Vulgar History Podcast
The Regency Era and Consent
December 3, 2025
Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and we are in our Regency Era. This season, we’re talking all about what was going on in Britain in the early 1800s, AKA the Regency era, AKA when you picture Bridgerton or Jane Austen movies, that time period. Empire waistline dresses, you know, people dancing around to remix this with Billie Eilish and that sort of thing.
It’s an era that in this first part of the season, I really wanted to jump in and explain the reality of it before we really get going into looking at some of the stories of this time, because it is a time and a place that a lot of people know of from things like Bridgerton and from Jane Austen novels, and just novels of that time. It’s the same as if people read novels of this time, if someone read Sally Rooney or something and thought, Well, that’s exactly what life was like, where it’s like, yeah, that is a world that is recognizable to us, but that’s not the daily lived experience of most people. Or even if you read like Danielle Steel or James Patterson. Anyway, there’s something about the Regency era where, myself included, just you like to imagine going to the ball and dancing around and how everybody has all this etiquette and manners, and everything’s kind of nice and polite. And it was not like that. No era in history has ever actually been like that, so I was really excited to come across this book.
Today, we’re talking with author Zoë McGee, who wrote a new book that’s called Courting Disaster: Reading Between the Lines of the Regency Novel. The tagline on the cover of the book, I think, really succinctly explains what her book is about, because every novel about marriage is a novel about consent. And what she’s looking at in this book are issues of sexual consent, sexual assault in the Regency era, as portrayed in fictional novels of the time.
It was such a fascinating book. I was really excited when Zoë agreed to come be on the podcast to talk about it, because I think it really helps dissect this time period, kind of our understanding of how we imagine it was, what it was really like, and how much you can really learn about a time period from what goes unsaid sometimes in Jane Austen novels and other novels of the time. I think it’s also really interesting because we have talked about writers from this era, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen herself, there’s going to be other authors coming up. So, this was a time where more women were writing, which is really interesting to see how the stories are portrayed through the point of view of women and their lived experience.
Anyway, it’s such a fascinating conversation, and I hope you’ll enjoy hearing from Zoë McGee about her book, Courting Disaster.
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Ann: So, I’m joined today by Zoë McGee, who is the author of the new book, Courting Disaster: Reading Between the Lines of the Regency Novel. Welcome, Zoë.
Zoë: Hi! Nice to meet you.
Ann: I’m so excited to talk to you about this research and for everybody to hear about what you’re talking about in your book. Can you explain, however you explain this to people usually? What’s your book about?
Zoë: So, the sort of elevator pitch version is like, what does the Me Too movement have to do with Jane Austen? And then also, what storytelling has to do with our consent activism? How have things actually changed from the past? How are they much closer to the past than we might like them to be? And how do we still use storytelling as, like, a key tool in talking about consent?
Ann: And I think what’s really… Well, I read your book, and I found it all so fascinating. Part of what was interesting to me as well was you’re talking about several books that I, personally, have heard of, but I haven’t read. So, you’re kind of explaining— I mean, there’s a lot of spoilers in your book…
Zoë: [laughs] There are a lot of spoilers.
Ann: For people who don’t want to be spoiled for books from, like, 300 years ago. But just the way that you explain the plot lines and what’s happening in them, I’m just like, “Oh my gosh! What happens next?” But also, the way that now, as well as then, you can learn things about a society, and what a culture is like by looking at the fiction that they read, and how they tell these stories. You know, facts that you’re going to find… Maybe you won’t find this in, like, a list of court cases, maybe you’re not going to find out what people were really up to. But in a novel, you can see there’s a reason why they wrote this story, and there’s a reason why people act the way that they do in this book, and it can speak to what society was maybe like. That’s what I find really interesting in terms of your work.
What I’m trying to do this season, talking about the Regency era, and people think of it as this time where everybody was so well behaved, and everybody… You know, there’s such etiquette, and there are all these rules, and everybody obeyed them all the time. But that just wasn’t the case, and you look at so many examples in your book about how that wasn’t the case.
Actually, can we start by just talking about the book Pamela, because I feel like that’s kind of the… You say in your book, it’s the first modern novel or something like that? Or it’s an early…
Zoë: It’s an early novel. It’s by Samuel Richardson, and it was incredibly, incredibly popular at the time. It’s probably, like, my least favourite novel that I read from that time period, just because of the plot. But what it does is it takes this story of a young, virtuous girl who goes off to work as a servant in this master’s house, and he starts sort of pursuing her sexually. She is very virtuous, so she’s not interested, and he kind of gets increasingly determined that he is going to have sex with her, and he ends up kind of enlisting the help of this madam, his housekeeper, to kind of help him restrain Pamela and have his way with her. And then, she’s so good that he can’t go through with it, and her morality saves her. Subsequently, he then decides, “Oh, actually, I should probably try and marry her instead,” which is just… That’s why I don’t get on with it so well, because it’s it doesn’t feel like a happy ending, I think, to our sensibilities.
It’s a novel told through letters, so it’s one of these epistolary novels. And it gets really quite weird because Pamela is writing these letters and she’s sending them out, but she’s also having to hide them. So, she kind of tucks them all into her bodice, and she keeps them very close to her skin because you didn’t have a lot of private, secure space in the 18th century. But then, her employer finds them, and he’s holding them and, like, thinking about how they’ve been warmed by her skin. So, that’s creepy in its own way. But then you’re holding the book that is, in theory, the letters, so there’s this kind of weird chain of body contact through the pages.
But that novel, it kind of bridges, for me, between the novels that we tend to think of as being active plots and stories and characters, and these sort of conduct manuals that the 18th century had, which were these guides on how to behave. You might give it to your young female relative, and she could read it and learn important lessons about how she was supposed to be dutiful and how she was supposed to be obedient. And so, Richardson started writing Pamela, and the kind of aim, at least in theory, was a guide on how to write good letters. So, you would read Pamela, and you’d learn how to write letters well because letter writing was a huge part of how people communicated and how you got news and entertainment and things like that, so you wanted to be able to write a good letter.
But it kind of morphed along the way into this story that ended up sort of… I guess, it’s hard to say about what he intends for it to be. But Pamela, as a character, is incredibly moral and kind of unrealistically so. She’s this paragon of behaviour, and it is her goodness that saves her. And she’s, in theory, rewarded with what she deserves by then getting to marry this wealthy man, even though he is not a great person. It’s something that the time period also didn’t necessarily take seriously. So, while the book was incredibly popular, it also had a huge number of parodies. So, there were books coming out called like Shamela, and things like that, that are all about this sort of conniving, devious, very knowing girl, like, out to snare her master and use her wiles to kind of trap him into marriage. So, it wasn’t something that the 18th century necessarily went, “Oh, yes. This is a totally plausible thing,” but it sets up Richardson’s kind of next, his big, his huge novel, Clarissa, which is sort of a real cornerstone for talking about consent and novels in the 18th century.
Ann: Well, and I do want to talk about Clarissa, absolutely. Not just, as you said, his big novel, but you describe it in your book, it’s a doorstopper of a magnum opus. But in terms of Pamela and the fact that it was really popular, I found that really interesting.
I did an episode a bit ago with Alexandra Vasti talking about, like, Regency era sex education, and how did young women learn about sexuality, the threat that sex can pose from certain men? A lot of it was from these novels. So, Pamela, the fact that it was popular, I find that interesting in the context of, I think, for people who don’t research the Regency era, but people who watched season one of Bridgerton will remember that the character of Daphne didn’t know what sex was. And so, people feel like, “Wow, can you believe that back then people didn’t even know what sex was?” And it’s like, well, maybe some people didn’t, but anyone who read a novel would have, and a lot of people read these novels.
So, do you know what cross-section of society would have read these novels? Was it mostly wealthier people? Or I guess that’s who would have the time to read a novel, really?
Zoë: Yeah, and would have the education to be kind of more literate. Literacy rates weren’t universal in the 18th century as well. I think you had a lot of, like, the nobility reading it, you’d have a lot of the genteel kind of more middle, upper middle section reading it. So, you know, people would put quotes on their fans and then be, like, wafting them across the ballroom. But books are expensive in this time period, so you do have to be able to either afford them, or afford to, like, be joined to a circulating library or something like that.
Ann: I love the idea… I’m just picturing the quotes written on fans. That’s so much like now; people get a sweatshirt or something, you know? Or they just have their, like, phone case has a quote from their favourite book. People have always read a book and wanted to, to let everybody know “I’ve read this book and I like it, and everybody needs to know that.” That just reminds me of today a little bit.
Zoë: And also the same kind of posturing of like, “Maybe I haven’t read this book, maybe I have. But if I’m carrying it around the park, it’ll look like I’m really intellectual and I’m in with the zeitgeist and I know what’s going on.” That kind of popularity feeds on itself as well.
Ann: That’s true. And so, Pamela was the it book of that point. But then, Clarissa, you were saying is, you know… I’ve read your book, so I know what happens in Clarissa. It’s quite an ongoing saga; it’s quite a lengthy series of perils of Clarissa, that she goes through.
So, set the scene. So, Pamela is popular, and then Clarissa comes out, and that’s even more popular, clearly.
Zoë: Clarissa is about 33 percent longer than War and Peace. It was like the longest novel ever published in the English language. It’s absolutely huge. So, she does have a lot of things to go through in that many pages. I think we were talking about, like, what lessons you might learn from the novels, and I think what we see is that Pamela, as a book, kind of tells you that if you’re really good, you’ll be fine. And I think Clarissa is really interested in this question or this issue, that you can be really good and not be fine, and also that you can be slightly less than perfect and still deserve to be fine.
So, Clarissa is like Pamela; she’s very virtuous. She’s got a bit more spirit than Pamela in some ways. She’s kind of caught in this impossible situation where she’s got a family who don’t appreciate her and are trying to marry her off, and a suitor who she doesn’t want to marry, but is starting to seem like the better option than her family. Her family have decided she needs to do exactly what they’re telling her, and they’re locking her up, and they won’t let her out, and they won’t let her do anything. She ends up meeting Lovelace, who is the villain of the book. She ends up meeting him at night, and she knows she shouldn’t really be doing this, but she’s also kind of got very few options. So, she takes this meeting with him in the garden, and then he stages things to make it look like they’ve been discovered. She’s not planning on running away with him or anything, but when the noise starts, and she starts thinking they’re being chased, she goes with him because at that point, if she’s found with him, it’s going to be really bad for her. So, she starts running away, and he starts, like, dragging her along with him and dragging her into his carriage, and she is screaming like, “No, no, no!” But it’s still kind of, she can’t help but be dragged into this carriage.
From there, he takes her away, and she is basically imprisoned for most of the book. So, Lovelace has this bet, idea, like, life thesis that all virtue is corruptible, and so, what he is trying to do is take someone like Clarissa, who is extremely virtuous and good, and show that she can be corrupted. He’s kind of got her in his power, and over the course of the book, it’s sort of like, when is he going to sleep with her? When is the, sort of, sexual deviancy going to corrupt her?
It’s an interesting one because you do have a few times where he’s sort of in proximity to her, and thinks about raping her, and decides not to at that point. And that’s quite interesting, like, having just talked about Pamela and her goodness kind of putting off her employer, because Richardson is really clear in Clarissa that although Clarissa is trying to say all the right things to, kind of, make Lovelace back off, Lovelace is making the decision of whether he attacks her or not. And at that point, he decides he’s not going to, but it’s very explicit in the text that she can’t say magic words that will make this okay. Which I think is such a powerful thing when we do think about novels as an educative tool, it’s something we don’t like to think about, that in a scenario where you’re being attacked, the only person who can make the decision about what’s going to happen is your attacker. It would be much nicer if there was something you could say or do that would keep you safe, but there isn’t.
What Richardson goes on to do with Clarissa is she does end up being raped by Lovelace, but she is drugged unconscious at the time. This is really interesting from a legal perspective because in 18th-century law, rape required the utmost resistance. So, it wasn’t enough to prove that you had resisted to show that you weren’t consenting. You had to prove that you had resisted enough, which made the burden of proof really difficult in a court of law. There were all sorts of ways people would like to pick holes in victims’ arguments. But you had to prove resistance for it to count as rape. And with Clarissa being unconscious, there is no way you can say that she’s resisted because she’s drugged; she’s out cold. So, you can’t say that she has technically performed resistance correctly, but also, it’s very clear that she hasn’t consented, and she has been raped.
So, Richardson is kind of highlighting here that there’s a real flaw in the legal system and in the way that that resistance requirement is problematic. I think that’s just such an interesting stance for a book to take, and a book by a male author as well, because a lot of the people I was looking at in this time period are women. And actually, Richardson was very popular and had a lot of fans who then wrote in at the end of the book and said to him, Actually, you need to change it. You need to make her marry Lovelace. You need to reform him at the end so that they can end up together. Because he’s one of these, like, rake characters. He’s quite dashing and charming, apart from the fact that he’s an absolutely terrible person.
So, what Richardson does is he kind of goes back, and he adds to the book, and he adds these footnotes, and he adds these notes. He does this a few times, trying to say like, “This is not the person you should want your heroine to be marrying.” And the people writing to him, you know, were women too. He had a whole mixture of readers, but he was really clear that you weren’t supposed to make all of this kind of go away and be unproblematic. Like, it was a problem; it was not the behaviour you wanted your heroine to end up, like, marrying the man for.
What he talks about to one of his readers he writes back to, her name is Lady Bradshaigh, he says he wanted his heroine to be imperfect, but not in intention. So, Clarissa doesn’t do everything right. She does take this meeting with Lovelace in the garden at night, which, you know, technically she probably shouldn’t have done. But what he’s really clear about is like, just because she’s done something that could be a mistake, doesn’t mean she deserves the rest of this treatment. This isn’t a story of her, like, falling, and it’s not a warning tale of how not to be this fallen woman. It’s very much saying like, even if you do something slightly wrong, you can still be harmed, and she’s still really good, and she’s still really virtuous. Actually, you know, the things that someone does to you can’t take that away from you as a person.
It’s something that Lovelace finds really confusing because he attacks Clarissa and then he’s expecting her to be changed afterwards, he’s expecting her to be, like, full of vice and corrupt now that she’s had this sexual experience, and she’s not. She’s still her. So, then he’s like, “Oh, maybe I need her to be conscious so that maybe she can be aware while this change is happening,” because he’s a terrible, he’s a terrible person. But you kind of get this real sense from Richardson that Clarissa’s value as a sort of an intrinsic moral being isn’t diminished by this attack on her, which is really important in a time where a lot of… I talk about this in a later bit of the book about honour and virtue, but a lot of women’s value was kind of commodified by their virginity. The fact that she’s shown to be still, like, a whole person in that regard is really powerful.
Ann: I do want to talk about that. Towards the end of your book, you’re talking about legal cases and legal records and things like that. That’s where I think what you’ve been talking about and what you do in the book is so powerful to show, like, here’s what’s happening in these novels and here’s the sorts of sexual assault cases that ended up making it to court. The same as today; there’s so many cases of sexual assault that never make it that far, people don’t report it, or they’re not believed, or whatever. So, it’s interesting.
If you could talk about what you found from the sorts of people who ended up going to court, being charged, versus the sorts of people in the novels. The people in the novels are mostly high-class, rich men, and the people going to court are not that. So, it’s interesting to show that the novels might be portraying a truth about society that we’re not going to get from the court records because of who ends up having the means to actually charge somebody.
Zoë: Yeah. I mean, it sounds terrible to say “It was so interesting” because, you know, it was quite difficult reading, and it hits very differently when you are so aware that it’s people’s lives. But it was really interesting seeing that the novels do generally all have this focus on, like, a higher class bracket. And also on… So like, we just talked about how Clarissa has this unconsciousness that doesn’t sit well with the legal system. When they have issues around consent, it’s often in gray areas that wouldn’t necessarily play amazingly well in court. I feel like the novels are often talking about where people’s sensibilities were, which are always further ahead than the legal system. The legal system needs, kind of, minds to change, and then legislative change to come in, so it is always slower. But when you actually look at the courts, there were very few cases actually being brought.
So, I took a 50-year window at the Old Bailey (which is one of the big, big courts in London), and they had 24 guilty verdicts for rape in that 50-year window, which is just kind of unrealistically low. They also only had under 200 cases actually being brought in the first place. So, it’s a very small number of cases that actually make it to court. Part of that is people need to have enough money to be able to go to trial, which rules out, like, the bottom end of the social scale, but they also need to not be so wealthy or genteel that their reputation is more valuable. So, you won’t necessarily go to court as a lady to say, you know, you’ve been attacked sexually, because that’s going to make your value to your family and your reputation be much less. It would be more common that you would either hide it and not talk about it, and hope that either nobody knew, or everyone would pretend not to know, or you would marry quickly either to the person involved, so then it just sort of cancels out a little bit, sort of socially, because the social issue is the sex before marriage, not quite as much the fact that you’ve been attacked. So yeah, you’d kind of be married off either to the person who’s attacked you or to someone else who you can quickly get into a marriage with.
So, you don’t have a lot of the nobility there, and you also don’t have a lot of married women. I think I found one case in this period where the victim was married. There was a few where you don’t get huge amounts of information, so there might be some more than that. But with this married woman, she was also charging, like, a carriage robbery, and actually, they convicted the criminals of the robbery and then didn’t try the rest of the case. So, they didn’t actually follow through on that rape charge. But you wouldn’t really get that many married women because, as a woman who was married, you wouldn’t be able to charge your partner because you signed over consent at the time you got married. So, marital rape wasn’t a thing, legally speaking. It wasn’t criminalized in the UK until the 1990s; I think it was also the 1990s in the US, but a few years later. It’s a much later thing. So, that rules out a lot of the people who would have been kind of committing these crimes.
And then, you have the fact that women didn’t have legal existence in the courtroom. If they were married, their husbands would have to bring the case for them. So, this then has to be something that is worth the expense of taking it to court, the convincing of your husband, if that’s a factor you have to take into account, and the ordeal of actually going into this public courtroom and having all these very difficult things discussed. It’s an ordeal, whatever time period you do it in, but it’s not a gentle time.
One of the things that kind of really brought home how difficult it would be to go through that court process is that you often have to have a medical exam, and the medical exams are a lot less sophisticated than ours are now. So, to go through this kind of re-traumatization of being poked and prodded by these doctors who are looking for very specific things to count as… The way that they decide whether it looks like someone has suffered this type of violence is quite specific and quite rigid. You see cases where there will be, like, a medical dismissal. With a kind of lens of what we know now more, we would think maybe that’s an overly hasty ruling. I don’t know how graphic it’s okay to be talking about this, so I’m trying to kind of dance around things a bit.
Ann: You can be as graphic as you are in the book in this conversation.
Zoë: Okay. So, a lot of the exams to determine whether you’ve been raped or not include things like, Have you suffered a particular kind of laceration? If your body isn’t torn up enough, it’s seen as, like, that there hasn’t been sufficient harm done, or that you haven’t resisted enough. But you also get cases where they’re saying, Well, you are not a virgin woman, you shouldn’t be having these issues, you should be used to it, so this is suspicious in itself. It’s quite bleak, but you also know that they don’t have tools to be doing these investigations, so it’s all kind of manual and hands-on, which is not what you would necessarily want to go and do.
One of the things that really came up was this question of resistance and consent. And so, the cases that were more generally successful were the cases that had less to prove in terms of consent. A lot of the cases involve children, and a lot of the cases involve venereal disease, because if the victim is underage, you just have to prove that the event’s taken place, right? You don’t have to show whether they resisted or not because they’re below the age of consent. And then, if there is some kind of STI present, you can say, Well, look, they’ve got this venereal disease, they’ve clearly had sexual contact because they’ve suddenly got this STI. There were a lot of children who were victims at this time, because there was this, kind of, folk belief that you could cure STIs by having sex with someone who was innocent, so you often will have the doctors kind of explicitly ask about whether that’s true, so that they have a platform to say “This is not true. Don’t do that. Please stop doing that, it’s really bad.”
I found that a lot of the people going through the courts, a lot of the cases involve children, a lot of the cases involved STIs, and a lot of the cases were in this bracket where they were either servants, or working at a public house, so they had some income, enough to pay for a case, but not so much that their marital prospects would be a significant financial transaction, if that makes sense.
Ann: I also just want to let everybody know that the age of consent was 11 at this point.
Zoë: The age of consent is really strange at this point, because there’s three. So, if you’re a boy, it’s 14; if you’re a girl, it’s 11 or 12, depending on the day. It’s kind of a legal oddity where there were these two different bits of law, and depending on which judge you got, depended on which bit of the law they were listening to. So, there are some cases where the victim is 12 and is tried as an adult, and there are some where they’re 12 and are treated as a child. It’s very much a little bit luck of the draw as to which one you got. But it’s incredibly young.
Ann: Yeah. Just in reading your book, you’re like, “Oh, and when people were underage, this was this and that,” and then you mentioned, “Oh, and that was 11,” and I was like, “Wait. What?! That’s the age of consent?” Yikes, yeah.
Zoë: No, it was hard to read. Actually, one of the things that I noticed going through it was you kind of get— If you’re just reading a lot of these cases one after the other, there’s a certain amount that you desensitize to just kind of be able to look through them all, and the language is quite dry. But also, people are very euphemistic in the 18th century; they are in their novels anyway, we know, but they also are within courts. So, this is a space where they’re supposed to be as explicit as possible, and you still get a lot of euphemism just to describe, kind of, everything, whether it’s like, “Oh, he showed me his thing,” or like, “This is the part.” I think someone described someone as “Having a great deal of human nature about them.” You know, there’s a lot of this language, and part of that obscures how extremely violent these cases were.
These were cases that were coming to court because they felt like they had a good chance of getting a verdict, and very few of those still managed it. Particularly of the ones that did, you see quite— I mean, it’s all violent, it’s already a violent act, but you see some quite extreme elements, particularly when you think like, Oh, you need to have this laceration on your body to prove this has happened, or there’s some element…
There was a story which was a piece of testimony by these two women who gave testimony together, because they were attacked together, and so you actually have a bigger picture of that particular case, because you’ve got these two voices. They do some incredible testifying. It’s much more emotive than a lot of the cases, and they are very clear about how, although they weren’t necessarily being physically restrained, they weren’t able to leave this situation. They were taken around town, and they kept being taken to different pubs, and they couldn’t leave. They kept saying, “I wanted to go home. We wanted to go home.” It was so powerful hearing them talk about just wanting to get out, basically, but also the fact that the court let that stand. One of the lawyers kind of comes back and says, “Well, nobody was holding you down, you could have left,” and that kind of gets battered away quite quickly, and they recognize that these women were not able to get out of this situation, even though, technically, they were not being restrained. You kind of get a sense of the court recognizing things like coercion; you get little hints of it coming through these cases, which was really, really interesting. But they are incredibly violent, and that’s obscured by the language a lot of the time.
Ann: Well, and that’s where I think that people might look at this time period and say like, “Oh, things used to be better because there was less…” You could see the evidence of the fact that there were less court cases for sexual assault, meaning that there was less sexual assault, which is part of where people might think, “Oh, things were nicer then, things were kinder then, they were gentler then.” It’s like, no, people just didn’t report things, and people weren’t believed, that doesn’t mean they weren’t happening. That’s why I think it’s really interesting… The combination, the way that your book looks at, here’s what people are putting in novels, which is either instructive, or makes people think about stuff that they’ve heard happen to other people, or things that they know are going on. When you combine that with, Here’s what’s happening in the court case, it’s completely different because the novels are these gray areas, these, kind of, where somebody knows they’re a attacker, and maybe it ends up in a marriage, which happens in several of these books.
But I was wondering if you could talk a bit about… You get into some of Jane Austen’s books, which I think people often think about as that’s the “Everybody’s well-behaved, and everybody’s nice, and let’s enjoy this book.” And they’re lovely books, and that’s kind of what they’re for, but at the same point, you have, you know, the risk of like somebody being treated like a fiancé to somebody who they’re not engaged to, for instance, I know that can become a scandal, like in Sense and Sensibility, for instance. Can you talk about some of the issues that you bring up in your book about that?
Zoë: Yeah. I think one thing you get a sense of is what risks and what threats the authors are treating as understood by their readers; they’re sort of like what’s an assumed level of threat. So, if we were reading a contemporary book and someone’s walking down a dark alley, you know, after a trip to the pub or something, and they’re in a short skirt… If you’re watching that on a TV show, you’re kind of reading cues as to, “Okay, this thing might happen because I understand this language, this visual language of telling me this bad thing is going to happen.”
You see across a lot of these novels, how easy it was to kind of disappear people in the 18th century, almost. You don’t have the same kind of network of finding people. So, if you get pulled into a carriage and run away with to a different part of the country, unless someone is able to go and physically look for you, or like, has a really good network of people already in the right area, you can just be vanished. It’s something the TV show Harlots does a really good job of kind of showing, that danger of just kind of your… How transient almost everything is because it’s purely physical. You know, your body can be taken away very easily, your money can be taken away very easily because it’s these coins in your hand.
And I think by the time we get to Jane Austen, you see something like Sense and Sensibility has… We get the sense of like, oh, here are Elinor and Marianne, and they live in a nice big house, and now they’re having to move to a smaller cottage. This is, you know, in many ways, this is a step down for them; they’re having to market and buy their food carefully, they’re having to think about the fact that the chimney smokes. But they also do still have servants, and they still are not working day-to-day, so they are still fine. But they are kind of in that way, but you see that, here’s what losing your fortune can look like, and it doesn’t look that bad.
But then you have a character like Eliza. We see Eliza, who is Colonel Brandon’s ward, she is part of this kind of history of women being mistreated and abandoned by men and the repercussions of that. Her mother was left pregnant and without financial support, and ends up dying of poverty and disease and leaves her child, Eliza, to Colonel Brandon to look after. He raises her and treats her as his ward, and then she ends up kind of falling into a similar storyline that her mother did, in that she is also made pregnant and abandoned by, in this case, Willoughby, but she is not going to die in poverty because she has a protector. So, you see a slight improvement on her situation from her mother’s. But without Colonel Brandon being there, you could kind of extrapolate that she would be in a horrendous situation.
And actually, one of the things that you see in the novel is that Brandon doesn’t know where she is for quite a lot of the book. He knows that she ran off with Willoughby, and he’s been looking for her, and he’s been trying to find where she’s got to. It’s only at a certain point that he gets the letter that tells him where she is. So, she has disappeared on him and thought, you know, that she was set up and was going to be married and was going to be fine, and then, turns out, he wasn’t planning on going through with that, and he’s run off to now find himself an heiress.
So, I think you see through their, kind of, mother and daughter storylines the way that it can go really horribly wrong and the fact that our central characters have more protection around them, it helps us kind of feel like they’re safe. But if Marianne had continued running off with Willoughby, they’re not eloping, but they are acting like an engaged couple, everyone thinks they’re engaged, she’s not too fussed about propriety, like, as far as she’s concerned, they’re getting married, so what’s there to worry about? If you were to ask her about it, she’d be insulted on both her behalf and on Willoughby’s behalf that you would think so poorly of him. And if she had just gone slightly further than she should, she also could be in this kind of same position as Eliza, where yes, she has her mother and her sister around, but they rely on family to a certain extent for support, as well as the inheritance from their father. You know, she would be just as vulnerable as Eliza would be, but she does have her sister kind of there, trying to protect her, and probably would be there making some very practical plans if they had to, to deal with this. It’s not that far off from being a possibility for her.
So yeah, I think you do get this sense within Austen… Same with, there’s a moment in Mansfield Park where one of the characters runs off, a married woman runs off with a man who is not her husband. Her sister immediately elopes because her sister has gone, “Right, if this gets out, I’m never getting married. I will be ruined, so I need to go and make sure that I’m married to someone before there’s an issue.” So, you don’t really know, at that point, how much she actually wants to. It’s a character she’s sort of flirted with before; you don’t think she hates this man. But you’ve got to ask yourself how much that would have been what she would want to do if there hadn’t been this sort of immediate time crunch on the situation. There’s, kind of, quite a pragmatic, like, “This is to keep me safe. This is what I’m going to do” situation.
Ann: Well, and what happens with… Oh, I was just thinking with both Marianne and with Eliza is what happens in so many of the novels that you summarize, or you discuss in your book, is that the man makes it seem like they are going to get married to get the woman to, usually, to have sex with him. In those circumstances, it is sort of it can be seen as sort of an instruction or a warning to young women who are reading these novels, like, just because a man is acting this way doesn’t mean he actually means it. Someone like Eliza thought that she was getting married and this is why she did all these things, and to find out that you’re not— And there’s other much more dramatic situations of that and other novels that you get into in your book of people just really putting on a whole pretense to make it seem like, “Oh, of course we’re getting married and of course we love each other.”
I mean, I don’t know, as much as anyone reading a novel or watching a TV show today… Although I do think there is something to be said for myself, at least, like, I learned a lot about dating etiquette and stuff just from watching, you know, Dawson’s Creek or whatever. You watch people in these situations to sort of familiarize yourself with, like, what are these situations going to be like? So, I could see that these novels would give people…
This leads me to my other question, which is just I wanted to talk a bit about the book Ophelia and the concept of what could happen to a person who, like that character in Bridgerton, who doesn’t know anything about anything, and how the parents could think, “Well, this is going to protect them, it’s going to keep them innocent,” but actually it just sets them up to be taken advantage of in other ways because they don’t understand what sexual threat is. Could you explain a bit? I just thought this book was so bananas. I just want you to explain it a bit to people.
Zoë: It’s a really funny book and it’s deliberately funny, which is nice, when you have a lot of, like, slightly more depressing subject matter.
So, The History of Ophelia is this very bonkers novel where there’s this young girl who is raised in basically complete isolation. She grows up just with her aunt, somehow, the two of them run a farm together, just the two of them. They don’t ever seem to do any, like, farm work; they’re just reading philosophy books, and somehow the farm runs itself. But when the story starts, a man appears, and it’s the first man that she’s ever seen. Her aunt is very suspicious because her aunt has met men before, and she doesn’t like the way that he is looking at Ophelia. And Ophelia can’t understand why her aunt isn’t being incredibly welcoming. Her aunt has basically educated her about morality and virtue and the right way to behave, but she hasn’t taught her anything about vice, and she hasn’t taught her anything about… She basically doesn’t want to, like, corrupt her mind with any negative information.
So, Ophelia kind of is confused why her aunt isn’t being, like, open-arms welcoming to this stranger, but she doesn’t think that much about it. The aunt shoos the stranger away and kind of says, “Off you go,” and he leaves, comes back in the middle of the night and abducts Ophelia, because that’s a normal thing to do. So, he’s thrown her over his horse, he’s riding off with her, and there’s this very clever, kind of, dialogue that she has with herself. The book itself is like a big letter from Ophelia, now a married lady in the future, writing to someone to tell them about her story. So, she’s describing what she was thinking at the time that she was very naïve, so you can kind of get this sense of now knowing more, but then knowing nothing.
So, she’s sort of running through why someone could possibly have abducted her in the middle of the night. She’s going, “Well, I don’t have any money, so it can’t really be robbery. And I don’t have any enemies, so it can’t really be revenge. So, I don’t know why they’re doing this, but I am scared, but I don’t know why I’m scared.” And so, they dance around this thing of, you know exactly what she should be afraid of, and you can see that she doesn’t understand anything about sexual threat, but also that she’s, sort of, innately virtuous enough that she is scared, even though she doesn’t know why she should be. Like, she can’t think of a reason why she should be, but she is. So, you get a lot of this throughout the book of her having the right reactions emotionally to things as, like, an innate response. But what you end up with is this girl being kind of placed into fashionable society with no idea what her behaviour signifies.
And so, the guy who’s abducted her doesn’t want to marry her, he doesn’t believe in marriage, but he’d quite like to, kind of, keep her on the side. In order to do that, he knows he can’t tell her that it’s not normal because she’s too moral for that, so he pretends to her that he’s acting as a guardian and looking after her and that this is very normal. He restricts her access to meeting other people so that no one else can tell her that it’s not normal. Along the way, everyone else that she meets believes that she is his mistress because she’s so open and so friendly and so warm with him. She’s not doing any of the proper behaviours that you’re supposed to do; she’s too familiar. So, her behaviour is kind of confirming to everyone that she is this kept mistress, even though she’s actually not doing that. She doesn’t understand what her behaviour is signifying.
The book kind of sets up this really interesting… It kind of poses this really interesting point about how if you get to a point where you are, like, the absolute most innocent you could possibly be, this kind of parody character, you cannot resist properly and show disinterest properly because you don’t understand what it is you’re supposed to be trying to resist. So, she’s never doing or saying the things to put him off because she doesn’t get that she’s supposed to be putting him off because she doesn’t understand that there’s a thing that might be coming that she’s not putting off. So, you kind of have this… It does a couple of things. It’s just really fun. First, this character is ridiculous. She’s completely absurd; nobody is that naive and innocent. And so, you can’t pick her to pieces and fault her for any of her actions because it’s farcically perfect, but it means you move away from, Let’s critique the woman in this scenario, and it means you kind of have to focus on this guy who’s abducted her and is keeping her. You have to focus on his choices and his decisions and see him as bearing the responsibility. So, that’s fun in its own way, that it’s kind of moving the conversation past, what did she do, and more going towards, well, what did he do?
You also then have this sort of truth that you have to have a certain amount of knowledge to be able to keep yourself safe because you need to know what it is you’re trying to keep yourself safe from, and what things are socially seen as signals. It’s something that was really interesting to me, thinking about consent more broadly, because we tend to think, at least I tend to think, that we have consent that we do with words, where we used to think like, “Oh, she said no. He said he didn’t want to.” And then you have consent through behaviour, where we say, “Oh, well, or she danced with him twice at the ball, so that shows that she’s interested in him.” That’s obviously a more, a more Regency-specific example, but we also have things like, if you let them pay for dinner, then you’re probably going to want to have sex with them on the date. We have our own sort of little ways of reading behaviour that are more ingrained than we think they are.
One of the things that I think is really terrifying about the 18th century is that when you break it down, a lot of the behaviours that are seen to show consent and willingness, they’re also usually the feminine behaviours, or the ones that are coded as, like, properly female, because a lot of the sort of appropriate female social response is obedience, acceptance, like, doing as you are told by someone else. There aren’t that many ways of saying no, or kind of self-asserting, that are considered proper. And I think when we now have more of these, like, say incel groups, or online, like, alt-right people talking about wanting to go back to a different time, sometimes what that means is they want to go back to a time when it was harder for someone to say no, or where if you performed the right steps of behaviour, then you would kind of unlock this prize because you’ve hit the right sequence of buttons, and therefore what comes out is someone who says yes. But actually, a lot of that behaviour, it was all kind of coded as consenting.
One of the things I looked at in the book was some more kind of present-day, or more recent legal theory, and just kind of philosophy around consent and making, like, can you make reasonable mistakes to think that someone’s consented but get it wrong? How does that fit in? And there was a study that was talking about how people are more likely to misread consent if someone’s refusal of consent is done softly or equivocally, they’re more likely to assume that it’s not really kind of a put-off. And if they’ve got an interest in the outcome as well, like if there’s an answer that they want you to have, they’re more likely to interpret your behaviour as signalling that answer.
We kind of see that, even now, we read people, we’re more likely to read people’s behaviour as agreeing with what we want it to be, and to misunderstand it as being a maybe rather than a no if they’re not being too forceful. We know that it’s not necessarily safe to be, like, particularly explicit in turning someone down because that’s not necessarily a safe thing to do; it can make people angry, it can increase the level of violence in the situation you’re in. So, you kind of get this real, just like, very messy scenario where a lot of how you are supposed to behave isn’t safe anyway, because it all stems and comes back to this compliance-obedience framework. But if you don’t know what your risks are, you really can’t… There’s no way to navigate that remotely okay, because you will just perform all these behaviours of acceptance and obedience that will look like you are then completely on board with what’s happening, but you don’t understand what’s happening.
Ann: I think that’s part of what, really, I appreciated about your book is just looking at this 18th century situation – both in the novels, but then also in the courts and things – and then looking at what people are up to today and how I do think that part of what you were just saying, you know, where people wish they could go back to a time when they think things were more black and white, it was more clear what was happening. You knew how a man was supposed to behave at a party and how a woman was supposed to behave at a party, and everybody understood what those behaviours meant. But what your book really shows is that no one ever really did. Like, if we think we want to go back to a time when things were more cut and dry, it’s like, well, it wasn’t. It’s just you think that it was because you knew that there was this code of expected society, but there’s so much wiggle room within that. And like you said, so much of that code was just women being nice and saying okay. That didn’t mean that they meant it, that didn’t mean that they wanted it.
I don’t know, just something about how people like to dress up like it’s the Regency era… Which I have nothing against; I think it’s lovely, I think it’s a fun thing to do. But to imagine that things were at all… better than they are now.
Zoë: I think a lot of it comes down to… So, we’re talking about, like, adaptations and watching things like Bridgerton or a lot of the Austen adaptations. I love them, and I think they’re great, but I also think that’s how we picture the time period. The thing is that if we all went back in time, we probably wouldn’t be those people; we’d probably be the people, like, washing their clothes, and cleaning up the horse poo off the roads, and like, fixing things, and doing the laundry and doing all the manual work. The bracket of society that is those people, we still have a bracket of society that is the very rich today, it’s just that we don’t think of it like that. So, we look at the protagonists in the adaptations and we identify with them, but they’re not who we would be.
I think one of the things that people look for in that “simpler time” is that it’s the kind of… The chance to wear nice clothes, and go to dances, and to not have to have a job, and to not have your emails ding, like, every 30 seconds with another thing that you have to do, and not to have to worry about climate change, and not to have to worry about the geopolitics of the world. Although that is very much in the novels still; there is political unrest, there is a war coming. They’re written after this war has just happened, and then kind of imagined just before it, a lot of the time. We see that, but what we’re saying is we want to be somewhere where we don’t have to worry about money, and we don’t have to worry about the business of living and the day-to-day difficulties.
And I think that’s… Of course, of course, we would like to be able to do that, but if we were in the 18th century, even if we were… Let’s say we were going to be Elizabeth Bennet, you know, we are in a small village where we’ve got kind of a couple of friends and they’re the main people we see, and we can’t really see that many more people because we’re geographically limited, unless we kind of pack up our trunks and kind of go and spend weeks and weeks and weeks in our friend’s house. You’ve got a smaller social circle around you than you might have now; we don’t have the same ability to communicate over distance as quickly. If you don’t like the circle of people you’re stuck with, you are still stuck with them.
It’s going to be cold in your house; you know, you’re going to have fires to heat it, but you can’t just whack the radiator on. Once it gets dark, you’re kind of limited to candles. That means that, you know, it gets dark quite early in the UK, so if you want to read or you want to sew or you want to do something, it’s either going to be quite expensive to keep the light going or you’re going to be really like squinting and kind of focusing on that. If you’ve got any kind of health issue, you know, like so, so many health issues, particularly around women’s reproductive health, are just not recognized at this point, and they’re not known about, or allergies, anything like that. You’re going to be just living in a much less comfortable— You know, you can’t just pop to the opticians and get glasses as easily as you can now, you have to be able to afford them, and you have to be able to…
Yeah, it’s just, there’s a lot of the day-to-day that you don’t write into the novel because it’s the normal day-to-day thing in the same way that, you know, a contemporary romance might not explain all the, like, realities of living today unless it’s also focusing very specifically on, you know, like, being in a terrible flat or something. Unless that’s the key focus of the book, it’s just going to be living today, and you might look at it and go, “Oh, the internet. Takeaway foods available at your beck and call. You could be warm, and you have enough clothes, and you’ve got vaccines.” You might be looking from the past and seeing, kind of, this wealth that we have of having spices on your food, and having dental hygiene that’s, you know, good, and having medical options that don’t require a leech to drink half your blood. It’s great, but then they wouldn’t understand what it’s like having your boss call you constantly when you’re supposed to be off or, like, deep fakes and AI, and the kind of rabbit hole of the internet. That wouldn’t be something you’d intrinsically know, but you do know if you live in this time.
Ann: Well, and that’s why I think that your book is so valuable because what you’re doing is, like your title says, “reading between the lines,” you know, the stuff that the people reading the book all just inherently know, but we don’t. So, just to sort of say this is… Like you were saying, you know, like if we’re watching the opening of CSI and the person’s walking down the dark alley, we all know those risks. So, to be reading one of these books, everybody reading it would know if you run away with a man, or if you go to meet him in the woods at night, here’s what that means. But to me, I’m like, “Okay, go into the woods at night. Sure.” I think it’s so valuable what you’ve done to explain sort of the context of all of this, but then also, the way that you put it within the context of the actual, you know, court records and stuff.
I just think it’s so valuable. I think it’s such an important book, and thank you so much for talking with me about it.
Zoë: No, thank you for having me on! It’s lovely to get to chat.
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So, if you want to keep up with Zoë, she is on social media. She’s on Instagram @TheZHM_Writes. If you just look up Zoë McGee, she is there. She’s got lots of events coming up, or she has been doing various events, talking about this book, being on other podcasts and stuff.
I think it’s such a valuable, important thing to braid into our understanding of the Regency era, both just for this season of this podcast, but for all of us in general. I think there’s really lovely things, like she was saying in the interview, about imagining going back to a historical time period, and how nice and lovely it would be for almost everybody. It would probably not be that lovely except for the mega wealthy, really. There’s nothing wrong with thinking about that and loving to read books, and imagine this in a romantic way and watching movies like that. But I just think when one starts to conflate that beautiful vacation version of history with what it was actually like, that’s where you get a slippery slope of people wanting to return to certain gender roles, or to certain amounts of women’s power and agency, because it’s not… Knowing the truth, or more of the truth, of more aspects of history, I think, just is only a good thing in general. And I think this book is so well written and so interesting, and it’s also, parts of it are really funny, like when she’s talking about that Ophelia book. Anyway, everybody should read it. You know, we’re coming up on a gift-giving season. This would be a fabulous gift to give to anybody.
Another fabulous gift to give to anybody would be my book, Rebel of the Regency. What? The Regency era? Is that why you’re talking about it, Ann? Maybe. My book is called Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain’s Uncrowned Queen. It comes out in February. So, you might be like, “How can I give that as a gift? It doesn’t actually exist as an item.” Well, you could give to somebody as a gift, a pre-order of the book, or yourself. Give yourself the gift. If you go onto any of the major book ordering websites, you should be able to order a copy. If you go to my website, RebelOfTheRegency.com, all the links are there as well. So, you can pre-order it. And then, you give somebody a little slip, being like, “I owe you this book.” You know, like when you were a kid, and you gave your mom as a present, a book of, like, coupons for hugs? Kind of like that. But also, if you do pre-order it, you do get stuff that you could give to a person as well.
For instance, when you pre-order the book – and just send me a message to show me the evidence, the literal receipt that you’ve pre-ordered the book – then I can provide you with things that you could give somebody as a gift, like a year’s membership to my Substack, a year’s membership to my Patreon, a Caroline of Brunswick digital paper doll. Yes, it’s a digital file. You could print it and give it to somebody. You know, thinking outside the box.
You can get all the information about my book and also the form where you can submit your receipt at, again, RebelOfTheRegency.com. Honestly, the more I learned about other things happening in the Regency, the more I’m just like, was Caroline of Brunswick (the character in my book), was she even that much of a rebel? It’s like, everyone was just messy as hell, honestly. And she was just honest about it, and that’s why people were sort of calling her out.
Anyway, we’re continuing on with Regency things. Next week, we’re going to be looking at another scandalous person of the Regency era, and I think consent issues play a major part in this person’s story, which is actually revisiting someone who we looked at before, but with our new understanding of the Regency. Anyway, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. Until next time, keep your pants on and your tits out.
Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster! Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Regency Era artwork by Karyn Moynihan. Social media videos by Magdalena Denson. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod. Get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com.
References:
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