Jew­ish Book Coun­cil spoke with trail­blaz­ing romance author Julia Quinn about the in-depth research she con­ducts, the infor­ma­tion rab­bit holes she falls down, how the genre has changed over the thir­ty years she’s been writ­ing in it, and more.

Simona Zaret­sky: What has it been like to see the char­ac­ters of the Bridger­ton series reach an even greater audi­ence with the TV adaptation?

Julia Quinn: Won­der­ful, fan­tas­tic, amaz­ing… Hon­est­ly, name a fab­u­lous adjec­tive and it prob­a­bly applies. It’s also a lit­tle sur­re­al, to be honest.

SZ: Are there any char­ac­ters or plot­lines that have stayed with you through­out the years?

JQ: All of them? I get asked all the time: Which book is your favorite? Which char­ac­ter? Which cou­ple? And hon­est­ly, I can’t say. Each book is spe­cial to me in its own way — it might be a char­ac­ter, or a scene, or even just a moment. It might be some­thing that was hap­pen­ing in my life when I wrote it, some­thing that would­n’t be appar­ent to the read­er. I’ve decid­ed I’ll let the read­ers have their favorites. I love all my babies the same.

SZ: Your nov­els are filled with such rich details and descrip­tions. What’s your research process like?

JQ: I gen­er­al­ly have two dif­fer­ent types of research. There is the kind that is over­ar­ch­ing, that I’ll need for the entire book. For exam­ple, in First Comes Scan­dal, the hero is a med­ical stu­dent, so I need­ed to learn about med­ical edu­ca­tion in the late eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry. How did one get to call one­self a doc­tor? Where might one go to school, and how long did it take? Sim­i­lar­ly, in The Oth­er Miss Bridger­ton, much of the action takes place on a ship. It turns out I know very lit­tle about ships, so I spent many hours research­ing ships of that time peri­od — how fast did they go? How many masts might they have? What would the cap­tain’s quar­ters look like?

More often, how­ev­er, I find myself look­ing up details as I go along. In It’s in His Kiss, the hero makes a joke about Lit­tle Bo Peep, which I thought was delight­ful until it occurred to me — what’s the ear­li­est known ref­er­ence of Lit­tle Bo Peep? If it turned out to be 1910 I was going to be out of luck. (For­tu­nate­ly, it was Shake­speare, so my joke was safe.) In The Lost Duke of Wyn­d­ham, the hero and hero­ine are look­ing at a paint­ing in an art book and I was halfway through the scene before I real­ized that in my mind they were look­ing at a glossy cof­fee table book of the sort one might buy at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art. Obvi­ous­ly that could­n’t have been the case, so I went down the research rab­bit hole of what an art book might look like in 1818. Authors tend to go down a lot of research rab­bit holes, to be honest. 

SZ: How have you seen the romance genre change in the past thir­ty years that you’ve been writ­ing them?

JQ: The biggest — and best — change is the embrace of diver­si­ty. When my first book was pub­lished in 1995, you would nev­er have seen a queer romance from a major pub­lish­er. Non-white char­ac­ters were usu­al­ly prob­lem­at­i­cal­ly depict­ed. It was a huge deal when Bev­er­ly Jenk­ins released Night Song in 1994, which was the first his­tor­i­cal romance to fea­ture two Black char­ac­ters on the cover. 

We’re not where we should be yet — BIPOC and queer authors still face unfair hur­dles and dis­crim­i­na­tion with­in the indus­try — but we’ve made great strides. One of my favorite recent his­tor­i­cal romances of the past few years is Lady Like by Macken­zi Lee, a sap­ph­ic romance set in Regency Eng­land. I loved it so much I chose it as one of the first titles for my new book club: JQ Edi­tions.

SZ: Speak­ing of which, you recent­ly launched JQ Edi­tions, a gor­geous sub­scrip­tion box series. What was the impe­tus behind this project? What do you see as the pow­er of the romance genre?

JQ: Romance is hav­ing a (big) moment in pub­lish­ing, but for what­ev­er rea­son, his­tor­i­cal romance isn’t see­ing the same kind of boost as con­tem­po­rary and roman­ta­sy. At the same time, we’re see­ing a lot of excite­ment around hard­cov­er spe­cial edi­tions with cus­tom art­work, sprayed edges, and the like. I’m always look­ing for ways to show­case my favorite his­tor­i­cal romance authors, and so I thought, Why not spe­cial edi­tions for his­tor­i­cal romance? I curate the club myself, and my choic­es range from brand-new titles, to recent gems, to clas­sics of the mod­ern genre. It’s a great way for read­ers to get gor­geous edi­tions of their favorite books and dis­cov­er authors they might not have found on their own.

SZ: Are there any Jew­ish authors or books that you enjoy? (In the romance genre or otherwise!)

JQ: I love Feli­cia Gross­man, who writes his­tor­i­cal romance set in Lon­don’s East End in the ear­ly 1800s. She’s cre­at­ed such a vibrant world, and I per­son­al­ly have learned so much about Jew­ish life in that era. For exam­ple, I had no idea there was such a social bar­ri­er between Sephardic and Ashke­nazi Jews. There is also a won­der­ful explo­ration of what it means to assimilate.