ducal reckoning

aristocrats, part IV

Wrapping up the Dukes! Good riddance, I’m only reading farmer romances for the next three months. Thank you for indulging this massive undertaking.

In this project, I wanted to look at dukes as they stand in historical romance. The aim was to be descriptive: these are the dukes that exist, grouped by generations of romance, and as such, this is what they add to the genre’s meaning of “duke” when a reader picks up a book. From that analysis, I hoped to extrapolate out the potential whys? of the genre’s fixation on this title over all others, and over any other class positioning for heroes. My intuition is that the answer cannot be “readers want dukes twice as much as any other title.” The blanket reasons for why readers supposedly enjoy dukes above all else are too easy to counter as non-comprehensive.¹ Dukes are not exclusive holders of the virtues of power, wealth, or rank that are usually cited as the draw. Often these values create conflict in the romance, not exclusively virtues or appeals, but harms that must be corrected or explained.

I didn’t want to rely simply on anecdotes of my small community of romance readers to draw these conclusions (though we have a lot of conversations about being a little tired of the volume of dukes). But quantitative data on book sales are notoriously opaque. In describing the ducal trends of these books pre-2020, I have attempted to counter this information blockade with qualitative examples of the history of the rank in the genre. This meant reading lots of books and describing a map of how these books and their characterizations of the dukes interact with and influence each other.

Based on my back-of-the-envelope metadata study in part I, the largest growth of the number of Dukes happened over the 2010s. But this parallels a general publishing boom for historical romance. But when we look at our current decade, as it stands, the ratio of dukes to historical romances is growing faster now. A bigger slice of the pie is taken up by dukes than ever before (and by extension, other aristocrats are also elbowing out the working classes, taking a bigger share of the market. What else is new!)

So a main theme of dukes of the 2020s is volume. With the older titles, I can see patterns and relationships between books, like Judith McNaught’s references to and subversion of a Heyer Dandy Duke when she gives us sinister (and masculine and virile) Clayton Westmoreland, Duke of Claymore. An often unacknowledged potential factor in the proliferation of dukes in recently published is the self-aware and responsive nature of genre fiction. Romance as a genre can be applied widely, but a book that is written with the intent of the genre fiction label adopts the history with it. While the ancestors of today’s historical romance might not as be as singularly defined as a genre like high fantasy and J.R.R. Tolkien, or steampunk and Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, the genre does have a family tree. Romance readers become romance writers and I think the way that we can trace something like the stereotype of a duke using a quizzing glass from Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades (1926) to Manda Collins’ A Spinster’s Guide to Danger and Dukes (2023) shows the iterative nature of both the characteristics of a romance duke and the exponential growth of the supply of those dukes.

But now, there are so many ducal titles to choose from, over a thousand that I identified published in the 2020s, I have struggled for weeks now to give you the picture of the landscapes as we stand with dukes. And that’s in part because of another struggle I have had: I really haven’t enjoyed the duke books I’ve picked up for the 2020-2024 part of the project. As much as I have a lofty goal of describing the state of things, the more duke books I read from the last four years, the more I hate them. On a macro level, I can’t pull punches here—I think the quality of romance books has declined since the pandemic started, though I do suspect this has more to do with publishing not supporting authors than authors’ talent. I found many of the books poorly edited and structurally dissatisfying, even compared to the same authors’ work published before 2020.

But still why so many dukes? The dukes have been market tested since 1926 when Georgette Heyer decided to give her villain his own novel and we’re in an era of historical romance that seemingly rewards derivativeness disguised and promised as innovation. The volume of dukes dovetails with my theory about wallpaper romance, how wallpaper romance is effectively mannerism of historical romance novels, so you can’t really write a wallpaper romance set outside the Big Settings of the Genre. It’s a copy of a copy of a copy. New material and considerations can be injected into these titles after that starting place, but as I discuss with the dukes below, the shaky foundation rattles throughout the novels for me.

Rather than attempt to discuss a breath of examples of our final era of dukes, I’m going talk about three books that I see as promising to do something forward-thinking, but that I felt were regressive, in part because of the ducal hero. What I saw repeatedly in recently published books was a structural contradiction between a duke who is expected not to act like a duke with a doubling down on the value of the aristocracy, as if to justify to the reader the choice of the class setting of the book. We’ll go through the mandatory ingredients of a historical romance with a ducal lead: politics, history, and romance, and the dukes who promise progress on those vectors while reinforcing the status quo.

Politics: Bringing Down the Duke (2019)

Evie Dunmore’s debut novel is technically from 2019, but you can just look at the title and cover to know that it’s an influence on historical romance’s shape nowadays, so I am treating it as a harbinger and grouping it with the 2020s. Here we have Sebastian Devereux, Duke of Montgomery, a very political duke. So political in fact, he is tasked by Queen Victoria herself to help the Tories win the upcoming election. It’s the election of 1880 that will dramatically shift power away from the Tories and Benjamin Disraeli, to the Liberal party of William Gladstone, Disraeli’s long-time political rival.²

Annabelle Archer, the daughter of a vicar who becomes an Oxford student whose scholarship is being paid for by an organization of suffragists, is tasked with courting the duke for the suffragists’ cause. Annabelle herself sort of sits on the outside of politics, primarily driven to Oxford by the promise of an education. Other female characters in the book provide the political undercurrent of the book, though Annabelle does support their cause. Annabelle also has a well-earned suspicion of rich men after a second son of a peer seduced and abandoned her. She is wary of both the institution of marriage and being kept as a mistress.

The plot, of a politically conservative duke falling in love with a woman who is outside of his class, has associations with a radical segment of the London populace, and has a past that narrows her marriage prospects, is very similar to The Duke by Gaelen Foley, which I wrote about at in part II. Both books imbibe the world with real-world politicking; we are invested in the stakes of the characters through the stakes of the real world that the authors include, borrowed from history. But despite all the specificity of Sebastian’s meetings with the Queen and Disraeli, the included real politics came across as quite hollow to me. A major flattening effect is the absence of Gladstone, the former Liberal prime minister and the main campaigner who besmirched the jewel of the Disraeli premiership (imperialism) in order to win the 1880 election. He is mentioned in the book but does not appear as a character.

If Gladstone did appear, I think Dunmore would have to confront the complicated reality of conservative and liberal politics in the 19th century that do not neatly graft onto “regressive/bad” and “progressive/good” containers, that she seems to wish they did. Gladstone’s multiple premierships had moments of progress, including the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, which is the legislation the suffragists are actively campaigning for in the novel. And though the Liberals ran the 1880 campaign on criticizing the Tory support of British imperialism, Gladstone’s disinterest in foreign policy meant members of his government ultimately often took actions that served the empire expansion. Gladstone’s reserved economic policies were claimed as precedent by Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative party of the second half of the 20th century since he focused on free markets and low public spending. And though Gladstone’s altered his view later in life, in the 1830s, he argued for the gradual, rather than immediate, emancipation of slaves in the West Indies and later aided his father, one of the largest and cruelest slave holders living in England, in getting reimbursement for their “value” when the enslaved people were staturiorly emancipated.

On the other hand, Benjamin Disraeli was a major architect of the British empire, but Tory conservatism had a paternalism angle towards urban working classes, that encouraged the party to enact workers’ rights bill and enfranchise the urban working class. This system relies on a hierarchal understanding of class but materially aided groups injured by the inequities of Gladstone’s preferred free markets. He also came from middle-class origins and a Jewish family that converted to Church of England after his unreligious father had a falling out with their synagogue. Though Disraeli took the Oath of Office of Parliament as a Christian, his Jewish family origins were a major subject of hateful criticism and rhetoric. One of the fascinating aspects of Disraeli is that hate against his origins was fixed on the same figure who was valorized by a conservative British public that held pride in the colonial empire.

I don’t know that Bringing Down the Duke needed all these details in it for context. After all, it is a romance, first and foremost. But its historical connection is weightier than many histroms, even ones that send their dukes to parliament. The election we’re anticipating is not a vague vote; it is a specific turning point in British politics. So the disconnect happens when we get grounded in history, but then the book is populated by effective caricatures of those who are politically opposed to the couple. Disraeli is particular is written as buffoonishly evil and almost incompetent. In one meeting with him, Sebastian wonders “how this man had managed to weasel his way into a position of leadership and into the queen’s good graces continued to astound him.” Here Dunmore repeats Victorian criticism of Disraeli without context of the usual hateful rhetoric: the question of “how did this man do this” often meant "how this middle-class Jewish man do this.” Dunmore borrows the conscending an aristocrat might have of Disraeli, but elides context of why a Duke might think in those terms, to make it appear that Sebastian’s distaste is personal and noble, not hateful.

Dunmore writes Sebastian as a beleaguered conservative whose party is going somewhere his compassionate heart can’t follow. A major confrontation between Disraeli and Sebastian is about Disraeli ignoring the interests of farmers. Again, Dunmore elides some history here, I think to make the reader’s sympathy with the “sides” less complicated. Sebastian says the farmers are still holding a grudge against Disraeli over the Corn Laws. The Corn Laws were a series of tariffs on imported grains that began after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, meant to encourage the use of British-grown grain, meaning the price of grain was highly dependent on the weather on the island. The tariffs would be abated if the price of grain ever reached a certain threshold, but during the thirty years the Corn Laws were on the books, this threshold was never reached.

“Farmers” who loved the Corn Laws made their money off of high grain prices. The animosity against Disraeli, originally a major opponent of the Corn Laws repeal, was for not reenacting them when he was prime minister. While discussing this, Sebastian and Disraeli also discuss the prime ministers imperial plans, which are costly and can affect the amount of government money used for domestic purposes. Disraeli says “Uplift the empire and farmers will follow you gladly.” Sebastian replies sarcastically “And I give every man credit who prefers starving for glory over feeding his family.” Sebastian is thinking of the men who rent land from him to grow grain, envisioning them selling it to feed their families. But who is buying it from them and struggling to feed their families when it is expensive? People who can’t afford to even rent land or make their money in new industries outside of agriculture! The urban working class who Disraeli helped gain the right to vote with the Reform Act of 1867!

Eventually, Sebastian is won over by the suffragists (because he’s fallen in love with one of them) and proposes an amendment to the Married Women’s Property Act on the floor of Parliament and leaves the Tory party. Sebastian and Annabelle (and the book as a whole) frame this as being on the “right side of history.” In the universe of the book, Sebastian is exclusively on the right side because Dunmore leaves out these complicating factors while peppering in flattened historical references.

In contrast, The Duke by Gaelen Foley has some references to Robert’s earnest interest in some progressive policies throughout the book, even when he is still ingratiated in the conservative party. And he also expresses beliefs that are not that as evolved or will prove in opposition to progress. When Bel questions the practice of pocket boroughs, Robert acknowledges the practice is unfair in a democracy, but he can’t envision how parliament would work without them. Indeed, discussing the inequities and organizing against them was considered treasonous and seditious under William Pitt’s new Tory government. Reforming the House of Commons and this practice would be a major subject of legislation in the 1830s, after the setting of The Duke.

The Duke felt like a miracle, with Foley pulling off Robert’s journey to thread the needle of his political career and his non-aristocratic love. Dunmore’s method for squaring the history and romance felt like she was wielding a very large curtain under which she hid Gladstone and the perils of classic liberalism.

I would have read this book differently if I weren’t tracking the duke’s journey as a duke, possibly more charitably.³ But Dunmore puts these things in the forefront in a way that is not always true for historicals, even with a character who is a peer. So I feel looking at the actual political context critically is a fair angle. The tension of how powerful and potentially political a duke is exists in all the books I have discussed in this project, but now we’re getting more directly legislative dukes. But they’re evolved dukes. There’s Henry Carrington, Duke of Clayborn in Sarah MacLean’s Heartbreaker who argues against child labor and for prison reform (in a way I was dissatisfied with) or Peter Kent, Duke of Stanhope from Ne’er Duke Well from Alexandra Vashti where the duke is an American abolitionist in 1815, when the abolition movement was at a nadir in post-Napoleonic war England parliament.

To me, the novelty and promised progress of these novels with dukes with perfect politics is belayed by the fact that these radical politics were present in history, perhaps just not amongst the dukes. When dukes are the benevolent leaders of stories that integrate politics so acutely, it feels like an iteration of the conservative paternalism we see in Disraeli’s One Nation Conservatism or Sebastian extending his sympathies to his farmers, but forgetting about urban workers. The books that use dukes (and though less frequently, other peers) this way, when taken as a pattern and a trend, suggest the most useful mechanism for change is one good man in a position of power whose name history will remember, instead of solidarity and work amongst throngs of anonymous people.⁴ People who fell in love! both in the historical past and at a higher ratio in earlier generations of historical romance.

History: A Spinster’s Guide to Danger and Dukes by Manda Collins (2023)

Author notes are not anything new in historical romance, particularly ones that give context to the adopted setting and history. Beverly Jenkins’ notes, for example, in her Westerns and American set books include robust bibliographies, citing her sources for history and she’s the high watermark for the utility of these notes. Jenkins writes Black romances and she has talked about pushback or questions that she gets about the veracity of the actions of her historical characters, so one motivation is to include a robust bibliography to “quell that kind of stuff.” The demand for that in 19th-century set novels with Black characters is an unfair burden in response to incredulity in the face of stories of Black couples in the myriad of situations that Jenkins writes. Though I am grateful for Jenkins’ author notes because they are always a joy to read!

In reading a bunch of books from the last five years in a row these past couple of books, I noticed an uptick in this sort of contextualizing author’s note, even in settings where pushback against some plot elements comes under accusations of “wallpaperness.” The author's notes will include some bit of history taken as inspiration for something in the novel that might be seen as ridiculous, or something that must be an invention of the author, but has a precedent.

A Spinster’s Guide to Danger and Dukes by Manda Collins has an “A Letter from the Author,” where she describes the Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe, a group founded by Sir Francis Dashwood in 1746. The order was a secret society/club of wealthy men who met for indulgences. It is often given as one example of a “Hellfire Club,” the general name for these somewhat secret societies where 18th-century rakes would gather and engage in “immoral” activities, though this particular club grouped with this set ex post facto. Collins tells us in her note “It was a haven for wickedness, where powerful men could indulge in immoral acts (some allege murder!), all while wearing “cool” robes and mucking about in caves.”

Historian Evelyn Lord’s stance, in the book The Hellfire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies (2008) is that historians and the public often take contemporary reports of both Dashwood’s club and Hellfire Clubs at large at face value too often, particularly when it comes violent acts associated with the clubs. The sensationalism of a moral panic about the main goal of Dashwood’s club, seeking pleasure, meant its naysayers often overstated the level of depravity of the activities.

In A Spinster’s Guide, Joshua Fielding, Duke of Langham, is the great-grandson of the founder of a club, the Lucifer Society, based on Sir Francis’ club. Poppy Delamare has accompanied the Duke to his estate because her sister, who lived nearby, has been accused of murdering her husband by pushing him off a building known as St. Lucy’s. Before they visit the building that Poppy assumes is a church to look for evidence, Joshua reveals to her “St. Lucy’s is short for St. Lucifer’s, and it and all the chalk caves that lie beneath it were used by my great-grandfather’s club to perform their hedonistic rituals. They were called the Lucifer Society.” His great-grandfather had been denied entry to Sir Francis’ society, so the late duke formed his own.

In the book, Joshua is somewhat nonplussed by his family’s history though it is clear the Society is a mark on the family’s name, particularly because of the money the great-grandfather spent in preparing his estate for the society’s meetings, including building a network of underground caves and follies. Joshua feels some gratitude for this depravity because he feels like he’ll never be the worst man to have his title and he refers to the man as a “villain,” a “seducer” and an “opium eater,” and suggests he suspects murder amongst his ancestor’s sins. Joshua also references efforts for rehabilitation by subsequent generations. Even middle-class Poppy endorses the successes of these efforts by commenting on the “quality” of house guests who have been gathered at the ducal estate while she is there.

Later while investigating the disappearance of Violet, Poppy’s accused-of-murder sister, the couple enters the caves themselves, only to discover some sort of revival of the Lucifer Society in the middle of a ceremony. This version is performing the most salacious versions of the rituals imaginable: men in robes watch a masked and naked man eat a heart that supposedly was cut from the murder victim that Poppy and Joshua are investigating. The naked man is branded with a Satanic symbol. After the heart-eating ceremony, couples in the crowd begin to have sex, seemingly aroused by the setting and ritual.

The couples discuss the reasons why either Joshua’s grandfather or the men they witnessed would act in such a way, and Joshua offers “Boredom with everyday vice. A need to prove oneself to be as bold as one’s fellows. Or in the case of the man who was leading the travesty, I’d guess a craving for power.” Poppy is primarily interested in asking questions about how the couples seemed to derive sexual arousal from bearing witness to the scene, asking Joshua if that is how is for all men. He assures her that the scenes they saw are somehow removed from sex that is equitable and joyous. The couple then has sex in the cave, after a negotiation with proper protestations by Joshua about the morality of “ruining” a virgin and retorts from Poppy that ruination is an artificial concept only used to subjugate women.⁵

The true murderer is revealed to be the man who was conducting the ritual and the people in the cave were villagers that he was using the society to defraud. Poppy’s sister is exonerated and there isn’t much more direct discussion of Joshua’s great-grandfather. Collins does end her author’s letter with a little jab at Dashwood: “I would say I think Dashwood would be proud of how I was inspired by the Hellfire Club, but let’s be real. He would totally hate it. And that’s okay by me.”

The main sources contemporaneous sources about Sir Francis’ club were written by John Wilkes, a disaffected former member and a novel written by Charles Johnstone, Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea, which have been taken at face value. In her book, Evelyn Lord tries to use primary source documents to cleave fact from sensationalized fact and fiction. Personal letters from the time that reference visiting the estate also include references to sex and prepared arrangements for such encounters, and some level of inner-circle that required initiation.

We know that Dashwood enjoys rituals involving dressing up in costumes from his participation in other social clubs, that have more documentation around them, like the Divan Club (where they cosplayed the Ottoman Empire) and the Society of Dilettanti (where the admission requirement was “having been to Italy” though Horace Wadpole said the real requirement was “being drunk.”) Pretty clearly, the scant amount of evidence about this club is what allowed the moral panic to run rampant—the clubs with more documentation have not been taken up as holding some sinister secret of black magic.

After falling out over political differences with other members, Wilkes began leak information about the secrets of Dashwood’s group. Later, for unrelated political action, Wilkes was imprisoned for a treasonous essay and while he was in the Tower of London, a drafted poem in his papers was discovered. The poem Essay on Woman is full of euphemisms⁶ and mostly extols female pleasure, but it also lampoons a specific reverend, a cuckold of the poem’s primary author, Thomas Potter. But when the poem was discovered, members of the Friars conspired to have it published, so that Wilkes might be charged in the House of Lords with libel. The public trial, which was ostensibly about the poem, but was really a cudgel used by the club member, the Earl of Sandwich,⁷ to punish his political enemy Wilkes. The publicity was the end to the private club, but ensured that London gossip and writer would take up the effective blank slate of the now notorious club and project any number of activities onto it.

Lord links the activities of the club and its interest in casual sex with the parallel development of the form of the novel and pornography, where socially acceptable books like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders sold well and had sex in them, but also with the explosion of printing presses, erotica and pornography boomed. The era of both political thought in the Enlightenment and sexual literature were possible in part because a change in censorship laws in England in 1695. The Licensing Order of 1643 that lapsed at the turn of the century meant that printed materials could be censored pre-publication. While authors in the 18th century could still be punished and censored, the thing had to be published first. Meaning writing has a mechanism to be part of the public discourse, even if the powers that be found them treasonous or obscene and publishing was now a much more lucrative business in England, especially if you could publish a pornographic best seller.

Back to the dukes and Collins’ authors note. By including a reference to a historical club, Collins seems to be attempting to cut off questions from a reader who projects a Victorian notion onto all of history, a habit that I see all the time, about whether this kind of debauched activity could have happened or did happen “back then.” And she does seem to be earnestly excited to share a thing that happened in history that interests her.

But Collins specifically chooses to write a Victorian duke and Victorian working class woman as her couple in this book, so we’re four generations removed from the history directly invoked. And like Dunmore’s Duke in Bringing Down the Duke, we have characters place immoral, bad things in one category and upstanding, good things in the other. The couple is more removed from politics than Dunmore’s book, so the labels are not quite regressive/progressive anymore, but Poppy speaks a lot like a 2023 feminist heroine, with her speech about the ruination of women and asking Joshua to treat her like an equal. Those personal politics are juxtaposed with Joshua and Poppy passing some very Victorian judgements on his great-grandfather!

The late duke hosted parties where people had casual sex. And he was a spend thrift. And he was an opium user. And Joshua even thinks he was a murderer (though this is said as an over-the-top aside). And his club is invoked by the revival of the club where Poppy and Joshua watch a “pagan,” sex-fueled ritual happen and the club is connected to the murder and the framing of Poppy’s sister. Collins is participating in the exact moral panic sensationalizing that Lord points out has been happening since the Order of the Friars was exposed to public gossip. She doubles down on casting her source character, Sir Francis Dashwood, in binary opposition to her couple by telling us he would hate her novel.

While the Friars were certainly hyper concerned with masculinity and class, and their activities were primarily focused on wealthy men indulging themselves, the literary history of this period and the opening up of the presses is something I think romance novelists and readers should be able to see as a good thing. The setting that begets the Order of the Friars also leads to valorizing of the freedom of the press (including the Framers of the United States feel spurred to enshrine the right in the United States Constitution), push back against censorship for works of art that depict sex, and the very development of the English language novel. Fanny Hill, published and censored during this period, is the book that led to litigation in 1965 in the United States that opened the door for romance publishing boom in the early 1970s with explicit sex on the page.

There’s a long literary history for invoking the club this way that Collins is welcome to participate in. Still, I find that aspect of the book ultimately a regressive, backwards looking view, even as Poppy makes her personal feminist speeches to Joshua! I’m not saying the Order of the Friars were not secret heroes, or feminists. But like the politics of Gladstone and Disraeli, when invoking this history, I think it is over simplistic to cast one as “good” and one as “bad.” When I see authors’ notes used this way, with a promised connection to history in a note to me the reader, but then a really flat use of that history in the book, I am disappointed. My distaste for this binary is especially felt when there are characters who espouse beliefs that feel out of time, there to assuage moderns readers’ anxiety about reading something potentially regressive through its nostalgia, while there is a duke there!

Romance: A Duke for Diana by Sabrina Jeffries (2022)

I do think every historical romance has both history (clearly) and politics, but what about the romance? That’s why we’re all here.

In A Duke for Diana, we have classic ducal type: a guy who didn’t realize that he was going to be an heir. Geoffrey Brookhouse, Duke of Grenwood, was not close to the previous duke, but he was close to his father, who died before he inherited. He is still mourning his father’s death, but he has a younger sister who needs a season now that she is the sister to a duke. This spurs him to go to London and hire Lady Diana Harper and her sisters to Pygmalion his sister so she can make a proper match. Diana is the daughter of an Earl who divorced his wife for running off with a Major-General, so she and her sisters have knowledge of the intricacies of the ton, but no means to use them, since they have been rejected by society. So they sell their services as guides for the world, for women who are awkward, unknowledgeable or otherwise not yet married.

A new-to-the-peerage duke is a great character for a Regency romance read by a modern audience (especially Americans). We have a built in audience surrogate asking questions, poking fun, and lampooning his new position, since he grew up thinking he was going to have work for a living. With Diana in this book, we have someone now on the outside of society who buys into the value of the aristocracy, though she has been injured by it, rejected for her parents’ actions.

This book was full of tonal dissonance for me. It’s the latest published book that I’ve read that really swings big with true Regency vocabulary and there’s a plot point involving divorce where Jeffries gets the law right and the divorce has major social consequences for the characters, working against the wallpaper side of the spectrum. But the premise of the book about the sisters’ Pygmalion business on the side, named Elegant Occasions, feels like historical romance invention to give us a conceit to have a series. There’s a reference to the rarity of dukes and marquesses and their heirs within the book, but within the series the sisters named Diana, Eliza and Verity marry, respectively, a Duke, an Earl and a Viscount’s heir. Some elements are so grounded and some are so cutesy.

But the big question for both Geoffrey and Diana is what does it mean to be a duke? Geoffrey has no inherent feeling attached to the title and his identity, but acknowledges he is attracted to the power and how he can use it to help him family He is unsure about how he relates to the title’s legacy, unsure if he wants to marry and have a child because the circumstances of his father’s death, not yet public, could lead to scandal. Diana, raised to respect and aim for the aristocracy in her marriage, has bitterness to her rejection from the ton for someone else’s actions, but also knows that she loves her life on the fringe—working with her sisters, being free to consider having an unburdened affair with Geoffrey.

Most of the conflict in the book comes from both members of the couple guessing at the rules that they other is invested in. Geoffrey assumes Diana is offended by his advances, or wants to marry him if they have an affair. Diana assumes that Geoffrey is only moved to establish a relationship out of a misplaced sense of duty and thinks she would be an inappropriate Duchess. The confusion and tension that these characters have about how they relate to this title felt like a microcosm of historical romance novels, attempting to square distaste, fascination and respect for the honorific.

Geoffrey was not raised to be a duke, but Diana frequently notes moments when he is expanding to fill the stereotypical traits of a duke. When Geoffrey arrives at Elegant Occasions and sums up the to-do list, with disdain, for his sister’s debut, Diana notes “His Arrogant Grace” “had certainly learned the high-handed manner of a duke to perfection.” This is the same meeting where she notes his “boorish” behavior, a word she later regrets insulting him with, suggesting he is acting too coarsely for his title. Diana goes back and forth throughout the book thinking of Geoffrey either in terms of rising or failing to meet his title. And she expresses attraction and distaste for both his duke-ness and his non-dukeness!

When Geoffrey jumps to a conclusion that he later has to apologize for, Diana says “will wonders never cease—the great duke has stooped to offer an apology.” But Geoffrey also changes how he dresses, going from practical every day wear to a black tailcoat, to show Diana that she was wrong about assuming he was a “duke in name only.” Something about this contradiction, between Geoffrey having the title and fulfilling some standards of ducal behavior but working outside others, is the premise of Diana’s attraction to him: “That must be his appeal. He was different. A duke, but not really a duke. A gentleman, but not always a gentleman. How could she not want to touch him?”

Geoffrey’s appeal is that he is outside the qualities of aristocracy that rejected Diana. But also that he rises to meet the title? His personal arc is about learning to act like a Duke, managing his family with aplomb without being overbearing, including navigating blessing a love match but controlling the terms of his sister’s engagement. We get a heroine who speaks about divestment from the value of the ton and the judgmental aristocrats and feels sexual freedom to seek out an affair because of her distance from the arcane rules of society that injure women, a progressive position. But the book still has a belief there is an inherent value to the men who are peers. Geoffrey is ducal because he is a duke and being ducal and gentlemanly is somehow better than not being so. I haven’t read the other two books in the series, but I think it is telling that each sister marries a peer. Their exile from the ton and proximity to the peerage is an error that the universe corrects with happily ever after. They are genteel and will be rewarded, not only with true love, but with their restored class position.

not with a bang, but a whimper

What inspired me to write these series was actually an author who I fell in love with who never wrote a Duke. I read A Lady’s Companion by Carla Kelly for Reformed Rakes’ episode on Waterloo. The heroine, Susan Hampton, has a baronet father who is an inveterate gambler and when he finally bets too large, they have to go live with a relative. Susan sees her future as being at the beck and call for her overbearing aunt and does what many a romance novel heroine considers, or fears: she gets a job.

When she goes to work as a lady’s companion for a dragon dowager, she meets the bailiff of the estate David Wiggins. Kelly writes chemistry better than just about any author I’ve ever read. But a major arc of Susan is squaring her immediate attraction to David with the judgmental classism she was raised with. Her father is a baronet, but a thoughtless cruel, fool. David is a solider turned farmer, with a potentially criminal past and no family of note, but he earnestly is interested in Susan’s thoughts and opinions.

Both characters make big mistakes toward each other, making assumptions based on their perceived class gap that has actually been collapsed by Susan’s new circumstances. I can’t overstate how much I loved this book. Originally published in 1996, this book felt better in execution than nearly any book I’ve tried to read published in 2024. But also I struggled to find examples of even similar attempts being written now, especially being published by traditional publishers. So I looked at the history and precedents of the plots and characters that I did see.

Where we’ve landed is a proliferation of dukes, coupled with a trend and assumption that characters need to reflect progressive views back to the reader in literal ways: participation in legislation that is above criticism (but no other aspect of Victorian politics), big speeches about the equality of men and women, or a seeming distrust of the aristocracy, only for the narrative to to double down on its value and power. The three books I’ve discussed in depth in this newsletter don’t capture all recent duke books, though many others that I’ve read could fit under these umbrellas. This is because any duke book has some investment the maintenance and valorization of the aristocracy. I don’t think this makes for inherently bad or regressive romance, but when coupled with on-the-nose depictions of progressive politics, there’s going to be tension between the characters’ speeches and the priorities of a book, ultimately undercutting much of what the book tells the reader is the stuff of romance.

What I love about historical romance is the breadth with what feels like a narrow mandate: how many different ways can a love story be told? Even within Regency romances, with a setting of 14 years and one country, I’ve found after readings literally hundreds of the books, I can still find something new to delight me. But the narrowing happening now with dukes, where we’re getting more than ever, coupled with the same structural ways of talking around endorsing the inherently conservative institution of the aristocracy, makes for books upon books that disappoint me in the same ways over and over.

recommendations

The Ruin of Evangeline Jones by Julia Bennet: a Duke book that actually works differently than any other book I’ve talked about in this project! Reformed Rakes has a whole episode on it. I’m not usually tender about spoilers in a historical romance, but I’d really recommend reading this before listening to our discussion!

Alias (2001-2006): Is Alias good? is a question that seems to be asked a lot less frequently than Is Lost good?, but Alias was my kooky JJ Abrams production of choice as a pre-teen. I’ve rewatched the first season and a half once before as adult and this time I’ve making my way through episodes I haven’t seen since they aired. Your mileage may vary on delight here, but I’m having a good time! I’ll probably rewatch The Americans next because I think my priority with all television right now is good wig work. Alias also probably features the first television couple (Sydney and Vaughn) I ever felt I would die if they didn’t kiss. Also Ron Rifkin and Victor Garber are there, having a chewing-the-scenery off. Amazing.

Bradley Cooper in Season 3 of Alias makes a wild swing on the accent in this episode.

A Matter of Class by Mary Balogh: A little novella that I read as a ducal palette cleanser. Delightful! Very short, very Balogh. I’ve not sure I’ve read a Balogh dual timeline book and it is interesting to see her pull it off.

1. See in depth discussion in Part I

2. Highly recommend The Lion and the Unicron: Disraeli vs. Gladstone by Richard Aldous, my main source for information about their politics and rivalry. The book was a great primer on 19th century electoral politics. I did find that it valorized them as Great British Men at the end, but was even in its criticism of both in the context of each other.

3. I mean, in honesty, I probably would have DNF’d it, which is what I did when I first tried to read it.

4. I’ve started poking around György Lukács’ The Historical Novel and it’s critical lineage discussing the question of class in historical novel’s forms. I think a detailed discussion of Lukács, especially when I am not particularly well-versed in this area of theory is outside the scope of the dukes. But I want to acknowledge that there is a whole ancestry of theorists and scholars discussing this exact impulse to depict every day stories in historical novels, with historical figures on the periphery.

I think this contradiction is especially important to think about considering that a point of pride for 18th and 19th century aristocratic politics in England is avoiding revolution like their continental peers by conceding to popular movements.

5. Never mind that after they have sex Poppy thinks about how much she has changed, reinforcing the idea that “having not had sex” and “having had sex” are immutable states of being.

6. The linked poem has different language that the one quoted in Lord’s book.

7. yes that one