Meet the mad and bad women of Regency England

by JOYZEL ACEVEDO

In Jezebel’s newest series Rummaging Through the Attic, we interview nonfiction authors whose books explore fascinating moments, characters, and stories in history. For this episode we spoke with Bea Koch, author of Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency, a work that unearths the triumphant stories of the women living and breathing during Regency-era England who were, until now, lost to history.

The cover of Bea Koch’s Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency features an 1817 British painting called “Cloak-Room at the Clifton Assembly Rooms” showing high-society men and women in stiff collars, long dresses, and white gloves. There’s a modern addition, however—namely, that the men’s faces are spray-painted out in pink, leaving only the women looking across the room, to the viewer, and at each other.

The Regency looms large in books and movies, where the era’s beautiful and dressy but still basically wearable fashions and archetypal characters (the spirited young miss! the fussy chaperone! the Napoleonic war hero! the rake!) remain perennially popular. But its actual timespan in British history was very short—9 years, to be exact. The era gets its name from Prince George assuming the role of Prince Regent, a proxy ruler, in 1811 after his father (also George!) was deemed unfit to rule due to illness. His father’s death in 1820 marked the formal end to the Regency era as far as history was concerned. But popular culture was far from through with it.

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