Yes, it’s me again, your Feisty Indian Aunty who will now tell you that she has read all eight books Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series. My one regret – Che! The romantic novels I read when I was in my twenties only had, “he looked into her eyes and leaned forward to kiss her lips.” That was it. That was as much sexiness that we got back then. Denise Robbins’ The Noble One, for example, was a “nice” story in which two guys fall in love with one girl who want to save a magnificent stag. Yes, there was plot back then too. Mills and Boon novels were the hottest ticket of the day. Truly racy writers were far and few.
I stopped reading romance novels for a while as they were all a little flaccid and monotonous. And then my daughter gave me The Duke and I, the first book of the Bridgerton series. Good God, I was shocked at how explicit the sex was. Who knew that “licking the back of the ear” can be so erotic? Who knew that every hero must be rakes and every heroine a virgin? Yes, you must be a virgin so that the rake can either be “horrified” that he has had sex with one, or “proud” that he managed to marry one.
The men are so well versed in sexual activity, that pages and pages of what they’re doing to excite their respective virgins is written so lucidly, passionately, and emotionally that it is enough to make the reader wake her husband up and do the same with roles reversed!
Bridgerton is, as far as TV adaptations go, a pretty decent one. The biggest difference being that there are now Black people in what must have been a very, very white period in the history of England. And thank God for that. A shirtless Regé-Jean Page is precisely what the world needs right now.
As for what it’s all about, well, the eldest daughter of the family, Daphne, must marry to make way for the others to follow suit. Her brother is a rake but a pain in her ass as he thinks no one is good enough for her. So she makes an arrangement with the catch of the town, Lord Simon Basset, and the inevitable happens.
(Tell me this doesn’t sound like every Tamil movie you’ve ever seen. Except without all of the sex. In Tamil movies, the pallu of the saree would fall off a woman’s shoulder and it would be a village scandal. Heaven forbid anyone has actual intercourse among the trees they’ve just been running around.)
But I digress. Back to Daphne and Simon. The attraction between them is there but she wants “love,” the elusive feeling of adoration, of tenderness, of heady passion that only sex can make you feel. And what’s more, she wants that desire and passion to last forever!
Kids! Right? They don’t know just how fleeting pheromones can be. But hey, this isn’t reality, it’s a romance. And there always needs to be a happy ending that makes you believe that love lasts forever.
See, Bridgerton was a fun series to watch. I enjoyed it and am looking forward to a second season. But I must say that it sometimes felt as fleeting as those pheromones. The sex can be steamy, but the way Julia Quinn writes it in her novels is far more scintillating to read. I’m not sure what turns on young people these days, but I still believe that the words on the page can do a lot more than a few minutes of unrestrained raunchiness on the screen.
P.S. If you enjoyed Bridgerton and were looking for something else to read, then allow this Feisty Indian Aunty to recommend the novels of Stephanie Laurens. I much preferred the women in her books who were much braver and far more authoritative.
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