Vulgar History Podcast
Regency Era Sex Ed: Round Two
December 31, 2025
Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and today we are talking about Regency era sex education. This is a re-release of a podcast that we did midway through 2025. At that point, it was in the context of our Revolutions season because, you know, there’s a lot of overlap between sex education in revolutionary era as well as in the Regency era. But really, we’re talking about the Regency era, so I wanted to, like, rechristen this episode so that it becomes part of the Regency Era because I know there’s new listeners and also, just to relate it to some of the episodes we’ve done so far. We talked about the Ladies of Llangollen in this; we talked about Anne Lister in this.
My guest is the fabulous Alexandra Vasti. She is a Regency romance novelist, and at the time that we first recorded this in mid-2025, her book, Ladies and Hating, was just about to come out. It is now available. Get yourself a copy of this book because we’ve been talking about, Vulgar History: Regency Era is a really sapphic-coded season as it seems to be turning out. So, I think this book about two lady writers in love, “A pair of gothic novelists, trade rivalry for love in this swoony, steamy sapphic Regency by USA Today best-selling author Alexandra Vasti,” now available, as well as all of her other books are available. You can learn about all of her books, including she has a new one coming out in June, at AlexandraVasti.com.
Anyway, I wanted to replay this episode partially just to, like, have it be part of the Regency season, but also just because I think, you know, it’s towards the end of the holiday season, it’s New Year’s Eve, and this is just a romp, it’s just a nice time. It’s the most fun I’ve had talking about sexual practices of the past on this podcast. But honestly, I had so much fun with Alexandra Vasti. She is going to be appearing again later in the Regency season in 2026, so honestly, like, just enjoy. Have a nice time, this is a fun one.
Happy New Year, and thank you, everyone, for supporting Vulgar History in 2025. 2026 is going to be a big year, and I’m happy to have you all here with me for it, so enjoy this episode!
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Ann: So, I’m joined today by Alexandra Vasti, author of Regency romance novels, and also a historian. We’re here to talk about where those two things intersect, which is basically sex ed for the Regency era.
Alexandra: [laughs] Yes! I’m so excited! I’m so excited to talk about this. I love when I have the opportunities to kind of combine my academic side, and also to talk about the books, when I get to be, like, Professor Alexandra Vasti. [laughs] So, I’m very excited and delighted to be here. Although I will say, I’m a literature PhD, I do a lot of literary history, but I’m not a historian. I really am, like, a book reader, a scholar of books.
Ann: So, a scholar of books, and you’ve done a lot of research obviously for your books, so a history enthusiast. That’s how I describe myself as well. [Alexandra laughs] I guess I just want to clarify also for the listeners because we’re doing a series right now about the French Revolution, and I just want to clarify. So, what you’re going to be talking about is Regency, which is kind of the decade after when the French Revolution was, but things didn’t change that much. What we’re talking about, it’s not like… In our modern era, it’s like, you know, the difference between the 1980s and the 1990s, it’s like, things changed slowly, especially for lower-class people.
Alexandra: Yeah, I always think that’s sort of interesting, though, because I think sometimes we can kind of flatten out history a little bit and be like, “Oh yes, everything in the 1800s…” you know? But actually, there’s quite vast differences between, like, 1804 and 1884.
Ann: True.
Alexandra: And I definitely see that a lot with historical romance because people often, they sort of treat them all the same, or imagine that they were all the same, or that what would have been on people’s minds or happening in 1884 is the same thing as the Regency, which is definitely not true. So, yeah, I mean, I think that we’ll see a lot of the same books were very popular in the period, but there are definitely differences as well, and you know, from France and England and the US, all of those things. We definitely see differences there too.
Ann: Definitely, definitely. So, first, can you explain, I mean, you have this historical interest just from your own personal work, and then, from your books also. So, explain the concept of the library that is in your books.
Alexandra: Yeah. So, my trilogy of novels is called the Belvoir’s Library Trilogy, and it is centred around this, sort of, notion that I had of my main character – this is a fictional library, it’s not real – of her starting this secret circulating library for the purpose of sex education for women.
The way that this came up is that… This was not my first idea for the series. I really am, as a writer of novels, I really start with the characters, and kind of, what the character’s interests and problems and conflict, and, you know, how they’re going to get through the book. So, I had this idea of this female main character, my heroine, as kind of a fixer, right? She’s a real busybody; she’s always in people’s business, and she’s sort of fixing things and handling things. And I wanted her to have a deep dark secret, or else the book would be quite short, you know, [laughs] 40 pages long, they get married, the end. So, I started thinking about this character, and thinking about her society, and what she would see in the world around her that she wanted to fix, that she wanted to change.
I was also thinking about things that were happening in the world around me when I was writing this book, and I was thinking a lot about book-banning. So, this was 2021, where we really started to see this big resurgence of book banning in schools, which obviously, things haven’t really changed in any positive way in 2025. But I was thinking about information access and specifically information access about sex and sexuality and about bodies and gender, and how that’s used as a tool for control, right? Like, if we can keep that information from people, we can control them better. Obviously, that’s very alive in the 18th and 19th centuries as well.
So, I had this idea that she would start this library, it’s a well-known public library, but has the secret stock of sex ed books for women, and that was sort of her way of tackling the problem of sex education in the period. So then, because I’m a literary historian, I was like, you know what I need to do, is fill this library with real books. Like, what books would she actually have stocked her library with in 1815? So, that was kind of the genesis of the idea for the library, and I really had a good time stocking her library and filling it with all of these books that really existed in the period.
Ann: It’s interesting because I have my non-fiction book coming out next year, Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain’s Uncrowned Queen, and one of the things that I dove into for my research for that as well was looking at contraception, and what would this woman have known about sex? And this is because, well, her story involves this because she’s apparently having a lot of lovers. And I was like, well, if she’s having a lot of lovers, then either she’s having a lot of children, or she was doing something to prevent having a lot of children. What were those things? Let me just research this a little bit.
But then also, your books as well, in a post Bridgerton on Netflix world, where there’s kind of, even the first season of that, there’s this kind of… The way that a lot of people learn about history, the average person, not you and me, [chuckles] but the average person who watches Bridgerton sometimes, reads novels sometimes, they’re like, “Wow, that’s what history was like, I guess. Okay!” Just assuming that, like, this is true. Wow, women didn’t know about sex until their wedding night. What a shocking way to live. I guess that’s how history was. And it’s like, “Welllllll, was it?” I guess that makes for a dramatic, interesting fictional TV show. But the research you’re finding, it’s like, these were books that existed. Women didn’t necessarily— Tell me about your thoughts about those plot lines on Bridgerton.
Alexandra: Yeah, yeah. It does make for quite good TV. People ask me this all the time, right? Because I mean, that’s a big part of the Bridgerton TV show is, sort of, the sexual education, or the sexual journeys of women. In a way, there’s something that’s, I think, meant to be quite liberating about it, and funny. It’s often played for comedy too, with the Featherington sisters, you know the, like, very quaint, comical, like, [soft, shocked tone] “Inserts himself where?” I love that scene, it’s very funny. But people are always asking me, like, “Is that real? Is that real?”
The first thing that I want to say about this is that, like, it absolutely could be, just like it could be real today. If you talked to, if you did a survey of, you know, 2,000 20-year-old women, they would probably have a vast array of different amounts of knowledge about sex and sexuality and what’s available to them, because that’s life. It’s not something that we tend to talk about super openly, right? Oftentimes, it’s what school did you go to, and how good was the sex ed program in your school? Maybe you were home-schooled, so maybe your parents never called it a vagina, never called it a penis, never used the word ‘vulva,’ you’ve never heard the word ‘clitoris’ before, until, all of a sudden, you’re like on Wattpad and you’re like, “Oh my god! What’s happening?” There are lots of different ways to access information, and everybody is different, and everybody’s life experiences are going to be different. That’s true today, and it was true in the 19th century.
So, could there have been women who were, like, absolutely astonished by their, whatever, like you know, consummatory experiences? Sure. But there’s nothing to suggest that that was the norm. And I think that because we do see that in these popular television shows, it tends to get flattened, or to be thought of like, “Oh, that’s the norm.” But if we look at texts from the period— One thing that I think is really helpful is to look at books that were published as contemporary novels in the period, and what did those characters know about sex and sexuality? And they know a lot! They totally understood, even unmarried women, understood the consequences of having sex, that that would lead to a baby, that this was a thing that happened, and how that all worked. It was definitely far more the norm to know what sex was, and how sex worked, and that sex led to a baby, than to not know that.
Ann: Actually, that’s such a funny point. I hadn’t related that to, like, what about people today? I’ll just tell you an anecdote that occurred to me. So, I have a friend who is an OB/GYN and, you know, sometimes she will share just interesting things that happened to her in her practice, and there was a patient, who I think was a teenager, a pregnant teenager, and they were talking about her delivery plan and stuff. And then it became apparent by the girl’s reactions to some of what they were saying that she thought that babies were born out the belly button. [Alexandra laughs] Like, a pregnant person, who was in a quite advanced stage of pregnancy, and they’re talking about her birth plan, and she’s just like, “Why are you talking about this?” And it’s just like, how do you think the baby is going to emerge from your body? And she thought the belly button expanded, and the baby just comes out.
Alexandra: Right! That’s not the norm, but it’s totally feasible. I mean, we did fertility treatments for our children, and it is sort of a well-known thing that in reproductive endocrinology, one of the things they ask you is, like, “But how are you having sex? You haven’t got pregnant, but let’s confirm…” because some people don’t know! They go to the infertility doctor because they’ve been thinking that they’re having procreative sex, and aren’t. But again, just like today, that’s feasible, it’s possible, it’s a thing that could happen, but it definitely wouldn’t be the norm.
Ann: It’s not everybody, yeah.
Alexandra: Or even common. So, Jane Austen, we see plenty of characters who are having, you know, unmarried sex in Jane Austen. She doesn’t necessarily say that on the page, but it’s quite clear, right? Like, Pride and Prejudice, the reason that this is so dramatic when we have the elopement with Wickham is that they’re living in sin together, and they’re not married! She even says, you know, Elizabeth Bennett says, like, for such a purpose as this, she could see why her sister’s charms would be sufficient. He doesn’t want to marry her, but he does want to have sex with her, right?
We also see in Jane Austen’s letters to her sister, she talks about a cousin who, you know, was intimate with her husband prior to marriage, and they get married, and she says to her sister that she’s glad she doesn’t have a congratulatory letter to write, meaning she’s glad that the cousin didn’t get pregnant. Jane Austen, who is an unmarried woman of genteel birth, her dad is a vicar, she knows what sex is, and how it works, and the whole process of it. That would have been the norm, and she’s definitely expecting her readers to understand and to know what she’s saying and what she’s getting at when these characters are having sex in the books.
Ann: I think the Bridgerton thing, it’s such a popular show, so a lot of people watch that, and a lot of people who I’ve talked to are like, “Wow, isn’t it so sad in the past, there wasn’t sex ed, and women didn’t know this.” It’s part of this trend that I see over and over again, that I’m sure I’m guilty of as well, of people just, sort of, assuming that people in the past were unintelligent and uninformed, and we are so much better now. Where it’s like, no, people are exactly the same. It’s not that people used to be so dumb and now we’re so smart. It’s the same thing, you know, like on Downton Abbey or something, where they’re all like, [incredulous tone] “A telephone? What?” And everyone’s just like “Oh no! Electricity!” It makes us feel good to see people in the past be, like, silly, but that doesn’t mean that everyone in the past was less informed than us.
Alexandra: Absolutely. It definitely makes us feel better to think, like, oh, we’ve progressed as a species! And then you know, you look, and you’re like, perhaps not, actually. And I do think there is a lot of flattening of the historical past. I always blame everything on the Victorians, they’re like my…
Ann: We do too! We do too.
Alexandra: [laughs] Oh, good! Yes! So, in the Victorian period, we do see a lot of pushback against talking about sex publicly. Even if we look at novels from the middle of the 18th century, people talked about sex, like, fairly openly; you could talk about sex workers, you could talk about getting pregnant. So then, it’s the Victorian period where we start to get like, “Oh, she’s in an interesting condition,” you know? And we just see a big pushback against how open and frank you could be about sex and sexuality, and I just think that that Victorian ideal has kind of got this chokehold on people’s understanding of the past that, like, oh, that’s how everyone was! The whole past was all the Victorian period. And I don’t understand why that is, and I think it’s really harmful, actually, to think that the historical past was this repressed, puritanical, hyper-Victorian, like, we can’t talk about anything, we can’t be frank about sexuality. I think it was harmful in the Victorian period, and I think it’s harmful today.
Ann: Yeah. And just talking about the differences between country to country, as well. Like, in the research that I was doing, it’s kind of like, this is happening in England. And then what I’ve been looking at this season on the podcast the French Revolution in France and stuff, it’s like, a couple weeks ago I had an episode where a guest was on we were talking about this American guy – I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, Gouverneur Morris, he was one of the Founding Fathers – and he went to France and he was kind of a ladies man in America and he went to France and he was like, “Oh my god. This is like, everything’s up a notch.” He went there, and the first thing they said was like, “How many lovers do you have?” And he’s just like “Ahhh!” The just the sexual mores were different from country to country. Have you come across that, like, France versus England, just in your own research?
Alexandra: Oh, absolutely. So many of the books that I have in the library – the real books in my fictional library in my books – are French, were French. It’s sort of funny because I think part of it was, like, publishing laws and obscenity laws were different as well, so these things could get published in French more easily. But if you look at the translation dates, they are getting translated to English, like, within months. People are like, “Oh! You know who’s going to like that? Those dorky, prudish English people! They’re not going to produce it, but we can translate it, and we can sell thousands of copies because they’re going to want it.” So, a lot of the books, the explicitly erotic books, are definitely French in origin and then get translated into English and sell for a long time in English as well.
Ann: Yeah, and just in terms of what I’m trying… I forget if I read this in your article or in something else that I was researching, but just in terms of, like, contraception and stuff. There’s stores that you can buy these things, and there’s, kind of like, code words where you can buy them. But I think people would go to France to get them, and bring them back to England and stuff like that. I think I read that.
Alexandra: So, you’re right. Condoms were in use; they were specifically used in the period to prevent pregnancy. We don’t have germ theory yet, so there’s maybe sort of a sense that like, “Oh, if you use a condom, that seems, generally, to help you.” There wasn’t a really clear sense like, this can be used to prevent disease. It’s really very much about preventing pregnancy.
Ann: And it didn’t prevent disease because they were made of, like, sheep intestines or something.
Alexandra: They could be made of, right, things that allowed bacteria to go through anyway. But condoms were absolutely in use, and a lot of times when they’re referenced, we see them being called, like, a French device. I don’t know the word off the top of my head, they were called gloves, but they would use the French word for the glove. But [laughs] we see a lot of things, in England and in French, where if it’s a little scandalous, they’ll be like “Oh, this was a this belonged to this other tradition. We didn’t invent this. It was the libidinous French who created this device.” But you know, French kissing, we call it French kissing, but originally, or not originally, but one of the very early references to it in French, they call it Florentine kissing.
Ann: A little bit different!
Alexandra: It was the Florentines who invented this sexy way of kissing. So, I do think that part of it, yes, is that attitudes were a little bit more open in France and other places in Europe, but also there was a sense that, like, we could just blame it on those lewd Gallics, and not to have to take responsibility. But yes, I’m very interested in talking about contraception, and how it was popularized and discussed in the period, because I think that’s super interesting.
Ann: That’s another thing that— Well, part of it is the novels. There’s so many books, you know, in your book, there’s this library of real books. So many books existed, and nowadays, when you see the section of “Classics,” it’s kind of like, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, like, these are the authors who survived through till now, but back then, there was so many books, and we just don’t know about them. Jane Austen was not the only person writing books in the Regency era, but her and, like, Mary Shelley, a few other people, like, those are the ones that are still kind of like studied and thought about. But there were so many books! So, it’s also the sort of flattening out to be like, “Well, that was the only novel anyone had to read,” and it’s like, No! There were so many books that people were reading.
So, stuff about contraception, I think, a really popular genre of book in this era and in the 18th century and in the early 19th century, was courtesans’ memoirs. The memoirs of a… We did some episodes about this Irish brothel owner called Peg Plunkett and her diaries, like, she lays it all out, she’s just saying everything that happened. So, people who were not courtesans, or people who did not visit courtesans, liked to read these just to learn the titillating stories, but also, there’d be stuff in there about contraception, right?
Alexandra: Oh my gosh, yes. Everything you just said is, like, my deep, deep special interest. So, I will try not to lecture for too long.
Ann: No. Please go ahead.
Alexandra: [laughs] All right. So, when I’m sitting down, and I’m like, I’m going to think about this library that I’m creating, and I’m going to use real books. I’m thinking, “What books would she use?” And I write down, I’m sort of taking notes, and I’m like, well, she’s going to use memoirs, she’s going to use all these sexy memoirs that were very popular. She’s going to use medical books, right? Like, how is baby formed. She’s going to want porn; she’s going to want erotic illustrations or erotic novels. And then, she’s going to want just, like, romance novels.
It’s so funny because I just sort of jotted that down off the top of my head, I was like, this is what she’ll want to have. And then, the more and more research I did, that sort of quick imagining that I had, really hit the nail on the head, in terms of how sexual education actually was accomplished. The funny thing is, I think that my sort of instinctive, you know, it wasn’t just because like, I know a lot about history, or whatever; it’s because that’s how it works today! So many texts have served dual purposes! We read a romance novel and, sure, it’s titillating, but also you’re like, “Huh! I didn’t know that could happen!” The line between sex ed and something that’s designed for titillation or this pornography, there’s no direct demarcation between those; all of those things can be contained within one work. And that was super common in the period as well.
So, we see, like if we look at Pepys, [phonetic: Peeps] you know Pepys? The diary of Samuel Pepys, he, for any listener who doesn’t know… [laughs]
Ann: I was going to say: P-E-P-Y-S.
Alexandra: P-E-P-Y-S, right. I highly recommend [laughs] reading this. This man kept a detailed diary of his life for a couple of years, and it’s the most frank discussion of sexuality that you can imagine, and it’s incredibly interesting to learn. But anyway, so he’s like, “And then I masturbated over this textbook,” [laughs] right? Because there is no strong demarcation between things that are intended pedagogically and things that are intended for titillation. Humans are our weird, kinky freaks, and we can learn from our porn, and we can be aroused by our medical textbooks, and all of these things are combined. In fact, one of the things that I think is super interesting is a lot of things that were explicitly designed for titillation, that were explicitly pornographic in the period, especially in the 18th century, they pose as an educational text.
So, an incredibly common form of erotic novel, and a lot of these were French too, was framed as a conversation. There are almost always two women (lesbian erotica is incredibly common in the 18th century), so we have these two women, and one of them is older and is experienced and, you know, knows the ways of the world. And then, we’ll have another younger woman who’s maybe embarking on her first relationship, maybe it’s her wedding night, and the older woman— And again, these are porn; they’re meant to be pornographic, they’re meant to be arousing. But the framing of it is this older woman is saying, “Let me tell you about how it’s going to be.” And often, that involves the older woman demonstrating and just, like, “Let me show you what it’s going to be like when you kiss your husband. Let me kiss you. Oh, aren’t you turned on? That’s exactly what it’s going to be like with your husband.”
It’s an incredibly common form that we see in the erotic novels of the period, that they’re framed as these conversations. A lot of them have “school” in the title, like School of Venus is a really popular one from the 18th century, again, French. So, I was just fascinated by discovering how blurry the lines are between these erotic texts and the explicitly pedagogical texts.
Ann: And something that I wanted to bring up also… We’re having this conversation and it’s perfectly positioned where I am in the season of my podcast because we’ve recently just had a discussion of the movie Dangerous Liaisons based on the book Dangerous Liaisons, which is also another movie— Like, we talked about this in the conversation of the movie which is very, very, very, very similar to the book, which I read and you have these extremely sheltered young women who were raised in convents, and they have not been trained or been prepared for what it’s like when a womanizing sociopath, frankly, sets his eyes on you. And he’s like, “I’m going to teach you sex ed,” and they’re like, “Great.”
So, it sort of, on the one hand, shows a young woman could be taken advantage of this way, but also it shows that book was so popular. It’s showing young women, like, here are the warning signs. This is a man who’s going to use you. It’s not a conversation like the ones you’re talking about between two women, but Dangerous Liaisons is written as letters, so people are talking frankly because they’re writing a personal letter to somebody else, so you can get to, kind of, innermost thoughts in a way.
Alexandra: Right. I mean, and that’s very common in the origin of the novel form. We really had to invent this concept of a novel where you could just be like, “This person said this, and this person said that.” That wasn’t a natural thing. We really had to invent and work really hard to come up with what now is just the typical structure of a third-person novel. So, that starts as the epistolary form. When we first start seeing novels, that epistolary framing is almost ubiquitous, because otherwise, why would you be writing down the story of what this guy did, and what this guy said? You have to frame it as, like, “Oh, I’m writing a letter to my friend.” [laughs] So, the epistolary form is just inherent to many, most, almost all early novels.
But yeah, I think it’s so, so interesting and also, a lot of these books are absolutely written as kind of like a warning text; we see a lot of that kind of moral panic over, like, what could happen to women. But the line between warning and something that’s designed to arouse or titillate is very thin, also, right? I particularly (I guess probably just because I’m a romance novelist), tend to be extra fond of the ones that aren’t warnings, but that are just like “And this is great.” [both laugh] You know, “I’m going to teach you about this thing…” In School of Venus, she describes it as “the many ways of fucking.” She’s like, “I’m going to teach you about the many ways of fucking because it’s going to make your life so much better, and you’re going to have a really happy marriage because of that.”
One erotic novel that’s like unbelievably famous, that you can’t talk about the period without talking about, is Fanny Hill. So, Fanny Hill is one of the few that’s written in English, that they didn’t have to steal from the French, and it’s written by John Cleland, and it was first published in 1748. So, Fanny Hill, it’s framed as her, kind of, memoirs. So, this idea of framing something as memoirs; sometimes they were real, sometimes they were fake. So, there was a sort of device that, like, “Oh, I discovered this woman’s letters in a drawer where she talks about her experiences, and now I’m so scandalized that I’m forced to publish this so you all can be scandalized too.”
Anyway, so it’s written as sort of these fictional memoirs of Fanny Hill, a woman of pleasure. So, she’s a sex worker in the 18th century, and she falls in love with one of her clients, and then they are separated through the disasters of life, and she has this, like, sexy career, and then they get back together, and then they live happily ever after! It’s quite charming, actually, [laughs] the experiences. But Fanny Hill is also written as… It’s like, here’s how she learned about sex, so that sexual awakening, or that sexual discovery, is very much present in that as well. She goes to this house of pleasure, intentionally, like, she intends to become a sex worker, and she’s initiated into the ways of sex through the other female sex workers, who, you know, quite hands-on teaching experience. So, all the first sex scenes in the book are between two women. And then, she goes on to have her various exploits and fall in love, and live happily ever after with her darling.
And it was unbelievably popular. Pepys also had a great time with Fanny Hill as well. Cleland did go to jail for it briefly. It’s sort of debated as to, like, why exactly they prosecuted Cleland, but you know, he was fine. [laughs] A lot of people went to jail, it was actually quite…
Ann: Well, I feel like that would just make more people want to read the book, you know?
Alexandra: Yes! Yes, absolutely. There’s another guy, Richard Carlile, who wrote a book about contraception. He was a big proponent of free love in the period, and he was a really big proponent of women’s sexual pleasure. It’s actually an incredibly comical book if you read it. He’s like, “Look at all these women who are just not getting fucked regularly. You can just tell. They’re pallid, they’re lethargic. You know what’s going to help them? Getting railed every day.” So, the point of the book is that— It’s quite short, you can read it quickly. The point of the book is that contraception is going to solve all of the problems of the world. He’s very in favour of it, and so he goes through this long discussion of different types of contraception.
Anyway, he was jailed also. [laughs] They eventually released him because they were like, “The more that we keep this guy in jail, the more that we’re drawing attention to this.” He was a radical in many ways; he’s actually a very interesting figure.
Ann: Tell me about contraception, besides, like, we talked about condoms. What are the other methods that people, that women specifically, would know about, or might be using?
Alexandra: Yeah. So, What is Love? is a really good one; it’s also called the Every Woman’s Book. Every woman, he was like, you know, he wanted to sell some books. He goes through and talks about the different types of contraception. He was a big proponent of the sponge. He thought sponges were the way, and they were very popular in the period as a form of contraception.
Ann: So, this is like, I’m going to presume, and you can correct me, some sort of sea sponge based on technology, and that would just be a thing that would, like, absorb the semen? Is that right? You’d put it up inside…
Alexandra: Yeah, absolutely. So, you’d put it up there, and it would form a physical barrier. People would soak them in things that they thought would be, like, a spermicide also. So, you could soak your sponge in vinegar, and then you know, insert it. Yeah!
Also fun, you could go into a shop, and there would be a clock, and each hour was a different form of contraception, and you would turn the hand of the clock to the one you wanted, and then the clerk would pass it out to you.
Ann: Love it!
Alexandra: Yeah, you could kind of like, pretend that you had not really—
Ann: Secret code.
Alexandra: Yeah! Exactly, exactly.
So anyway, he really liked the sponge; he was a big proponent of the sponge. He thought that that was good, he thought it was the most effective. In the book, he’s like, “I don’t know, but people say that you can’t even feel it. [laughs] Not that I’ve ever partaken myself.” But also, he talks about condoms as well, and he talks about withdrawal as a way of preventing pregnancy. Again, there’s really no sense of like diseases, or germs, or germ theory.
Ann: Because people didn’t know anything— They were just like “Here’s some leeches,” like everything’s cool.
Alexandra: Yeah! I mean, we just don’t know about germs yet, so that’s not available to them. He also talks about, it’s really funny in the book, he’s like “So, a lot of people believe that you can ejaculate inside but not up by the womb. [laughs] You can decide for yourself, but, to me, the notion that you can really tell if you’re by the womb, or not, is not clear. So, I’m just going to say that’s not the one I would recommend.” So, apparently, that was an extant theory, that you could ejaculate but not by the womb.
Ann: Just direct— Okay. Good luck with that.
Alexandra: Shoot it elsewhere. Yeah, no, I don’t think it was— [laughs] The other thing that Carlile talks about in the book is that he’s like “We don’t totally know how conception works,” which is interesting too, right, because there’s obviously a lot of physical evidence but, you know, sex cells and different types of cellular, meiosis and mitosis, is not something that people are clear on in any way. So, we’ve got, you know, thousands of years of physical evidence that doing this thing results in babies, but not a really strong sense of how exactly it works. So, we’re really kind of feeling it out as you go, for how contraception could be handled.
Ann: And this makes me think about something else that we haven’t yet talked— My season of this podcast we’ve been looking at all these revolutions, and we’re leading up to a discussion of Marie Antoinette and her life but, like, just to get into some Marie Antoinette spoilers, she and her husband did not have children for several years and it was really stressful for her and for the country of France because it’s just like, “Why are they not…?” Eventually, eventually, they do conceive, there was sort of like an intervention, [chuckles] her brother… I think part of it was just like, what method were they using? Or the physiology of her husband was maybe… Like, they had to use a different method.
But if you have these two teenagers, and they don’t know what they’re doing, like you were saying, people going to the fertility doctor, or some people going to my friend who’s a doctor, sometimes they’re like, “We’re having trouble conceiving,” and she’s like, “Are you having sex like this?” And they’re like, “WHAT?” [Alexandra laughs] Like the Featherington sisters, they’re like, “I would never have thought to have done that!” So, like, there are people who just don’t know.
Alexandra: Yeah. So, there’s a book called Aristotle’s Masterpiece, and Aristotle’s Masterpiece was first published in, I want to say, 1648… 1600s. It purports to be a medical textbook about conception, how to conceive, pregnancy, labour, things like that. This book… So, people thought Aristotle was sort of both, like, he was very knowledgeable, and this is classical, so it gives it this ethos of accuracy, but also like, there was this association of Aristotle with, like, sexy stuff. A lot of sexy stuff gets the Aristotle stamp.
So anyway, Aristotle’s Masterpiece, when I was first researching this, I was looking up academic articles about Aristotle’s Masterpiece, and I kept finding them about James Joyce’s Ulysses, and I was like, “What the hell? Is this a different book? That book was published in 1922.” No! Aristotle’s Masterpiece is, like, the biggest seller for 300 years! [laughs] This book was, like, the book. So, it was published anonymously, and obviously, copyright is not copyright in 1648; we don’t really have that. So, printers would be like, “Oh! This is a good book, I’m going to print it too!” and print their own version of it. So, for literally 300 years, this book is the preeminent book on procreation and conception. It gets constantly edited and changed, and new things are added.
I’ve seen some really interesting articles about Aristotle’s Masterpiece that are like, what do we learn about people’s ideas of sex if we compare the 1648 version versus the 1748 version versus the 1848 version? Because, you know, things really change vastly. Some of the versions of it are very much focused on, like, learning and kind of, this is the most that we know, they’re more scientific. And some of them are more kind of like a warning, right? They’re like, “Oh, this is what can happen if things go wrong.” There’s a lot of sense of, like… [soft, sensual tone] The secrets of the woman’s body, and like, can we ever learn her secrets? [laughs] So, there’s a lot of discussion of the clitoris and how it works. Is it important? Is it not important? Does it play a role in procreation? We don’t know, here’s what we can observe.
There’s a ton of discussion of virginity, even in 1648; it’s very clear in the book that the hymen doesn’t necessarily mean anything. So, they’re like, you know, the hymen, it may exist, it may not exist. There’s one part of it that’s like “The humours can eat it away.” [Ann laughs] If you have bad humours, your hymen can just vanish. But there’s also a big part of it that’s, like, how to fake a hymen, right? So, this idea of the hymen was quite— It could be serious business, it could be used in courts, in the court of law, if you know, a woman was examined and found to have a hymen or not have a hymen, that could be used in court. So, there’s a lot of stuff of, like, how do you fake it? If you’re about to get married and you’re very worried that your husband is going to think you’re not a virgin, like, how can you create a fake hymen?
Ann: Can I say: That is still a thing. My friend, the doctor, has had patients who are from, like, very conservative cultural groups who ask my friend, like, “Can you sign a certificate saying my hymen is intact?” Even when it’s not. And she’s just like, “I don’t do that. That’s not a doctor’s note that I will provide for you.” Yeah, and there’s people who put insert, like, blood-filled balloons, and she’s learned about all these things that people do because in some cultures, it’s really mandatory that there’s this, like, hymen breaking moment. So, that’s interesting that, yeah, people were doing that then, people are still doing that now.
Alexandra: Right. It’s kind of bonkers too, that in 1648, the people writing this book are, like, “And even if it doesn’t exist, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
Ann: Back then!
Alexandra: Right! And yet, still, this myth persists somehow. Anyway, so Aristotle’s Masterpiece is a really great book for just seeing how understandings of sex and sexuality changed.
But anyway, I think the reason I initially started talking about this is because I’ve seen historians say that this was considered a really common and typical newlywed gift. I don’t know if that’s true, but I have seen a historian argue that, like, you would— I mean, it sold so, so well for 300 years, obviously people were buying it. So, a couple would get married, and you’d be like, “Hey, here’s your book. Here’s your Aristotle’s Masterpiece, it’s going to teach you, like…” There’s one part of it in the later editions that’s like a manual for how to have sex. It’s like, first, you take your clothes off, then you touch the woman here, and then you touch the woman there. It’s got a nice little emphasis on the orgasm too, for both parties. That’s quite important, that was seen as a big thing, like, everybody needed to climax to get pregnant.
Anyway, so this book was very popular, very common, and there was— It’s actually very funny, I read something about Aristotle’s Masterpiece that in the 1700s, young men would pass it around for instructive purposes or whatever reason, but that it was kind of cringy and embarrassing. They called it a granny book. It was sort of like, you know, passing around like your grandmother’s bodice ripper, but it was still instructive, right?
One other thing that bothers me about representations of how people learn about sex in the historical past is that it’s always women who don’t know. So, like, in various popular representations of sex in the past, it’s like, “Oh, women don’t know anything.” But men are expected to know everything! That’s one of the things I think is so charming about that Featherington scene in Bridgerton, the husband doesn’t know either! Neither of them knows how it is supposed to work, and I think that that’s also very harmful, this idea that young men who would have got married in the period were supposed to just, like, magically know everything about sex and how it works. That’s not based in any reality either!
Ann: Yeah. Well, and I would imagine, for people like yourself, who are writing Regency romances, with that in mind, there’s the old trope of just kind of like, the virgin who doesn’t know what she’s doing, and the man who comes in and he introduces it. I would think contemporary writers are having a more nuanced portrayal of relationships in this sort of book.
Alexandra: Yeah, absolutely. I was very shocked, like, I don’t know, I was very astonished by this. The first book that I put out features a non-virgin female main character and a virgin male character, and I just wrote it. And you know, my first couple books were self-published, and all these people were like, “It’s a gender swap,” and I was like, “What?!” Like, that was so far from my mind, it just did not even occur to me because, you know, it was just a historical reality. Sure, that would have happened for some people sometimes. And oh my god, I got so many blistering emails that, like, I had made this female main character a slut and a whore, and that she had had— And I was like, [laughs] “What?” I was not expecting the vitriol that I received. Of course, then, I was like, you know, “Well, now, I’m going to write it ten times more!” [laughs] So, my readers were then treated to many more of that exact variant.
Yeah. So, it’s very interesting how these ideas just are very entrenched, and we see them pop up everywhere, and it is, of course, that would have represented some people’s experiences, but it certainly doesn’t represent the totality of experiences.
Ann: And I think in terms of the books written at the time, and you know a lot more about this than I do, but I’m just going to say something, and you’ll tell me if I’m right or wrong. But the books written at the time, like French Revolution era, Regency era, versus books now written about that era books written… People expect a certain, like you were saying, people thought it was a gender swap, but a certain sort of thing of this, like, naïve, young virgin, and then this kind of worldly man who teaches her stuff. It’s kind of like that’s just what people imagine things were like then, so you want to read books that reiterate that. But it’s like, things weren’t necessarily even like that then, but people get these really entrenched ideas of what history was like, and then they get mad when someone’s like, “Well, actually, what if history wasn’t like that?”
I feel like Regency romance is such a long-standing genre that people are just like, “That’s what it was like” and if you’re making it different than that, to challenge what people’s understanding of the past is – and I mean we’re not going to talk about this because I’ve talked about this with other guests – but I mean, involving Black people, you know, having non-white characters, where it’s like “What? That’s not true!” It’s like, actually, it was true, and so many people’s understanding of what the past is based on movies they’ve seen, or like, a book they read that was written in the Victorian era, or written in the 1950s, where it’s like, “Well, that was true.” It’s like, was it? Just trying to buck against what history was like versus what people think history was like, and people like their idea of what they think history was like.
Alexandra: Oh, absolutely. And I think that many people are actually quite eager and excited to learn about things being different than what they assumed, it’s just that we get these loud voices who are so angry about it, that sometimes that’s what our brains focus on, or these loud, angry, wrong— Nothing is more frustrating than someone being wrong on the internet, you know?
I also think that if we look at hundreds of years of this sexual awakening story being popular, obviously, there’s something titillating about that. Obviously, people are kinking on this idea of this young, inexperienced person who has to be taught and led into the ways of darkness and depravity. You know, we see that in 1748 with Fanny Hill, and we see that in the first season of Bridgerton, when you know Simon is sexily whispering into Daphne’s ear about how she needs to go home and touch herself, and she has to discover the concept of masturbation because of Simon. Obviously, this is something that people are finding kinky. That doesn’t mean it’s, like, the historical reality though, right? [laughs] Sometimes I want to say to people, like, look, if that is your kink, that you want a sexual awakening story, that’s fine. But you don’t have to frame it as, like, “because that’s how it was.” That’s when I want to push back a little bit.
Ann: Well, what I’d also love to get your take on is something that I’ve come across, especially in the French Revolution era. It was such a weird time of, like, there was so much social change and exciting stuff happening, but there was also this huge, overwhelming, conservative, like… Rousseau was being read by everybody, and everyone’s, and so it’s just like… Women should stay home, they should be having babies, women shouldn’t be entering the political discourse. So, you see things like hatred of Marie Antoinette and the female revolutionaries, and they were all just like “She’s a whore, she’s a whore!” And it’s like, when I’m looking at these women’s lives, like the revolutionaries, what I’ve looked at so far, it’s like, actually she wasn’t, and she could have been and fine, but like… The slut shaming of just, like, especially… Well, I don’t know, because Marie Antoinette was a married woman. So, slut shaming of married women, of unmarried women, of just being like, these women are sexual entities, and that’s bad, and that’s wrong, and in most of the cases I’ve been looking at, “Let’s murder them,” [Alexandra laughs] which they did.
But yeah, so how do you… Like, you’ve got these sexy novels coming out of France specifically, but then you’ve also got this, like, it reminds me of now, the trad wife conservatism, where it’s like “Women shouldn’t be doing stuff. They should just be at home, they should just be having babies.” How do you square that off to have this licentious society, but then also this, like, weird, conservative thing?
Alexandra: Well, because it is exactly like today, which is that there are a lot of people that we’re talking about, and there’s a vast spectrum of political beliefs, and you know, certain things can be used to incite a moral panic, can be weaponized, and it is extra easy to weaponize claims against women.
So, Mary Wollstonecraft. I love Mary Wollstonecraft; my third book is dedicated to Mary Wollstonecraft, very normal, very normal, not-dorky thing to do at all. So, Wollstonecraft writes about Rousseau in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and one thing I think is really interesting about Wollstonecraft and about her life and her story is that she was pretty popular, actually. People are always like, “Oh, she died in penury,” which is sort of true, but a lot of people read her books. A lot of people read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and a lot of people were very interested in what she espouses in Vindication, and a lot of people were talking about it, and thinking about it, and thinking about her in her period, and then she dies in childbirth, and her husband William Godwin thought she hung the moon. He thought she was the most wonderful, delightful, incredible creature. So, he was a big proponent of free love, and he was very anti-marriage, and he thought marriage was the root of all society’s evils, and he thought it was playing a big role in bringing women down, he thought it was like a prison for women. And then, he falls in love with Mary Wollstonecraft, and he’s like, “You know what? Never mind, I just want to marry you. I love you.” It was very charming.
Anyway, so she dies in childbirth, and he is so… You know, he loves his wife so much that he’s like “I’m going to tell everyone about her life because she overcame so much, she had a child out of wedlock, she had all these things happen her, and she overcame, and she struggled, and she fought, and she wrote, and she was so brilliant.” He writes this story of her life and talks pretty frankly about her sexual exploits, which he thought was great! He thought it was just another sign of how, like, wonderful and radical and amazing and courageous she was. He had absolutely no idea that people were going to take this and be like, “We knew it! She wrote this book, and it was pushing the boundaries about women, and we knew she was a whore this whole time!” And then they weaponized the fact that she had died in childbirth, and they were like, “This was God’s punishment on her for all the wrongs and evils and sexual evils that she did,” and it destroyed her reputation for, like, a hundred years.
I think that this is such a fascinating story because part of it is just a societal shift, especially in the Victorian period, toward more of that kind of, domestic spheres and women are the angels of the house. But a lot of it too is that it was okay for her to think radical things, and to say and write radical things, but when she put a toe out of line sexually, that was the excuse that people could use to sort of slap her down and say “See, her ideas don’t matter and we shouldn’t listen to her philosophies after all.” So, I just think it’s very… I mean, we see that today, right, that sex scandals don’t really seem to affect men anymore, but even the idea of a sex scandal can be used to take down a female politician, for example, even if it’s not true.
Ann: This reminds me of the episode I did about Charlotte Corday, the murderess of the French Revolution. At first, they’re like, “She couldn’t have done this. A woman would never assassinate someone herself; a man must have made her do it.” And then, she’s like, “No, honestly, it was just me,” and they’re like, “Okay, well that must be because you’re a whore.” [Alexandra laughs] And they’re like “She’s a whore!” And then they did like a hymen inspection— Oh no, after she died, and they’re like “Oh, she still has a hymen. Oh wow, she wasn’t a whore. She was unnatural. Why wasn’t she having sex?” They kept pivoting. It’s just like, what she did was so threatening to the status quo.
But the same thing, to go from it’s like, “Oh, she’s a whore. Oh, wait, she’s not a whore… She’s a virgin, and that’s bad!” It’s like, we want to hate her, so let’s just pivot. It just seems the same thing for Mary Wollstonecraft; they were just looking for a reason to be able to hate her. And then her daughter, Mary Shelley, who absolutely lived this, kind of, free love thing. I always find that really interesting because when we think about – when I think about – the Regency era, kind of the main… Jane Austen is who people always fall to, and they think about her books which are sort of full of decorum and etiquette and parties and balls, and it’s like, yeah, but Mary Shelley was also writing at the same time, and she wrote Frankenstein. She was a teenage runaway, having babies with a man who was married to someone else, and her stepsister was there for some reason. That was the same time period, guys.
Alexandra: Well, it always sort of puzzles me when people like “Jane Austen was writing these… everyone’s just in the ballroom,” but like, people have read Pride and Prejudice, they know that Lydia and Wickham run off together. What do they think that they’re doing? [laughs] They’re having sex! It could not be more clear in the book that that is what they are doing. So, sure, she focuses her story on that, but it’s not like those novels are absent of… It’s just those aren’t the main characters, they’re the secondary characters.
Anyway. Yes, Mary Wollstonecraft dies in childbirth, and her daughter… William Godwin names the daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and yes… I always think this is very funny. This is something I always teach that Godwin was this big proponent of free love, and he didn’t believe in marriage until his teenage daughter ran off with Percy Shelley, and he was so angry. And Percy Shelley was like, “What do you mean? I thought you were a proponent of free love?” And Godwin is like, “Not when it comes to my daughter!” Anyway. Yes, Mary Shelley… I don’t know. Percy Shelley is not my favourite. He was a fuckboy, and he—
Ann: Oh god. No, absolutely, absolutely. I did a whole episode about Mary Shelley, but I just think that it’s interesting that she doesn’t, in my experience, come up often when people are talking about the Regency era, she doesn’t really come up except in her later life when she’s, like, a widow, and she’s sort of a more “respectable” woman, and she’s preserving her husband’s legacy by publishing his poems. But when she was 16, what was she doing? You guys, she was traipsing around Europe with this, like, free love, van life scenario.
Alexandra: [laughs] Did you know that a lot of scholars think she was bisexual?
Ann: Tell me about that.
Alexandra: Well, we don’t really know. We don’t have a lot of evidence, but she does talk about how about her feelings toward other women, and that she’s like, “I don’t really like men, but I do feel a little tuzzy-muzzy about other women.” So, tuzzy-muzzy is slang for the vagina, so there’s a lot of scholarly focus on: What did she mean when she says she feels tuzzy-muzzy about other women? That seems quite sexy to say, maybe. [laughs] So, we don’t really know, but there’s a lot of speculation.
Ann: Actually, that leads beautifully to something that I do want to talk about, which is your book coming out in September, which is a sapphic story. What can you tell me about lesbians in this time period?
Alexandra: Yeah! So, I’ve sort of joked that with every book that I publish, my author’s note gets longer and longer and, like, increasingly more defensive. I’m like “This is real.” So, Ladies in Hating is the third book in the Library Trilogy, and it is a sapphic romance. So, the premise is that the main characters are sort of duelling rival gothic novelists, who, in research for one of their books, end up trapped in this haunted house together that they’re planning to use as a setting for their next book. And while they’re trapped, are forced to kind of confront the sexiness underlying the hatred, as you do in a romance novel.
So, because they are novelists, I got to really indulge myself [laughs], in talking about the novels that they would have read that would have formed them as writers, and that would have been available to them in thinking about their sexuality, right? So, as I mentioned, Fanny Hill was really popular; it’s definitely a book that they would have heard of, if not read, although, of course, I have them read it. And like I said, the first few sex scenes in that book are all between women. It’s really presented in 1748 as, like, that’s totally normal. There’s a character who… The first character that kind of instructs Fanny in the ways of sex is… They’re in bed together, and she’s showing Fanny how everything works, and she gets very aroused, and she kind of has Fanny bring her to completion.
And then, there’s a little discussion of this character’s sexuality, and Fanny says that it wasn’t that she preferred women, necessarily, although in my experiences, I did meet some women who did, it was just that she liked sex, and she could be aroused by whoever she was with. And I’m like, oh! 1748, this is just presented as one of various ways of existing in the world as a sexual being and having this outlook on sexuality. Different, what we would today call sexual orientations, are presented in the book; they’re not really considered shameful or shocking. One part is sort of played for comedy, which is that one of the women from their brothel likes to dress up as a man; that’s part of her gender presentation. Then a man, thinking she is a man, a man who prefers men, hits on her, and they go off together, and then he’s quite upset, actually, to discover what’s underneath her clothing. It’s presented sort of for comedic effect, but he’s just like, “Okay, well, I guess fine. Sure, we’ll go at it.” But it’s very funny that this, you know, what we might consider a traditional heteronormative pairing, is like, this disappointment. He’s like “[groans] Fine. I guess I’ll do it this way.”
So yeah, it’s just… We see this much less judgmental attitude than I think most 2025 readers would expect to see in a text written in 1748. We do see, kind of, increasingly more pushback against homosexuality as we get into the 19th century, and especially, especially into the Victorian period, because the Victorians are the villains as always. But there’s a lot of discussion of it. One thing that I think is always interesting to share is that in England, sex between women was never criminalized. It was like, “But what are they doing?” Like, they’re not doing anything…
Ann: Right. It’s that thing where it’s just like, “Well, if there’s not a penis, then that’s not sex, I guess.”
Alexandra: Exactly! There’s one court case that we have a transcript of, and the guy is trying to sue his wife for adultery for sleeping with another woman, and the judge is like, “I can’t charge her for that,” and the guy’s like, “Well, she’s constantly in bed with our neighbour, and I can’t get her out of bed,” and the judge is like, “But what are they doing in the bed? [laughs] I just want to know more about what’s happening,” he can’t conceive of, like, what could be going on there.
So, sex between women was never criminalized, although sex between men was, and we see occasional, you know, it would be a big news story that someone was tried for this and whatever. We see a lot of people talking about it in real life, about: Should this be illegal? And we see a lot of people pushing back at the time, saying… There’s one really charming— It’s the diaries of just this random farmer, and it’s a really interesting historical document because, a lot of times, we only have access to the upper-class and what their thoughts on things were, so this diary is one of our few ways of accessing people from the working class. So, this farmer, I want to say it’s like 1810 maybe, he says something like, “If God gave them this desire, then surely it can’t be immoral,” and it’s just really lovely. And again, that is 1810. This is not something that happened yesterday, and I think people often are really not aware of the actual historical realities of the period, which is not this homophobic thing, even that we see later in the Victorian period.
Ann: And I think also part of this whole discussion is that marriage at that time, like French Revolution time, Regency era, is very much about alliances and real estate and bank accounts, it wasn’t – especially in the higher classes – it was never about love, and like, you had sex so you would have children, so they could inherit the real estate, and the money, especially in France. Yeah, so you have lovers, but you have your husband, and that’s who’s the father of your children. So, if a woman married to a man is having a sexual affair with another woman, it’s like, well, she’s not going to conceive a child, so kind of like… who cares?
Alexandra: Yes. Absolutely, yes.
Ann: Like, that’s not going to threaten the lineage.
Alexandra: Right. It is very much non-threatening in that way. There’s a kind of well-known political cartoon that I also reference in Ladies and Hating, where there’s two women kissing in the park, they’re sort of entangled on a bench, and they’re kissing, and it’s called “Love à la mode” meaning “fashionable love,” so obviously, someone thought this was quite, you know, the trend of the day was to sleep with your with your bestie. And then, it says, “Or two good friends,” which I think is so funny that people are making that same joke in the 19th century as they are today.
Anyway, so in the cartoon, their husbands are behind them, and it actually uses their names, which was not always common, like, a lot of times, the cartoons would kind of like try to just do an initial. But it actually uses their names, so we know exactly who these women are, and husbands are like, “What do we do?” because there’s nothing that they can do. There’s no way to disentangle them legally. They’re just kind of like, “Well, hopefully they break up and come back to us.” But again, this was like, you could buy it on the street, it was not… The existence and the idea of same sex desire would have been something that people would have known about, talked about, would certainly have been available.
Ann: And then you’ve got people like Anne Lister, who like, did she not marry a woman or something like that?
Alexandra: She did! Yeah, she did! Oh my god, I love Anne Lister so much. Anne Lister, who is also a TV show, Gentleman Jack is the name of the TV show if people want some not quite so heteronormative representations of the past. So, Anne Lister was this very famous, out lesbian; everyone knew that she was a lesbian. You know, it would be like, hide your wives! Because she was so sexy and so charming and, like, could just absolutely, like, get it. After she finished sowing her wild oats, she fell in love, and she and her wife, whose name was also Ann, got married in church in 1834, and then they went on a honeymoon together.
One of my favourite facts about Anne Lister is that she used to record her sexual exploits in her diaries, so this is part of how we know everything about Anne, but she did it in code. Her family, sort of, it was passed down, and they decoded it, and they were like, “This can’t be right!” [laughs] because it was so sexy and she loved… I don’t know, I’m like afraid to say this on your podcast, but I will say it anyway: She loved to give head, and it was very much like a little competition for her, of like, could she make her female partner come more often than she came. Her relatives were like, “Perhaps we have erred.” But no! They had decoded it correctly.
Ann: That’s funny. So, it’s like, you’re doing a crypto code, and you’re like, “Oh, this can’t be right. I must have decoded this wrong because these are words, but this can’t be what it means. So, let’s just tuck this away…” Because isn’t that what they did? Her descendants were like, “Let’s just hide this back in the wall again for, like, a few more decades because we’re not ready to handle this,” and then a later generation actually… And thank god, the diaries, they’re in an archive. I actually used a brief part of one of her diaries as a reference for my book because she talked briefly about Caroline of Brunswick, because everybody was. That was my example of like, “Everyone was talking about her, even Anne Lister!”
Alexandra: [laughs] Even Anne Lister! Yeah! What does she say about Caroline?
Ann: She was just like, “God damn it, everyone’s talking about it, even me.” It’s sort of like people who are like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m watching Love Island.”
Alexandra: [laughs] I was just going to say Love Island!
Ann: That was her vibe. She was just kind of like, “I stayed up way too late tonight talking about Love Island. I hate myself.” [Alexandra laughs] That was basically— But Carolie of Brunswick was what she was talking about, and I was like, “I have to include this in my book.”
But then there’s also, I was just going to say, the Ladies of Llangollen.
Alexandra: That’s what I was going to say! That’s so funny. So, Anne actually goes to visit the Ladies of Llangollen, who were, again, a very popular couple in the period; people were very interested in them. Queen Charlotte actually persuaded George to give them, like, a royal pension that they lived on because they were such an interesting celebrity couple. So, basically, one of the women was sort of from this upper-class family, she was the daughter of an Irish earl. So, the family was like, “You need to get married.” And they revolted, these two women, they were kind of neighbours, and they kept eloping together, the two women. The first time, they got sort of tracked down in, like, a farmer’s hay field or something. But the second time that they eloped together, they were allowed to… I think their family just sort of gave up and was like, “All right, fine.” They had an aunt who supported them financially at first, and they lived together in Wales for 50 years.
People were super interested in them, and they were like, “Are they fucking? I need to know.” They were constantly visited by… Wordsworth wrote a poem about them, Byron came and visited them. People were very, very compelled by the story. And so, Anne Lister went and visited them and was trying to hint at, like, are you a couple? And they wouldn’t answer. She wrote to her friend later, and she was like, “I just don’t believe that they’re not a couple.” [laughs] But she was actually supposedly very inspired by them. It was part of the inspiration for her marrying Ann Walker.
Ann: So, this is like… Your book, it’s coming out, I think, in September, Ladies in Hating, which is your sapphic story, but also I wanted to mention— First of all, that’s the most important thing: everybody should pre-order that book and get that book. But also, getting back to Bridgerton again, there was hints in this last season that there’s going to be a sapphic love story on Bridgerton, and some people freaked out. Well, some people were mad because the original novel, like, that pairing was a heterosexual couple, and now it was going to be sapphic, and it’s the same thing, they’re like, “But there wasn’t lesbians in Regency England!” And everything you just explained, it’s like, there completely were. [laughs]
Alexandra: There absolutely were, there absolutely were.
Ann: If we’re looking at any era in British history, it’s like, this is one of the time periods where we have the most confirmed sapphic relationships happening. So, it’s like… I think it’s what we were talking about before, where people are just like “No, I want to believe that the past is this specific kink I have, and you can’t… Don’t kill that for me.” So, I love that your book is coming out. I’m sure in the author’s note you get into all of this as well, but it’s just like another example of, like, no, this was happening. This is not made up.
Alexandra: Yeah. That was a real reckoning for me as someone who has been reading historical romance for 25 years, and is very engaged in the community and, I mean, I read those Bridgerton books when they came out! I was like 11, and I was devouring… When they made that a TV show, and it became the phenomenon it has been, it was the best day of my life. And you know, this is a community that I am very passionate about and a part of! And then seeing this pushback against this, it broke my heart, I’m not going to lie. It really made me devastated to see that, and I don’t know how Julia Quinn does it because she is such a lovely person and she is still… She’ll post about it, and there will be dozens of vitriolic comments about, like, “How dare you go woke?” And like, what? And she’s still there! She’s just still plugging away, posting on social media. It’s very heroic of her end of the show to continue on in the face of this, just, absolutely, A) mean and B) wrong responses to this future sapphic storyline!
Ann: And also, just in terms of Bridgerton, which is already… We don’t turn to Bridgerton for historical accuracy, like, when we’re looking at, for instance, Queen Charlotte. What if she was known and understood and accepted as a Black woman? Where it’s like, her whole heritage, I did a whole episode about that, but it’s like, whatever her heritage was, she was not historically seen as a Black person, she did not move in the world as a Black person; that is not the story. But Bridgerton is like, “But what if she was?” Already, it’s historically inventive. So, to be like, “Bridgerton, how dare you have sapphic people?” Where it’s like, well, we don’t turn to Bridgerton for accuracy. They’re playing Billie Eilish songs at the ball, [Alexandra laughs] like, this is not… Are we turning to them for accuracy? Oh, we’re not, at all? Great.
Alexandra: Yes, I totally agree with you. Although I do feel that then that somehow bleeds into this idea that sapphic romance couldn’t be historically accurate, which of course, as we’ve just shown, is not in any way the truth. So… [sighs] I’m wary of that particular line of discussion of the show.
Ann: Yeah. Well, I can’t even imagine for someone who’s been in the Regency world, fiction world, for so long, like, what the Bridgerton, what the phenomenon of that has meant [laughs] for how complicated this makes everything you’re doing.
Alexandra: Yes, complicated! Complicated, exactly.
Ann: On the one hand, you can be like… For people who don’t know, for me, because I’m writing this book about the Regency, people are like, “The Regency?” For people who don’t know, I’m like, “You know Bridgerton?” And they’re like, “Oh yeah, well I know Bridgerton.” It’s such an easy way to explain the time period, so I appreciate that about it.
Alexandra: It sure is. [laughs] I also say that all the time, yes. When I’m talking to people about what I write, and I’m like, “Well, you know Bridgerton?” And they’re like, “Oh yeah! Bridgerton.” It’s just become a complete shorthand for, you know, when you might have said Jane Austen, now you can say Bridgerton and people know. It’s pretty incredible for all the fandom stuff it has created. It’s also been… I mean, I absolutely love the show, and I certainly think it is available to critique, and I have critiqued it myself, but I also love it.
Ann: Yeah. We started off our conversation with Bridgerton, we’re ending with Bridgerton, but kind of, that’s the elephant in the room when you’re talking about Regency anything these days.
Alexandra: Well, and I think it’s especially relevant to the things that we’ve been talking about, which are A) sex ed and women and women’s sexuality, and lesbian relationships. So, really, it all comes back to Bridgerton, which I think is great.
Ann: Exactly. So, remind everybody again… Your newest book is coming out, but you have other books that are already out. So, just let everybody know so they can get your books.
Alexandra: Yes. I have quite a few books out now. This trilogy that we’ve been talking about is the Belvoir’s Library Trilogy; the first one is called Ne’er Duke Well, and it came out last July; the second in the trilogy is called Earl Crush, it came out in January; and then the third one which is the sapphic one that we’ve been talking about is called Ladies in Hating, and it’s out in September.
Ann: Your titles are amazing! I love your titles, they’re so good.
Alexandra: Ah, thank you! [laughs] Thank you so much. The tradition of the pun title is still alive and well in historical romance, and that makes me very happy because nothing I like more than a little wordplay.
Ann: But yeah, Ladies in Hating comes out in September. It can be pre-ordered. I’m just looking, you have a website, AlexandraVasti.com, and the links are there as well. And where can people follow you? I will not blame you if you’re not online, but if you are, where are you?
Alexandra: If you like sort of goofy historical facts, queer literary history, things like that, I do make a lot of little silly videos on the internet, on Instagram or TikTok, you can follow me. I just did one recently about historical slang for breasts, someone asked me. Someone read “titties” in a historical romance and was like, “Would they have said titties?” So, I have a video, recently, about historical words for breasts.
Ann: That’s very pertinent to listeners of this podcast because we often talk about titties-out behaviour.
Alexandra: [laughs] The answer is almost certainly yes, although they would not have probably spelled it titties. But yes, that would definitely have been available and legible.
Ann: I will just mention, you know, this has been a long discussion but I do find it also interesting that the French Revolution, if you think about Marie Antoinette and how she dressed, the big, huge dresses and stuff, and then the sudden pivot into the Regency, the sort of like, the draping, the Grecian sort of dresses. Some of those were so sexy, like completely see-through dresses, they were having, like, cotton muslin, people would wet themselves down so you could see their nipples. This was like… Sexuality was not hidden away in this time period.
Alexandra: [laughs] Absolutely.
Ann: The dresses were just, I’m like, “Oh my!” I didn’t realize.
Alexandra: I have heard that the dampening the dresses wasn’t real, like, is kind of historical myth. I don’t know. Historical fashion is not my area of expertise in any way, although I will say I have heard that that is it was, like, in political cartoons kind of satirizing this new, way too sexy, revealing fashion.
Ann: Yeah. I think it might have been a couple of famous courtesan-type people maybe went to one party dressed like that once, and it’s just like, everyone’s doing it, this is what everyone’s up to. But even the fact that they did that was like, okay, okay. This is not the Victorian era; this is something different. Anyway. Thank you so much for this conversation. I was so much looking forward to it, and this was so fun.
Alexandra: Thank you so much for having me! This is truly just a dream come true, actually. So, thank you so much.
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So, just to say again, this episode was recorded a bit ago, originally. Alexandra’s book, Ladies in Hating, is now available, so go and get yourself a copy of this! And all of her other books as well. You can learn about her books at AlexandraVasti.com, and follow her on social media as well.
You can also follow me on social media as well. I’m @VulgarHistoryPod, I’m basically everywhere… Everywhere you want to be. Because I’ve got my book, Rebel of the Regency, is coming out next month, or a month and a bit, February 2026. I’m going on all the social medias because I want to promote this book to all, everybody, everybody everywhere. I’m on Instagram, I’m on TikTok, I’m on Facebook now, Threads, Bluesky, we’re on Substack. We’re on… everywhere you are on the internet, there’s me. YouTube! Like, just follow Vulgar History to get all our updates.
But I mean, the place to make sure you get all the updates is to join my Patreon, which is at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter, and you can join there for free to get my updates, and if you pay a little bit, then you get a bit more. But whatever, you know all this stuff, you’re a regular listener, and I appreciate you. Go to RebelOfTheRegency.com for information about my book, which is coming out in February. As I figure out information about my various book tour stuff, that’s going to be all posted there as well. RebelOfTheRegency.com, that’s where you can get all of your information.
And yeah, happy new year to everybody. Can’t wait for you to see what’s coming up in 2026, and until next time, until next year, you know, as a new year’s resolution, 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:
Buy Alexandra’s sapphic Regency romance Ladies in Hating (affiliate link)
Info on Alexandra Vasti and her books
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Preorder info for Ann’s upcoming book, Rebel of the Regency!
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