is a potential oxymoron, uniting two forms of fictional prose narration that scholars—especially eighteenth-century scholars—have for so long set in opposition to each other. Despite their roots in what is often referred to as the realist novel, romance novels have been viewed by detractors as encouraging unrealistic expectations in readers.²⁵ In contrast with these critics, I mean to suggest that the seeming unreality of queer historical romance novels can be understood as anachronistic in Rancière’s sense—that is, in a potentially emancipatory way. To make this claim, I want to turn briefly to how romance novels more broadly have been discussed by scholars.

To the extent that academics have engaged with romance novels, they have tended to do so in derogatory terms. As Northrop Frye so succinctly puts it: “Romance [is] always a despised form of writing.”²⁶ Almost forty years after its publication, Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) remains perhaps the most famous—and generally respected—academic work on romance novels. In the book, which is shaped by reader-response scholarship, Radway concludes that romance novels give “the reader a strategy for making her present situation more comfortable without substantive reordering of its structure rather than a comprehensive program for reorganizing her life in such a way that all needs might be met.”²⁷ Romance novels, in other words, give women—Radway’s focus is solely on heterosexual, cis-women readers²⁸—just enough escapist pleasure to avoid having to make changes to lives that she perceives as unhappy and unfulfilling. Such moral panic over the subject of feminized reading practices is nothing new, of course. It is part of a long tradition that arguably can be traced back (in British literary history at least) to eighteenth-century Britain; depending on the interpretation, a novel like Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) either subverts or upholds the perspective that women cannot be trusted to read fiction safely, a debate Austen herself takes up in Northanger Abbey (1817). In response to criticisms of the unreality of romance novels, bell hooks—an avowed romance reader—was described in a Washington Post article as “bristl[ing] at the notion that the books set women up for disappointment and promote unrealistic fantasies about being rescued.”²⁹ If defenders of the genre typically argue that readers of course understand the distinctions between the fantastical elements of romance novels and the reality of life, hooks goes further than most in her defense, implying that readers of romance are in fact more than usually attuned to their own pleasure, needs, and desires; hooks embraces the fantasy that romance offers, declaring: “ ‘Only a crazy person doesn’t want to be rescued.’ ”³⁰

Romance novels are also censured for what is, understandably, seen as their conservative embrace of a monogamous courtship narrative that has traditionally culminated in marriage. Tracing the longer history of the romance novel back to eighteenth-century works like Pamela and Pride and Prejudice, Pamela Regis explains how these novels emerge “as a dominant form of the English novel just as the expectations surrounding the choice of a husband shifted. Affective individualism added to the choice a desire for liberty, and the shift from older forms of union to companionate marriage added a requirement that the wife- and husband-to-be love each other. The woman’s search for liberty and love in marriage, a lifelong commitment that resulted in her loss of property rights, made courtship a time of conflicting goals.”³¹ Novels ending in marriage—or, as is more common these days, a committed pairing off—are often read as foreclosing possibilities for their women protagonists, a point that Jeremy Chow and Riley DeBaecke return to later in this collection.³² Indeed, Radway argues that the “ending of the romance undercuts the realism of its novelistic rendering of an individual woman’s story” and thus “reaffirms its founding culture’s belief that women are valuable not for their unique personal qualities but for their biological sameness and their ability to perform that essential role of maintaining and reconstituting others.”³³ While I do not think all such novels merit this cynical take, I am particularly interested in how The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics relies on the genre beats of romance, even as it subverts them. While the novel is both indebted to the Regency romance and set in the period associated most closely with the triumph of the heterosexual marriage plot, it also shows how placing queerness at the center of the story necessitates a different relationship to romance novels’ generic conventions.

UNDOING THE MARRIAGE PLOT, ARCHIVING QUEERNESS

The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics is an exemplary case of what I have found holds true in the still small subgenre of queer historical romance more broadly: when queerness is made central to historical romance, the foundations of the marriage plot—bourgeois culture and property consolidation—also recede. That is to say, even when queer historical romances are indebted to the marriage plot and follow some of its key beats, they resist the sense of narrowing possibility that is often associated with romantic closure. Instead, and without devolving into the counterfactual or the radically ahistorical, these novels almost always find ways to open up new possibilities of love, of companionship, and of being in relation to others.

For both Lucy and Catherine, committing to each other also involves an explicit rejection of marriage and a desire to find “something better” that reimagines the possibilities of partnership.³⁴ Although Catherine never wants to remarry, she also wants “to offer Lucy something that would last for the rest of their lives.”³⁵ Catherine becomes inspired by an archival project Lucy begins after the success of her translation and adaptation of the fictional astronomer Oléron’s treatise. (In a significant reveal late in the novel, Lucy meets Oléron, who turns out to be a Black woman.) Working her way through old issues of science society publications in Catherine’s late husband’s library, Lucy is astonished to learn that, as a woman in science, she is far from an anomaly. Her investigations seem inspired in part by evidence about noted long-eighteenth-century women scientists in Europe, such as Laura Bassi and Caroline Herschel. But the novel goes further, pointing out both the limits of archival evidence that tends to erase women from the record and the necessity of a different kind of archival reading practice. As Lucy explains: “ ‘There’s more, so many more, once you know to look for them. Hiding behind initials and their husbands’ names.’ ”³⁶ In this sense, she can be seen as advocating for an approach to archival inquiry elucidated by a historian like Manion, for whom the seeming “absence of … evidence” does not “constitute its nonexistence” but rather constitutes an invitation to reconsider historical methodologies.³⁷

At the same time, the novel acknowledges a sense of inevitable archival loss: “ ‘Every generation had women stand up and ask to be counted—and every generation of brilliant, insightful, educated men has raised a hand and wiped those women’s names from the greater historical record.’ ”³⁸ For Lucy, her project begins as a way of forging a queer community, even if it’s one she will never meet—her desire, she makes explicit, is to recognize her peers and not feel so “alone” as a woman in the sciences.³⁹ But Catherine comes up with the idea of actualizing this queer community and integrating it with the romantic commitment she and Lucy want to make to each other. Their happily ever after is not just that they end up together, but that Catherine proposes—not with an offer of marriage, but instead with an offer of a partnership committed to an archival reclaiming of women in science:⁴⁰

“A rather substantial fund, administered by you and me, for the purposes of publishing women’s writing on the natural sciences. We would … solicit women of science to be authors, and arrange to have them checked thoroughly for accuracy before offering them to the public.”

“That …” Lucy had to swallow against a dry throat. “That sounds like an immense amount of work.”

“Oh, it will be, I assure you. It will tie us together legally, and financially, and probably take us the rest of our lives to accomplish … I am asking you to stay with me for the rest of our lives. I am asking you to join me in making this world a better place, insofar as we are able. We cannot stand up in a church and make vows—but we can stand up, publicly, and declare that we are important.”⁴¹

I am captivated by this ending. It both honors and plays with the conventions of romance novels’ required HEA in order to revise narrow ideas about what romance and the marriage plot can look like. While the shared publishing mission replaces marriage and, perhaps, any reproductive futurity, it also expands the happy ending beyond Lucy and Catherine. Rather than turning to literal procreation as a way to endure beyond death, Lucy and Catherine embark on a publishing project that makes possible a far more capacious queer community—and queer lineage. The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics promises a kind of happiness—or at least justice—to the lovers’ (fictional) peers, as well as (fictional) future scholars.

At the same time, this restorative fantasy of a lost archive reclaimed, expanded, and underwritten by queer women should not simply be read as a blueprint for scholarly engagement with the archive. (This fact would be obvious to most readers of romance, who are used to hearing that they should be careful not to mistake fiction for reality.) Looking to the archives when studying queer people—and especially queer people of color—is a fraught undertaking, as Stephen Best and Anjali Arondekar have addressed in their work at the intersection of queer studies and, respectively, Black studies and postcolonial studies. Discussing the “recovery imperative” that has dominated Black studies for at least a century, Best writes: “It is not hard to see in the recovery imperative a powerful and compelling theory of how history works—not simply the theory that the past persists in the present, or the proposition that the past has to be made relevant to the present, but the idea that history is at its core a fundamentally redemptive enterprise” that will yield distinct subjects and be “fundamentally recuperative in its orientation.”⁴² Arondekar also warns against the desire to find subjects in the archive, arguing instead for “an archival turn … that moves away not from the nature of the object, but from the notion of an object that would somehow lead to a formulation of subjectivity: the presumption that if a body is found, then a subject can be recovered.”⁴³ More recently, Arondekar has added, “To fix sexuality within such archival vernaculars of loss (while politically exigent) is to elide alternative historiographical models, to bypass imaginative histories of sexuality, full of intrepid archives and acts of invention.”⁴⁴ Best and Arondekar both explore a relationship to archives as one explicitly involving—and embracing—loss and failure.

But Best and Arondekar are discussing a relationship to material archives, while Waite’s fantasy of archival restoration is, of course, fictional. In this sense, a novel like The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics shows its indebtedness to the eighteenth century not only in its setting and reworking of the marriage plot but also in its relationship to fictionality. As Catherine Gallagher has persuasively argued, a hallmark of eighteenth-century fiction is the rise of “nobody’s story,” featuring characters whom readers knew were not based on real people.⁴⁵ That Waite’s story is fiction alters the terms of any discussion surrounding the relationship between queer histories and the archival turn. In imagining the fictionality of Lucy and Catherine’s undertaking of a project of recuperating and expanding a fictional archive of fictional women scientists, Waite does not degrade the importance or reality of accepting the limitations of extant archives. Indeed, the turn to fiction is a way of submitting to the limits of the archives. The novel does not recover particular lives; it instead undertakes a fictional worldbuilding project that offers possible new ways for thinking about the eighteenth century within the space of popular culture.⁴⁶

What is notable about The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics—and a small cohort of similar historical romance novels—is not just that it offers up a fictional yet plausible story about queer people in the long eighteenth century, but that it is telling one with an HEA. Muñoz explains that he thinks of “queerness as a temporal arrangement in which the past is a field of possibility in which subjects can act in the present in the service of a new futurity.”⁴⁷ While I recognize that he’s not thinking about queer historical romance here, I think the claim nevertheless applies to how queer historical romance writers are working to counter the still overwhelming narratives of tragedy attached to queerness.⁴⁸ Recent work in Black studies on the politics of pleasure echoes these interests. Badia Ahad-Legardy, for example, offers “Afro-Nostalgia” to study a range of texts that help “contextualize the desires of the African-descended to discern and devise romantic recollections of the past in the service of complicating the traumatic as a singular black historical through line.”⁴⁹ If the only narratives from the past are traumatic ones, it becomes that much more difficult to envision happiness in the present or the future—and that much easier to accept less in the name of some kind of gradualist Whig notion of progress. If such utopian-inflected approaches seem too optimistic, let us turn instead to Sara Ahmed: “Looking back is what keeps open the possibility of going astray … This backward glance also means an openness to the future, as the imperfect translation of what is behind us … We have hope because what is behind us is also what allows other ways of gathering in time and space, of making lines that do not reproduce what we follow, but instead create new textures on the ground.”⁵⁰ While I am aware that Ahmed might classify queer romance as veering into the world of “ ‘homonormativity,’ ”⁵¹ her attention to the “backward glance” captures what I see as a strong desire within The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics and other queer historical romance—a desire to figure out new ways of “going astray.” They are reckoning with both the history and the narratives that have gotten us to where we are today—and they are trying to imagine new possible futures by returning to the past.

When I teach queer historical romance novels, I stress to students that these novels are, of course, telling us as much about our own time as they are about the past. I recently taught The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics as part of a Jane Austen afterlives class in which we had Olivia Waite as a special guest on Zoom. During her conversation with the class, Waite introduced the concept of “historical possibility” (rather than “historical probability”) which guides how she thinks about writing queer historical romance.⁵² I have found that teaching queer historical romance—especially with the idea of “historical possibility” in mind—not only offers undergraduates a different perspective on the eighteenth century but also gives them narrative resources to think in new ways about their own temporally dispersed lives.

NOTES

Acknowledgment: I am thankful to Jeremy Chow and Shelby Johnson for giving me the opportunity to participate in this collection, for their immensely helpful editorial feedback, and for their understanding and patience throughout the process. I am also grateful to Cass Turner for their belief in (and support of) this project—and for many inspiring conversations along the way, as well as for their always insightful feedback. Thank you also to the anonymous reviewers, whose feedback helped to improve this chapter. Finally, this chapter has its origins in a paper I gave at a queer studies roundtable convened by George Haggerty at ASECS 2021. Thank you to George, the rest of the panel (Emily West, Caroline Gonda, and Madeline Reynolds), and the audience for engaging with my nascent ideas, and inspiring me to keep thinking about this project.

1. 1. Anjali Arondekar, “There Is Always More: Sexuality’s Archives,” Foam Histories: The Archival Issue 59 (2021): 91.

2. 2. Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox: A Novel, Reprint ed. (London: One World, 2019), 267.

3. 3. Olivia Waite, The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics (New York: Avon Impulse, 2019).

4. 4. Avon publishes some of the biggest names in romance, including Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series. In a larger project I am developing on romance, I am interested in a variety of queer romance novels (not just ones focused on “female/female” or “f/f,” as it is usually referred to in online discussions).

5. 5. “Romance Readers By the Numbers,” Nielsen, May 26, 2016, https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2016/romance-readers-by-the-numbers/.

6. 6. Amanda Rae-Prescott, “Race and Racism in Austen Spaces: Notes on a Scandal: Sanditon Fandom’s Ongoing Racism and the Danger of Ignoring Austen Discourse on Social Media,” ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830, 11, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 1–27.

7. 7. Gretchen Gerzina, Black London: Life before Emancipation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 6, 5. For more on Black life in, before, and beyond eighteenth-century Britain, see Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984); and Kathleen Chater, Untold Histories: Black People in England and Wales During the Period of the British Slave Trade, c. 1660–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).

8. 8. See also Margo Hendricks on the relationships between historical romances and racialization in Romance and Race: Coloring the Past (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press, 2022).

9. 9. D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 28.

10. 10. See, for example, the responses detailed in Danuta Kean, “Jane Austen’s Lesbianism Is as Fictional as Pride and Prejudice,” The Guardian, May 31, 2007, https://www .theguardian .com /books /booksblog /2017 /may /31 /jane -austen -lesbian -fictional -as -pride -and -prejudice.

11. 11. The romance novel in particular troubles the oft-identified (and debated) divide between realism and romance. Scott Black intriguingly argues that “the realism of the past becomes romance for future readers.” See Black, Without the Novel: Romance and the History of Prose Fiction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 13.

12. 12. Within the world of Chris Van Dusen’s Bridgerton series, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall explains, Queen Charlotte, “rather than simply having been rumored to be of mixed racial heritage & passing as white … is presented as a Black woman reigning openly as one.” Sepinwall, “On Studios and Patterns of Erasure,” in “Unsilencing the Past in Bridgerton 2020: A Roundtable January 9, 2021, https://kerrysinanan .medium .com /unsilencing -the -past -in -bridger ton -2020 -a -roundtable -792ecffd366. As we learn in season 1, episode 4, it is because of George III’s love for Charlotte that Black people were given titles and fortunes.

13. 13. Mira Assaf Kafantaris, et al., “Unsilencing the Past in Bridgerton 2020: A Roundtable,” January 9, 2021, https://kerrysinanan .medium .com /unsilencing -the -past -in -bridgerton -2020 -a -roundtable -792ecffd366

14. 14. At one point, Lucy reflects on the queer men she knows who have “affairs that could get them transported (or worse) under the full force of law,” but there is no character in the novel who faces the explicit threat of prosecution and death dictated by anti-sodomy laws. See Waite, The Lady’s Guide, 41.

15. 15. Waite, The Lady’s Guide, 79.

16. 16. Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 9–10.

17. 17. Manion, Female Husbands, 10.

18. 18. Manion, Female Husbands, 14.

19. 19. Romance Writers of America defines romance novels thusly: “Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.” “About the Romance Genre,” Romance Writers of America, accessed March 6, 2022, https://www .rwa .org /Online /Romance _Genre /About _Romance _Genre .aspx. This generic expectation has a long history, which can be traced back at least to the distinctions between the endings of early modern comedies and tragedies.

20. 20. Alyssa Cole, That Could Be Enough (Self-published: Kindle, 2017), 116.

21. 21. Jacques Rancière, “Anachronism and the Conflict of Times,” Diacritics 48, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 110–124 (116).

22. 22. Rancière, “Anachronism and the Conflict of Times,” 122.

23. 23. Rancière, “Anachronism and the Conflict of Times,” 122.

24. 24. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 1–2.

25. 25. Romance—in the most capacious sense of the term—has long destabilized conceptions of time and invited accusations of anachronism, both formally and in terms of its content. As Black argues in Without the Novel, romance is constituted by its self-awareness and recursivity.

26. 26. Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, Collected Works of Northrop Frye, ed. Alvin A. Lee et al., vol. 15 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 199.

27. 27. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 215.

28. 28. Romance novels are often described as being primarily written by—and for—women. In celebrating the genre as one celebrating “women’s freedom,” Regis echoes many romance readers’ explicit embrace of romance as a feminist genre. There is a part of me that wholeheartedly agrees with this assessment and affirms the important role romance novels have played—and still play—in exploring the many dimensions of sexual pleasure, which do not always neatly align with politics. There is also a part of me that is reluctant to adopt an overwhelmingly positive attitude toward seemingly all romance novels, especially given the tendency of many of these novels to uphold gender binaries and heterosexuality. I thus also take seriously scholar and romance novelist Mary Bly’s opinion that one cannot offer “a defense of the [romance] genre” as a whole, and that while “a specific reader may engage in a subversive reading of a specific book … neither books nor readers are interchangeable.” See Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), xiii; and Mary Bly, “On Popular Romance, J.R. Ward, and the Limits of Genre Study,” in New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays, ed. Eric Murphy Selinger and Sarah S. G. Frantz (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2012), 60–72 (62).

29. 29. Lonnae O’Neal Parker, “Fantasy Aisle: Harlequin Romance Novels Steam through 50 Years of Changing Mores,” Washington Post, February 20, 1999, https://www .washingtonpost .com /archive /lifestyle /1999 /02 /20 /fantasy -aisle -harlequin -romance -novels -steam -through -50 -years -of -changing -mores /9310be9a -473b -400c -9293 -80172cf16854 /.

30. 30. O’Neal Parker, “Fantasy Aisle.”

31. 31. Regis, A Natural History, 58–59.

32. 32. The relationship between the rise of companionate marriage (and novels narrating such unions) and the rise of capitalism is a topic I cannot address properly in this chapter. In recent work on romance novels and the Kindle universe, Mark McGurl argues that “from Pamela to the present, the novel in the English-speaking world has developed alongside and within a capitalist economy increasingly oriented toward consumer enjoyment and, if only implicitly, has been telling the story of that economy the whole time. What we now label the romance novel is the reflexive expression of the novel’s original appeal: it is not only written for the satisfaction of the imaginative needs of the reader but it is about that satisfaction in the figure of the heroine and her mate, who always get what they want and who thereby reassure their readers of the legitimacy and continuity of the social order.” See Mark McGurl, “Unspeakable Conventionality: The Perversity of the Kindle,” American Literary History 33, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 394–415 (404).

33. 33. Radway, Reading the Romance, 208.

34. 34. Waite, The Lady’s Guide, 186.

35. 35. Waite, The Lady’s Guide, 296.

36. 36. Waite, The Lady’s Guide, 286.

37. 37. Manion, Female Husbands, 10. Jack Halberstam also explores how a return to the archive can yield up different ways of understanding the past. Discussing Peter Linebaugh’s and Marcus Rediker’s work on “the history of opposition to capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth century,” Halberstam argues that the authors “do not find new routes to resistance built upon new archives … their point is that dominant history teems with the remnants of alternative possibilities, and the job of the subversive intellectual is to trace the lines of the worlds they conjured and left behind.” Although, as Halberstam also points out: “Gender and sexuality are, after all, too often dropped from most large-scale accounts of alternative worlds (including Linebaugh’s and Rediker’s).” See Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 18–19.

38. 38. Waite, The Lady’s Guide, 286–287.

39. 39. Waite, The Lady’s Guide, 287.

40. 40. The publishing project is soon expanded to include women artists and diverse kinds of art. (Catherine is a talented embroiderer.) While I have not had space to address it in this chapter, the novel is also committed to challenging the disciplinary boundaries between what we now know as the humanities and the sciences—professional boundaries that were beginning to develop in the early nineteenth century.

41. 41. Waite, The Lady’s Guide, 320–321.

42. 42. Stephen Best, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 12.

43. 43. Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 3.

44. 44. Arondekar, “There Is Always More,” 91.

45. 45. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

46. 46. In Confessions of the Fox, Jordy Rosenberg theorizes a fantastical, collectively oriented vision of queer archival recovery that feels related to—although also quite different from—the fictional archival project that Waite imagines in The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics.

47. 47. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 16.

48. 48. In recognizing this kind of work, I do not mean in any way to discount work by queer scholars like Ann Cvetkovich, who celebrates “ways of thinking about trauma that do not pathologize it, that seize control over it from the medical experts, and that forge creative responses to it that far outstrip even the most utopian of therapeutic and political solutions.” See Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 3.

49. 49. Badia Ahad-Legardy, Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021), 3.

50. 50. Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (October 2006): 543–574 (559–560).

51. 51. Ahmed, “Orientations,” 567.

52. 52. Olivia Waite, “Visit to Honors 3063: Austenland: Jane Austen’s Life and Afterlives,” Zoom lecture, Oklahoma State University, April 18, 2022.