too many dukes on the dance floor

aristocrats, part I

We’re halfway through 2024 and it’s felt like a lot of my thinking about romance this year has been a grappling with my lack of interest in most historical romance that is being published nowadays. If hot girl hobby and wallpaper romances are parts one and two of the “what exactly are we doing here?” trilogy at Restorative Romance, then this is part three and it is about dukes and it is also (at least) three parts.

I’m on the record in a few different places saying I’m weary of aristocracy in historical romance. In this genre, Regency and Victorian England are still the most popular settings for books¹ and it is most of what I read. It feels like a foregone conclusion, almost a genre mandate, that these settings will generally focus on a very small subset of these cultures: people with money and often with aristocratic titles. And my sense is that in recent years, historical romance, at least romance that retains this popular setting, is focusing more on this narrow group of people, despite promised strides in diversity in other ways. One aristocratic title is significantly more popular than any other in the genre: the duke.

Lots has been written and spoken about dukes in romance spaces² and three things usually frustrate me in this discourse: mischaracterizations of how the aristocracy actually functioned, imprecise sweeping statements of how dukes work in the novels, and the baseline assumption that the proliferation of dukes in modern historical romance is completely driven by readers’ wants. Take this Reddit thread for example. It’s playing the hits: references to British dukes ruling duchies, the idea that dukes are popular for the same reason as modern day billionaires, other titles are a dime a dozen, and conflation of royal dukes and peerage dukes. Plus, we have people in the thread wishing there were more books with anyone other than dukes.

And my final frustration is that when you ask, “why so many dukes?” the answer so often feels removed from books about dukes I do enjoy. The refrain is: There are so many dukes because dukes are so appealing because they are alpha males, powerful, at the top of the social ladder. I think something else has to be going on!

Dukes are powerful, but the aristocracy at large is powerful. Plus so many great romance novels explore the downsides of ducal power and pressure. In practice, I don’t think a duke is any more likely to be an “alpha” male than any other titled hero, or really any other type of hero. Six-foot plus, moody, dominant heroes are the baseline in romance across the board. Nothing about that is unique to a duke. This character type is also not where dukes originate in the genre. When an “alpha” (please imagine I am saying that will enough to disdain to make it clear that I think the term is a little silly) duke does appear, very quickly we’re getting peers that are responses to this type of hero, complicating it and expanding it. When question “why a duke?” is asked, the answer often comes as if each romance novel is written anew, severed from connection to genre history or history in real life. Or that all old romances are one way, and all new romances are another better way.

In the conversation about dukes, I want precision and I want expanse. By its nature as genre fiction, romance is partly a product that is marketed and sold to an audience, while also being art. Genre fiction is necessarily is in dialogue with both itself and its audience, and the historical genre is in dialogue with the literal past. Most readers who read a duke book in 2024 presumably know more about how dukes are characterized in romance fiction than they do about how dukes worked in real life in 19th century, though that real life baseline can never completely fade away. Stephanie Meyer may be able to reinvent totally the mythology and markers of a vampire, but when an author opens a book with England, 1811 and introduces me to a duke, that duke has a real like precedent, no matter how much we clamor that romance is a fantasy. By using a real life peerage title and it’s accompanying setting, the author is borrowing some historical fact to do some of their world building. The image and meaning of “duke,” built from fact and genre, populates the reader’s head and then the author has to decide where to go from there.

Those tensions are what excites me about this genre! The simultaneous communication between the historical past, the genre’s previous publications, and the current market created by readers are all existing at once. The answer, “well dukes are the most powerful,” feels like it cauterizes that conversation before it even starts. So here it is: a history of dukes (historically), a history of dukes (romantically), and a plea for a different vision of where we can go from here. As ever, let’s start with the history.

(historically)

In Great Britain, there are five titles in the peerage: duke, marquess, earl, viscount and baron. Baronet is a sixth hereditary title, but is not a member of the peerage.³ The British aristocracy in the 18th and 19th centuries was distinct in its political function from parallel Continental systems of nobility. A French Duc, for example, ruled a duchy, a medieval political territory, with varying levels of fealty to the King. Power would consolidate around the court in the reigns leading up to the French revolution. The French aristocracy would be abolished and reestablished twice, until finally they were no longer recognized after 1870 under the Third Republic. The Holy Roman Empire, over its thousand year history, had many duchies underneath the centralized emperor. Pre-unification Italian Grand Dukes and Dukes were sometimes the sovereigns themselves of city states, though might also be royal dukes or heads of branches of royal families.

Russian nobility worked substantially differently than the English system because all children of a nobleman would inherit the title, thus producing a whole ecosystem of impoverished nobles, who also often had compulsory civil service requirements. Prince Kuragin from War and Peace is a good example of a formerly high ranking family suffering from poor estate management and divided inheritances. Though he is a Prince and his daughter is a Princess, her arranged marriage to wealthy and, until very recently, illegitimate, Count Pierre Bezukhov is seen as an advantageous match by the father. And Pierre is able to inherit the title “Count” by his father’s dying wishes, despite being born out of wedlock!

But in England (and later in Great Britain), dukes never really had duchies, with the exception of the royal duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, which were titles held by royals anyways. Further emphasizing the distance between an aristocrat and specific land governance is how often the nomenclature was removed from reality of landholdings. The title’s toponym may be derived from a physical location, though it is not necessarily even an area associated with the family’s estate. In France, of course the Duke of Anjou ruled the county Anjou that had been elevated to a duchy. The Grand Duke of Tuscany ruled the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.

In contrast, the Duke of Devonshire had so little to do with his namesake place that he is named after an old name of a county he didn’t own land in. The Cavendish family estates, including Chatsworth House which played the outside of Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice (2005), are in Derbyshire, though the title is named after the county contemporarily called Devon, over two hundred miles away.⁴ In fact, sometimes the place name came before the title. When General Arthur Wellesley was still in Portugal in the Peninsular War, he was offered a peerage title, so his brother, Richard, Earl of Morington, found an unoccupied manor house for his younger brother in Wellington, chosen because of the similarity to the family name.⁵ Wellesley would later be elevated to Duke and given another more stately house by the crown to be his seat, much closer to London than the sleepy Somerset hamlet.

So a non-royal English Duke does not rule any political unit of land, though certain honors and privileges, like jurisdiction over how small misdemeanors are handled or the ability to toll or tax the land might look like pseudo-government functions. But the literal political power of the title finds its origin from the process of medieval Kings summoning landowners to the parliament first based on their role as feudal barons to the king. This group formed the eventual House of Lords. Originally seen as an annoyance, with having to get all the way to the court to give the king advice, these requests, or writs, by the King became hereditary honors—titles that ran parallel to, but independent from, property inheritance from father to son.⁶ The title was not attached to the land itself, but was a separate inheritance. As feudalism as a system of government waned, the peerage structure calcified.

Many of the individual titles were created for the first time in the 1300s and 1400s, leading up to the War of the Roses (1455-1487), when Parliamentary participation would be very important for a nobleman. The OED places the first use of the word “peerage” to refer to these five titles as a group in 1454. The War of the Roses would also kill off many of these peers, reducing their number greatly. Another peerage creation boom would happen between 1775 and 1830 (prime romance novel setting) when 209 new peerages were created, primarily driven by prime ministers using this power, via the sovereign, to pack the House of Lords to obtain a majority.⁷

When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries (1536-1541), ecclesiastical lords like abbots lost their place in the House of Lords. Previously, they had made up the majority of participants in this house. So when the clerics lost their power, the peerage’s influence was consolidated in a legislative body. Access to this branch is what gave a peer literal political power. But social and economic power came from the granting of privileges exclusive to the peerage, though over time, many of these privileges expanded to the baronetcy and the landed gentry, and some eventually expanded as universal rights to non-landowning commoners (like freedom from imprisonment for debts which ended in 1869).

According to M.L. Bush in his book The English Aristocracy: A Comparative Synthesis, a peer has two categories of privileges, but neither of these are truly limited to nobility.⁸ Seigneurial rights refers to rights that expand the landlord-tenant relationship beyond just the paying of rent. At different times this included the ability to excise taxes or tolls on the land and control over how the land is used economically. Landowners of any class could potentially have access to these rights at different points. England has a large landowning class that did not have peerage titles, the landed gentry. “Noble rights” could come from a noble title, but also could be extended through m an appointment to justices of the peace or sheriffs, who would likely be commoners. These privileges included freedom from arrest of civil cases, including cases of debt, juries of their peers (so other aristocrats), and tax codes that favored, though did not totally exempt, them. Other more amorphous advantages included things like access to the sovereign, the right to graduate from university in three years instead of four, and hunting game restrictions that heavily favored landowners.

Bush argues that the major difference between the nobility and the commoner who had noble rights was how those rights were acquired and held: a noble person obtained it from birth and the rights were descendible, able to be passed on. And continual granting of noble-like and noble-lite rights to the landed gentry and the possible elevation of a wealthy landowner to titled status, according to Bush, helped stave off some of the revolutionary fervor that led to the end of many Continental systems of aristocracy, where the aristocracy was a much more closed system.⁹

British ducal inheritance importantly followed rules of primogeniture, so generally an inheritance of a title would come along with an entire estate to the eldest son. If the peer had no sons, a brother or a nephew through a brother could inherit, as long someone could trace provable male lineage to the title. But titles went extinct all the time. So it was much more likely that a title would become dormant through death of the holder when he lacked an heir rather than being cash poor, especially considering the number of privileges that supported extension of credit to peers and the availability of wealthy heiresses to straighten out finances. Out of the 14 dukes that existed in 1483, four were extant in 1485, everyone else having died without an heir (frequently from War of the Roses politics conflict), forfeited their title through treason, or merged with the crown during various usurpations.¹⁰

The result was not necessarily a set of impoverished aristocrats, but an self-populating group of bourgeois, not-quite aristocrats, whose female members could marry into the aristocracy and whose male members could serve in the House of Commons, under the patronage of a Lord, with hopes of possible ennoblement themselves, or at least proximity to that status.

The aristocracy and the landed gentry were built to thwart revolution, to be insular and self-feeding, and some ways this succeeded in that Britain still has a literal political aristocracy, unlike many of its European peers, though reform has changed substantially how the House of Lords works. Still, that reform came without a revolution. The aristocracy produces second sons who become the gentry when primogeniture denies them a hereditary title and the landed gentry provides a bourgeoisie, hungry for distinction from the commoner and kinship with the aristocracy, with the possibility of future ennoblement, or at least some of the rights of an aristocrat through proximity and landownership.

All of what I’ve said above applies to dukes and other peers alike. But dukes are the ranking the highest in order of precedence, which from everything I’ve read, mostly comes down to appearances in social gatherings, though these social gatherings often had political and financial stakes involved. This feels like a British class thing that I’m just never going to grasp fully the distinctions about. But it is meaningful, supposedly, that dukes are always “Duke of [place]” and never Lord [Toponym], according to Brian Masters in The Dukes: The Origins, Ennoblement and History of 26 Families. Precedence within the dukes is determined both by the type of duke someone is (Duke of England, of Scotland, of Great Britain, of Ireland or of the United Kingdom, in that order) and what year the title was created. Precedence controlled the order of everything where people could be ordered, from seating arrangements to entering or exiting a room, though Masters suggests the power of this system was primarily enforced by bored duchesses needing something to worry about in their lives of leisure.

In history, this feels like the ennoblement of small differences. A peer is more powerful than a commoner because of the privileges afforded to him by statute and custom that allow to accrue him both political and financial power; a non-specific duke is more powerful than other peers because a marquess, an earl and a viscount may treat him so. But any of these peers could be wealthier or a better, more connected politician than any specific duke, even if it still means he has a better seat at the dinner service than they do.

(numerically)

So just how many dukes are there in historical romance?

I knew it felt like a lot. I knew it felt like there were more now than even when I started reading romance in 2021. But I wanted concrete numbers to confirm or contradict this assumption. It is extremely hard, if not impossible to get concrete sales numbers of books as a layperson, though Sarah MacLean on a recent episode of Fated Mates stated her books with dukes sell twice as well as books without dukes in them. But because I don’t have access to data to reflect that across the whole genre for the past four decades, I focused on volume of publication, rather than sales numbers, as indicative of the history of the trend. I will just say, as one reader, I’ve never consciously read a book specifically for one title over another, outside of research for this newsletter. I’m much more likely to think “do I want to read a book with the aristocracy or not today?” than seek a specific peerage title.

Using FictionDB’s book search, I’ve identified over 2100 Regency and Victorian romances that include the word “duke” in either their title or their marketing summary, published from 1983-2023. The chart below shows the dukes¹¹ over time, compared to all Regency and Victorian books published at the same time.¹²

We can see the explosion of titles that happened in the genre in the mid 2010s, and the accompanying peak in the number of duke books. To better see the relationship between these two sets of data, here’s a line graph of the ratio over time.

Starting in 2009, and every year since, more duke books have been published than were dukes at any given point in history (20-30, depending on the year). In the 2020s, we have achieved that level of dukes per month. Some of this increase has happened because just more historical romance novels being published. But the ratio is on an upward trajectory, reaching a peak just last year, with over a fourth of the books tagged as having a Regency or Victorian setting being marketed in some way with a duke. And this is just dukes! Expanding to the other aristocratic titles would only increase the ratio.¹³

But why? People have been trying to answer this since the first peak and continual climb started. The arguments are often the same, and disregard concrete examples.

In an article in USA Today from 2015, linking the boom of billionaires and dukes, historical authors Joanna Shupe, Julia Quinn,¹⁴ Grace Burrowes, and Tessa Dare all give their assessment of the appeal of dukes. This is reflective of most takes that I’ve seen, attempting to explain this phenomenon. All four of them cite power, wealth, and status inherent in the title. I think this is a flattening of what is actually happening in many duke books, including some written by these authors! A first time reader of the genre might pick up a Regency romance expecting a duke as an almost omnipotent figure, but for as much dukes that I have read that come in the typical, romance novel hero specs, there’s a duke that complicates that assumption. And, as we’ll get to next week, this is simply not the ancestry of this character in the genre.

The two most illuminating statements in the article come from Burrowes and Dare. Burrowes suggests that the romance novel reader (generally assumed to be a woman) actually identifies with the duke: “I think many of us live lives of constant responsibility and not enough rest, and yet we know we're supposed to be happy and grateful ... even if we're also really lonely, bored or overwhelmed. The duke knows how we feel, and if he — with his pride, romantic backwardness and demanding schedule — can find love and happiness, then there's hope for us all.”

This identification with the duke by the female reader recalls Laura Kinsale’s chapter in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women titled “The Androgynous Reader: Point of View in the Romance.” This 1992 volume is a collection of essays edited by Jayne Anne Krentz and written by romance novelists that “explode myths and biases that haunt both the writers and readers of romances.” It is a hallmark of the study of romance talking about itself. In her essay, Kinsale argues that the assumed female readers will often align herself more closely with the male lead of a heterosexual romance, which is the opposite of how many people talk about romance, then and now.¹⁵

In the reading of a romance, the conflict and resolution of a romantic relationship are entirely within the reader and have nothing directly to do with the reader's husband, boyfriend, male boss, or male co-workers, except as they may interfere with the reading process itself. If, as [Jayne Anne] Krentz suggests, the romantic male lead always represents both hero and villain, then the reader must be experiencing those aspects of herself. If the hero is being gentled and tamed, it is a taming and gentling of passions within the female reader, not within any real-life male. Experienced and mentally healthy fiction readers always know where the fable ends and actuality begins. Reading a romance is not practice for the real thing.

Kinsale’s chapter does rely on some clunky metaphors that comes across as gender essentialist and I do wonder how she, or another author, would write this piece now. But she is arguing that since romance is about integration and union, the things that need to be aligned in a successful romance are the things that separated at the beginning. And heroes, especially dukes who find their origin in that villainy she cites, hold the most potential for transformation. It does make sense to me that Burrowes would link a modern female reader with a duke more than a Regency woman, who is a romance novel might be seen as having a life of leisure or fewer worries similar to that of a working woman.¹⁶

I wish this idea got explored more in the duke discourse, that readers of any gender might read a duke’s power and status from a position of identification for themselves. This line of thinking makes more sense than a blanket statement that romantic and sexual attraction to the title is the appeal because how often we see the opposite, or at least a substantial complication of this assumption, in the romantic narratives.

Tessa Dare’s statement is also illuminating. I think Dare is saying the quiet part out loud when it comes one reason why dukes get written. She says “the appeal is pragmatic. A lot of real-life relationship conflict is rooted in money and finances, and knowing money is no object lets us enjoy a romantic fantasy without worrying how the happy couple will make the mortgage payment.” Dare speaks of a reader being able to enjoy with the romantic better if there is no mortgage payment question looming for the couple.

I place the onus slightly differently. I agree that a ducal hero is pragmatic, in that it may mean less work for the author to think through consequences of plots and how that might affect the finances of a couple, who we need to believe has a roof over their head at the end of the book. One of the appeals of historical romance to me is that relationships must be reconciled on vectors beyond the romantic; we have to know how they will work socially and financially. Oodles of money in the coffers can help undo many a third act break up or smooth over the social hiccups of a morganatic marriage.

This is certainly not to say that an infinitely wealthy duke always makes for a worse book. I just disagree with Dare that money being present means that authors don’t have to worry about it or that it wouldn’t create conflict to be mined for plot and passion. I also think that many authors do write dukes just this way, creating artificially low stakes and cutting off potential story telling. So many of the ducal books that I get frustrated reading solve the introduced problems with the duke’s deep pockets that have been available since the beginning of the book.

The article also connects the popularity dukes with a boom of billionaire romances. I’ve seen this sentiment in a few different places, again as sort of received wisdom. Dukes are the billionaires of historical romance. Contemporary romance is so not my bag, but the repeated connection between billionaire heroes and ducal heroes as parallels feels contrived to me and like a cop out. Firstly, as reported by friends who have read billionaire romances, one of the frequent tenets of the character is they are often self-made. Historical romance does have business men who are self-made and use that to distinguish themselves from the aristocracy (I think Kleypas wrote more of these than dukes! hello, McKenna, Derek Craven, and actual slumlord Tom Severin). Also, billionaires may run amok in contemporary romance, but they really seem to be their own subgenre. Some years, Dukes take up over a quarter of all the historical romances set during the two most popular settings. I could easily read and participate in romance community around contemporary romances and never read a billionaire. Dukes are harder to avoid in historical.

Additionally, both character types’ popularity gets connected to the global financial crisis in 2008.¹⁷ The idea is that as economics got worse, readers wanted to lean more into the fantasy of a hero whose life is unaffected. 2009 is when I see the ratio between dukes and all historical romance having a first peak, but the upward trajectory continues after that, for another fifteen years. And the economic downturn connection to growth in popularity for dukes feels spurious if billionaire romances are needed to bolster that claim because the volume of billionaires seems like it can be linked pretty directly with one phenom that actually comes later than the financial crisis.

I did a similar search for “billionaire” on FictionDB as I did for dukes and the earliest I could find were two published in 1990: Full Steam by Cassie Miles and Legends by Deborah Smith. The numbers consistently grow for the new two decades. 82 billionaire romances were published in 2008, 89 in 2009, 6o in 2010, 61 in 2011, 139 in 2012, 324 in 2013 and over 500 in 2014. The number more than doubles between 2011 and 2012 and again between 2012 and 2013. If you look at the first chart I included, this does line up with a boom in romance publishing in general—historical romance is going up at the same time. But I think this could also be directly connected to the release of Fifty Shades of Grey, first as an independently viral sensation in 2011, and then a traditionally published best seller in 2012.

Perhaps we could connect the popularity of that book to the global financial crisis, with EL James beginning her work on the series in 2009, but then we’re getting close to a domino/butterfly effect, especially when we extend it to dukes. The leap happening for billionaire romances immediately after the publication of Fifty Shades feels an important precipitating factor to include in that subgenre’s history if this cause and effect is going to be explored. But I usually don’t see it mentioned!

this is not fruitful historiography to me

Either way, dukes do not have this flash in the pan origin and expansion. Even if we accept that they function the same way in the books as billionaires (they don’t, again more on this in the next part), they certainly have a different genre fiction history. I want to trace some dukes from the last half century of historical romance and spell out some places where the image of a duke, as it stands today, came from. And how once you get into the actual books, the image of a duke is much more complicated than how it is often discussed when we’re asking the question: “why so many dukes?” I think in order to understand how a duke works in the genre, we have to look how a duke works in individual books, while considering those books’ places in the genre’s history. No books in a vacuum, but also no sweeping statements without evidence.

Next week, we’ll look at the ducal family tree, backward and forwards, of the mother of all Regency dukes: Clayton Westmoreland, Duke of Claymore from Whitney, My Love.

recommendations

Sharpe: I grew up watching Horatio Hornblower and it is one of my comfort watches and probably a root of this Napoleonic thing I have. I did not realize until recently that Sean Bean was in landlubber Horatio Hornblower! Sharpe is based on the historical fiction novels by Bernard Cornwell about Sergeant Sharpe during the Peninsular War. They’re on BritBox!

Elaine Scarry’s Art of Nonfiction in The Paris Review: I’ve been working my way through this quarter’s Review and had not yet gotten to Scarry’s interview, but a friend sent it my way when the Review’s pull quote on Twitter was Scarry talking about how she always cries when she reads aloud a certain passage of Bleak House. I’ve not read Scarry’s work. She writes really widely and seems to have a singular mind, even if a little self-aggrandizing. The interview is behind a paywall, but what I’m really recommending is just little bit that comes before the Bleak House anecdote:

I’m obsessed with a million details in this image and just think it is one of the most romantic things I’ve read all year. It’s romantic that my friend thought of me when someone is crying over Bleak House and it’s romantic to be read aloud to and it’s romantic to read War and Peace, walk away and only be able to think of the moonlight and the snow on the Rostovs’ faces.

1. Confirmed by a search of FictionDB for books published so far in 2024 labeled as “historical romance.” Regency and Victorian far and above still the most popular settings!

2. Some sample of the talk about dukes: Fated Mates (2024), Reddit thread (2021), Regency Reader overview of Regency Dukes (2019), Lorraine Heath in NPR (2014)

3. Think like a hereditary knighthood. Baronets, like peerage titles, can be inherited, while most knighthoods are only life titles for one person. And baronets are above most knights in order of precedence.

4. Brian Masters, The Dukes: The Origins, Ennoblement and History of 26 Families (1988).

5. History of Wellington, UK

6. Thus the British need for a system of entailing property!

7. Michael W. McCahill, “Peerage Creations and the Changing Character of the British Nobility, 1750-1830.” The English Historical Review, vol. 96, no. 379, 1981, pp. 259–84. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/568290. Accessed 2 July 2024.

8. Bush argues that the landed gentry were effectively members of the aristocracy, so I’m going to try and precise with how I use my language here. I buy his argument, especially during pre-Reform House of Commons, where the lower house of parliament was made up of mostly landed gentry who were related to or dependents of peers who could serve in the House of Lords.

9. “The survival of the monarchy and its readiness to grant honours completed both the incapacity of the people to mount a revolution, which, in the continental manner, could single out juridicial privilege at the villain of the piece, and the inability of the government to order the destruction of the clearly anachronistic House of Lords.”

10. This chart on Wikipedia is the easiest place to see just how often ducal titles go extinct! You can also see how often titles are recreated, like Cambridge for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The current iteration as a royal dukedom is the fifth time that title has been used.

11. Sometimes created false positives (a hero might be the brother of a duke, or the second son of a duke, or a heroine might herself be a the daughter of a duke and this mentioned on the back of the book) or false negatives (Flowers from the Storm does not reference Jervaulx’s title in the description on FictionDB, so did not appear in my search, despite being a stellar Duke book). I controlled for titles series that jumped out to me as clearly not actually featuring duke heroes, so I think, if anything, I am underreporting the number of dukes because I did not manually any titles back into the data set.

12. I double checked that extreme dip in 2018-2019, but it is the data available on FictionDB. I suspect it might be a coding/metadata error in how they are describing books for those two years. But the most important thing is the ratio between the two data sets, and I think if there were an error, it would affect both data sets in the same way—so hopefully not creating an error in the ratio.

13. Further, this is just identifying books that use duke in the plot summary blurb, not including romances that structured to be immediately adjacent and very much in the same world as a duke: a second son who doesn’t inherit his own title or a best friend who is an industrialist. Those books may not involve ducal heroes, but they are not exactly exciting new strides in class diversity in the genre.

14. Not to pick on Julia Quinn, but she makes two historical flubs here. She mentioned that Queen Elizabeth offered a dukedom to Winston Churchill in 1955, and that he turned it down because it would have precluded him from sitting in the House of Lords. This is not true. It would have be precluded him from sitting in the House of Commons, which was the house he was a part, given that he was Prime Minister. But he was retiring when offered the dukedom—he was less concerned with his preclusion, but of his son’s. Randolph Churchill had been raised to be his father’s political protege, which famously caused strife between the two, because Randolph regularly lost elections. Also annoyed with USA Today for not fact checking this!

15. It is interesting to me how Kinsale cites authors talking about reader identification with the heroine, when structurally, Kinsale sees so many books inviting the opposite relationship. This is what I see happening with the duke discourse! Repeated nuggets of sweeping truth that have no connection to an actual genre history of function

16. I don’t agree with this conservative, retvrn style of nostalgia of past womanhood, which is adjacent to Burrowes point, but I think this unexamined wistful look backwards is a part of a lot of historical romance discourse.

17. Commentors in the same Reddit thread I linked to earlier suggest the boom after after the global financial crisis from 2007-2008 and I’ve seen this sentiment echoed on social media, matter-of-factly.