Romance icon Beverly Jenkins concludes her Old West series with Tempest, a passionate, sweeping love story between a frontier physician and his mail-order bride. Regan Carmichael understands the dangers of traveling to the Wyoming Territory, and doesn’t hesitate to shoot a man she believes is trying to hijack her station wagon. That man turns out to be her intended, Dr. Colton Lee, who was attempting to rescue the coach from bandits. A dynamic woman who seeks equality in marriage is not what Colton had in mind when he set out to find a caretaker for his home and young daughter. But despite his initial shock at Regan’s behavior, he comes to appreciate her strength, and both explore what it would mean to forge a true partnership.

Many depictions of the Wild West have predominantly white characters, but in reality, the American frontier was extremely diverse. The Old West series tells the stories of people of color, and Jenkins has made a point of sharing the historical inspirations for her novels. In order to write a character such as Dr. Colton Lee, Jenkins researched the opportunities for African-American physicians in the 19th century and came across an incredible true story.

As a writer of historical romantic fiction, one of my pleasures is the research. Mining the works of historians such as Dr. Benjamin Quarles, Dorothy A. Sterling, James M. McPherson and others allows me to pepper my novels with documented facts and introduce readers to real life figures they may be unfamiliar with. In my newest release, Tempest, our hero is African-American physician Dr. Colton Lee. The story takes place in 19th century Wyoming, where Jim Crow and segregation were alive and well, so a writer must ask herself—where was he trained? That question took me to the medical school of Howard University, which opened its doors in 1868 with eight students and five faculty members. Among that faculty was the remarkable African-American physician, Dr. Alexander T. Augusta.

Born free in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1825, Augusta hoped to pursue his dreams of becoming a doctor by attending the University of Pennsylvania, only to be denied entrance. However, a member of the school’s faculty took the young black student under his wing and taught him privately. By 1850, Augusta and his Native American wife, Mary O. Burgoin, were living in Canada after he’d been accepted for study by the medical college at the University of Toronto. Upon receiving his M.B., he was appointed head of the Toronto City Hospital.

Back home in the states, the Civil War was raging, but black men weren’t officially allowed to fight for the Union until 1863. On April 14 of that year, Dr. Augusta became the first of eight black officers commissioned. Given the rank of major, he was appointed head surgeon of the 7th U.S. Colored Infantry, a tenure undermined by discrimination and disrespect. The average monthly pay for a major was one hundred and sixty-nine dollars. Major Augusta was initially paid seven dollars; a rate even lower than white privates, who earned thirteen. His letter to Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts solved the problem and resulted in him being compensated appropriately, but other issues remained. In Baltimore, while traveling to a meeting, Augusta was attacked by a mob who took exception to a man of his race wearing a uniform. Back on the war front, his white assistants, who were also surgeons, complained about taking orders from a black man. Rather than settling the matter in Augusta’s favor, President Lincoln transferred him to Camp Barker’s Freedman’s Hospital near Washington. But by war’s end, Augusta had been promoted to lieutenant colonel, making him the highest-ranking black officer of the time.

After his service, he led Lincoln Hospital in Savannah until 1868, and then moved to D.C. where he began private practice and taught at Howard medical school until 1877. During a number of those years, the school fell on hard times and was unable to pay its faculty. Augusta showed his dedication to his students by teaching for free. When he left Howard, he headed up D.C.’s Freedmen’s Hospital.

Despite the many lives he saved on the battlefield, his spotless military record and his stellar achievements before and after the war, the American Medical Association never recognized Dr. Augusta as a physician during his lifetime because of his race. Yet, he holds the title to many of our nation’s African-American firsts: first commissioned officer, first to teach at a U.S. medical school, first to lead a major hospital.

And there’s one more. When he died in 1890, he was the first black officer buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Julia London’s latest highland romance, Devil in Tartan, upends the typical power dynamic of the genre —the bold hero is taken captive by heroine Lottie Livingstone, who has commandeered his ship for her own purposes. London tells us how Lottie is part of a new wave of historical leading ladies who recognize the patriarchal injustices of their world and insist on their own agency and happiness anyway.

There is a misconception about historical romance that persists in the book world at large. They are pejoratively called “bodice rippers,” a term that is a throwback to the 1970s, when the heroines were innocent, powerless creatures and the heroes were worldly, experienced alpha males who knew best. The heroines were charming, delightful confections, and the heroes were drawn to their innocence and felt a strong urge to protect them. The heroes were afforded all the meaningful choices—when to have sex, who to marry. The heroine wanted all those things, but rarely got to lead the way of her fate.

Well, good news. The historical heroine has come a long way in the last several decades.

Throughout history, across the globe, women were little more than chattel. They had very few personal rights and lived by the rules of men. Their personal worth was the sum of their chastity and their ability to provide heirs—preferably sons.

Historical romance novels have always captured that lack of power and personal agency, but in the last few years, the heroines have begun to push back. Authors were introducing women who demanded consent long before the current feminist movement took to the streets. Historical heroines have been inspiring readers to make their desires known and their consent necessary. They’ve been in situations where they needed to be strong, to be clever and, most importantly, to create choices for themselves. Of course the historical heroine is still physically vulnerable in a patriarchal world, and she still lives in a world ruled by men, for men. But she has shed her resignations. She is no longer merely a good girl in an impossible situation—she is not going to sit back and wait for life to come at her.

Gone are the days of bodice ripping, and in their place, we have smart, savvy women in a historical setting who learn how to navigate a male-dominated society. To the extent that she can, she pursues what is best for her both personally and, in some cases, even professionally. She doesn’t need a man. She wants one. She is exploring her sexuality instead of being chased around a desk.

In my opinion, the evolution of the historical romance heroine makes the central romance all the more compelling. It becomes something that’s hard-fought and won. This doesn’t mean the historical heroes have lost their alpha or don’t pursue a woman with the same vigor as they always have. He’s still strong, still protective, still possessive, but alongside that is a current of respect and devotion that our heroines have earned. The hero doesn’t just want her—he needs her now. He needs what she fulfills in him, he needs what he was missing before she came along.

In Devil in Tartan, my hero, Aulay Mackenzie, discovers that Lottie Livingstone, the woman who brazenly steals his ship and holds him captive, fulfills him in a way he never imagined he needed. He wants to see her hang for the crime—he definitely wants to see her hang—but he also recognizes what she might have added to his life had she not committed this crime. It’s quite a conundrum for a captain, a man who has always been in charge of his own destiny. It’s just as much a challenge for Lottie, who has never been in charge of her destiny and, now that she is, wants so badly to lean on someone as strong and capable as Aulay. But her conviction is stronger—she will not give in until she has done all that she can for a clan that depends on her, and to live up to her expectations for herself.

It was a delight to pen this novel, to watch these two characters come to realize so much about themselves and what they need in a partner. I was inspired by the way Lottie grasped for the brass ring even when she didn’t want to do it and didn’t know how to do it. But what she did was always her choice. I hope you enjoy the adventure Lottie embarks on and enjoy the book as much as I enjoyed writing it.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Devil in Tartan.

In the eyes of high society, Cornish noblewoman Tamsyn Pearce is a pretty, if a bit unpolished, new addition to the marriage mart. But Tamsyn’s not in London to get married—she’s there to find a buyer for her latest shipment of smuggled goods. Eva Leigh’s London Underground series features heroines involved in the criminal underworld rather than sheltered society belles. Here, Leigh tells us what drew her to historical romance’s darker corners.

Readers of historical romance have long immersed themselves in tales of the ton—British high society during the Regency and reign of George IV—and with good reason. The intoxicating combination of elegance, wit, fashion and strictly regulated conduct captivates readers and provides a welcome antidote to the chaos of contemporary life. From the foundational novels of Jane Austen to the era’s glittering re-imagination by Georgette Heyer to the sharp, feminist works of Sarah MacLean and Tessa Dare, the Regency period has proven again and again that readers’ appetite for historical romance has never faded.

Yet, as much as high society continues to captivate imaginations, recent television programs such as Taboo and The Frankenstein Chronicles have introduced audiences to a darker, grittier side of the Regency. MacLean, Dare and other romance authors such as Cat Sebastian and Rose Lerner have started exploring some of the shadier aspects of the early 19th century.

My current series, The London Underground, features aristocratic heroes, but the heroines are from the more lawless side of society. The first book in the series, From Duke Till Dawn, brought readers a romance between an extremely principled duke and a con artist who’ll do anything to ensure her survival. In my latest novel, Counting On a Countess, the upper-class hero has been made an earl in exchange for his military service, and while the impoverished heroine is also nobly born, she’s the head of a Cornish smuggling operation.

Liminal figures have fascinated me—from my earliest youthful daydreams of being a cat burglar to fixating on the scruffy nerf herder scoundrel, Han Solo, and on to learning about women such as Mary Seacole and Mary Anning, who made inroads in male-dominated fields. And while, like many readers, I enjoy fantasies about elegant balls and promenades along Hyde Park’s Rotten Row, I also want to know more about the people—especially women—who didn’t quite fit into prevailing ideas of “proper” behavior.

If genteel women and aristocratic women deserve stories about their journeys to love, don’t working-class and impoverished women deserve them, too? An accident of birth is not the indicator of someone’s moral character. I wanted to write books that showed women’s strength in the face of financial and social adversity, as well as these women finding love and acceptance, so I envisioned The London Underground series.

For research, there was no shortage of texts, including Donald A. Low’s The Regency Underworld, The London Underworld in the Victorian Period by Henry Mayhew, et al., and the often-used The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. To glean more information about smuggling, I turned to Smuggling in Cornwall: An Illustrated History by Jeremy Rowett Johns and Richard Platt’s Smuggling in the British Isles. Naturally, the internet provided a wealth of information—such as finding photos on Pinterest of the Cornish coast where my heroine conducts her smuggling.

For me, the greatest trick with research is not finding the information needed, but knowing when to stop researching and start writing. But eventually, I cut the cord and wrote the story of Tamsyn Pearce, baron’s daughter and smuggler.

And while I will continue to read (and write) tales of society’s dazzling elite, I’ll turn my eyes from the stars down to the streets, where love and adventure await. After all, doesn’t everyone deserve a happily ever after?

A notorious rake and a buttoned-up paragon of respectability. A mysterious, reclusive earl and a con artist. Cat Sebastian has gained a devoted following by transforming beloved Regency romance tropes and characters into gay love stories.

The first book in her new series, Unmasked by the Marquess, uses the time-honored trope of a girl dressing as a boy. Here, Sebastian tells us how she detangled the classic plot from its potentially regressive implications in order to create a far more progressive story—a romance between a woman who discovers that she identifies as nonbinary, and the grumpy bisexual nobleman who utterly adores her.

I got the idea for writing Unmasked by the Marquess, in which a character identifies as nonbinary in the early 1800s, when somebody on Twitter said that they’d like to read a romance novel with the classic girl-dressed-as-a-boy trope, but where the girl realizes she isn’t a girl after all. I can’t remember the exact wording, and I wish I knew who the author of the tweet was, but the comment was like an anvil dropping on my head. I adore the girl-in-breeches plot, but it’s often transphobic and biphobic in its execution. I realized at that moment that I could twist the trope around and tell a story I had been toying with for ages.

At around the time I started plotting Unmasked, I read E.E. Ottoman’s shatteringly beautiful Documenting Light, a contemporary romance between a trans man and a nonbinary person who begins to acknowledge their nonbinary identity over the course of the book. The characters find an old photograph that may have been of a same-sex couple and are frustrated by the practice of assuming historical personages are straight until proven otherwise. This practice is problematic on many levels: it frames being straight and cis as normal, it has an “innocent until proven guilty” quality that implies queerness is shameful, and it ignores all the ways queerness has deliberately been concealed and erased from the historical record. When people are living under threat of criminal prosecution and social ostracization for their sexual orientation and gender identity, we can’t expect them to leave proof lying about. Similarly, it’s unsurprising that their family members would take care to burn letters and diaries after their death.

This is all to say, I wrote Unmasked with the understanding that trans and nonbinary people have always existed. Once you accept this, you realize history is filled with people who might have been transgender. All those people who were assigned female at birth (AFAB) but dressed in men’s clothes in order to become soldiers or doctors or otherwise avail themselves of opportunities that were reserved to men, may well have been trans men. Similarly, in 18th-century England, there were quite a few instances of AFAB people marrying women. We’ll never know whether they were con artists, trans people or queer women enjoying domestic bliss, but they may well have been trans, and we need to acknowledge that possibility. (It’s also worth pointing out that they were only publicly exposed when something went wrong; we can only guess how many people flew happily under the radar or were privately out to close friends).

What many of those instances have in common is that people dressed or lived as men in order to take advantage of opportunities—whether practicing medicine or marrying a woman—that were unavailable to women at the time. This freedom is something audiences have found compelling about girl-in-breeches stories, from Shakespeare to modern romance novels. In Unmasked, Robin first disguises herself as her employer to attend university, and then later to prevent her employer’s sister from being rendered homeless and penniless due to the entail of the family property, but ultimately the freedom she seeks in male attire is freedom from the vague uneasiness and dysphoria that tainted her earlier life, the freedom to be her authentic self.

It’s impossible to write about the girl-in-breeches trope without addressing its typical pitfalls. For example, a hero’s dismay at his unaccountable attraction to a person he believes to be a man reads as either homophobia or biphobia. Alternatively, if the hero somehow intuits the true gender of the heroine, this generally reads as transphobia to me, with its assumption that the gender of a person can be divined from physical attributes despite how they choose to present themselves to the world. When crafting the character of Robin, I made sure she was paired with a partner for whom gender is not a factor when it comes to attraction. Alistair, the titular marquess, is bisexual and comfortable with being attracted to people of all genders.

Another issue is that books employing this trope often fail to consider the gender identity of the character. When the character is happy and confident in men’s clothing, and then sad and anxious when forced to live as a woman, I want the text to engage with the possibility that the character is not a cis woman. Not doing so comes across as trans-erasure.

While I am very aware that this is imposing current social norms on characters from two hundred years ago, I can’t see any reason why a book written today ought to preserve the past’s worst attitudes without good cause. Certainly members of marginalized groups had grim experiences in the past, but many also managed to thrive and have happy, full lives, alongside friends and partners with whom they could be authentic. My goal as a writer is to tell those stories, to populate the past with stories of people who have been left out or overlooked.

Kelly Bowen’s current series, The Devils of Dover, centers around a finishing school for girls in the evocative coastal setting of Dover. As the series goes on, it becomes clear that secondary themes of the books are the Napoleonic Wars and their effect on people at all levels of society. A near-constant backdrop in the era, the continental conflict is almost never explored in depth in Regency romance beyond giving a titled aristocrat a reason to brood. Here, Bowen tells us why the wars were all the things we don’t associate with the Regency—chaotic, socially disruptive and for some, liberating.

It is often unusual to come across more than a passing mention of the Napoleonic Wars in British Regency-set novels. Yet there are extraordinary real-life accounts of courage, hardship and bravery that can’t be overlooked and offer inspiration for my own tales. The hero in my new novel, Last Night With the Earl, is a veteran of this conflict and is finally returning to England. As an officer and the son of an earl, Eli Dawes’ experience on the battlefield has disabused him of any romantic notion of war and his homecoming has opened his eyes to the struggle to survive beyond his privileged world.

The wars that engulfed almost the entire European continent for nearly two decades cost 2.5-3.5 million soldiers their lives. And even though the battles were not fought on British soil, they still had a huge impact on the lives of those British citizens left behind. Massive taxes to fund the war effort were levied. At the same time, food prices and unemployment skyrocketed due to wartime trading restrictions and increased industrialization. Many desperate men—and women—faced with starvation enlisted in the military. But at the war’s end, circumstances did not get better.

For those soldiers who did survive to return to Britain, there were no war memorials or recognition. Many were weakened, crippled or severely maimed. They, like the widows and families of fallen soldiers, were left to fend for themselves as best as they could, reduced, in many cases to stealing or begging. Or, in Kent, where the Devils of Dover series is set, smuggling.

Over the centuries, the smuggling trade flourished along the Kent coastline with its proximity and easy access to the continent. The practice was not without its risks, yet after the wars, the illicit trade became even more dangerous with the reassignment of the Crown’s soldiers from the battlefields of Europe to the coastlines of England. Their directive was to bring order to the lawless coasts and end smuggling for good.

Rose Hayward, the heroine in this novel, is well-acquainted with this quandary. Living in Dover, she is familiar with those who so valiantly served their country and are now hunted by the law for surviving the only way left to them. Her position at the elite finishing school managed by her sister, Clara, has allowed her to run interference with the law more than once to protect these individuals. The sudden arrival of Eli Dawes provides her with a fierce ally and champion she wasn’t expecting. If there was a silver lining in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, it was the resulting political, economic and social unrest helped ignite the beginnings of reform.

Eli isn’t the only character I’ve written who served on the front lines of the Napoleonic wars. Harland Hayward—baron, surgeon and the hero of the next book in the series (A Rogue by Night)—is also a veteran. And so is the heroine, Katherine Wright. An estimated 4,000 women accompanied the British army, working and sometimes fighting alongside husbands and lovers, brothers and fathers. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention their contributions here.

The Napoleonic Wars were huge in scope and their direct and indirect effects were profound. Writing about some of these effects—real facts woven into my own fiction—seems not only justified but essential. The men and women who faced impossible odds and prevailed offer an author no end of inspiration.

Kelly Bowen attended the University of Manitoba and earned a Master of Science degree in veterinary physiology and endocrinology. Her infatuation with history and weakness for a good love story led her down the path of historical romance. When she is not writing, she seizes every opportunity to explore ruins and battlefields.

Romances set at the end of the 19th century are usually westerns, taking place in the last gasp of the Old West. But in recent years, some books set in the period have moved back east, to the glittering, booming New York City of the Gilded Age. We’ve been longing for historical romances set in unique time periods and Maya Rodale, whose new book Duchess by Design is one of the most exciting new additions to the subgenre, is here to tell us what makes the Gilded Age so alluring.

Mention historical romance novels and most readers will think of a Regency-era duke, the occasional pirate or a laird in the Scottish highlands and not too much bathing. But the American Gilded Age is having a moment as authors like Joanna Shupe, Marie Force and myself turn to a subgenre pioneered by authors like Beverly Jenkins, Laura Lee Guhrke and Brenda Joyce. When it comes to irrepressible spirit, dynamic heroes and heroines, fascinating history—and running water!—nothing compares to the Gilded Age romance.

The Gilded Age—a coin termed by Mark Twain—is roughly defined as the latter half of the 19th century in America. It’s an age of massive transformation, tremendous wealth, high conflict and high drama. This is the era of Robber Barons, Dollar Princesses and also extreme poverty; it’s the era of transcontinental railroads, Fifth Avenue mansions with modern conveniences and a progressive spirit hoping to change the world for the better. Guhrke sums it up perfectly: “There was tremendous change and upheaval. That atmosphere is a storyteller’s dream.”

Legendary author Jenkins, who writes Westerns set in this period, is drawn to the “excitement, expansion and possibilities” of the era and Force notes that it’s an era of “innovation and progress.” Whether its transcontinental trains, the invention of department stores or rising skyscrapers, the world was changing dramatically, which is the perfect backdrop for adventurous characters and complicated love stories. For those who love history—and think they know American history already—a Gilded Age romance might offer some surprises. Shupe points out that stories set in this age remind us, “Our history is much more complex and diverse than we were taught in school. So many wonderful stories have been left untold and unexplored.”

The Manhattan set Gilded Age novel definitely has elements that will appeal to the lover of Regency romance—whether it’s corsets, horse-drawn carriages or romantic moments by candlelight. While the Regency has the haute ton, the Gilded Age has the Four Hundred (a coin termed to describe the limited number of people who could fit in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, a.k.a. the highest of New York society). In both time periods there is a high society to navigate with wit and daring. As Shupe notes, “Both Regency and Gilded Age romances are full of wealthy people and scandalous behavior that shocks the rigid society around them. Carriages, balls, fancy dresses, mansions . . . both periods are brimming with glitz and glamour.” And in both time periods, there’s an emphasis on Getting Married and the tension between a marriage of wealth, status and convenience—or the love match. Classic romance conflicts!

But the novelty of the Gilded Age setting allows familiar tropes to be refreshed due to the types of heroes and heroines one finds in this era. There’s a particular kind of woman who we’ll find strutting across the pages of a Gilded Age romance. Guhrke, who writes novels set in England during this era, says, “In the Regency, a woman gained a position in the world only through marriage. It was almost impossible for a woman to gain recognition for anything in her own right. Her entire identity was based on who her father and husband were and what accomplishments, wealth and position they had.” But women during the Gilded Age, however, were embarking on higher education, becoming doctors (Elizabeth Blackwell), working as journalists (Nellie Bly), social reformers (Lillian Wald) and advocating for the right to vote and whole host of progressive causes. The heroine of my novel, Duchess by Design, rises from mere seamstress to proprietor of her own dressmaking establishment—she doesn’t land a duke so much as he lands her. The Gilded Age is a great time for historical heroines who do things and the type of heroes who find that kind of woman alluring.

Most of us read historical romance for the escape, and while the Gilded Age has so many parallels to our current world (income inequality, a progressive spirit, an ever-changing world), these romance novels provide that oh-so necessary escape to a setting where dynamic characters face high conflicts and still find life, liberty and happily ever after.

When Vanessa Kelly concluded her Improper Princesses series with The Highlander’s Princess Bride, which featured a sprawling family of gorgeous, eligible Scottish men, it seemed fated by the romance gods that the Kendrick family would play a part in her next book.

Lo and behold, The Highlander Who Protected Me is Kelly’s first book in a new series which will tell the love stories of the wild, but eminently lovable Kendricks, starting with ex-soldier Royal and the British heiress he’s sworn to protect.

With the fourth season of “Outlander” only days away, Kelly told us why there will always be fans of men in kilts.

The long wait for the return of “Outlander”—or Droughtlander, as some fans referred to the seemingly interminable passage of time—is almost over. Soon our favorite Highlander and his sassy sassenach will return to the small screen with their exciting adventures. Cue up the mania for all things Scottish!

That mania extends to readers as well, with their insatiable love for Highlander and Scottish romance. Even as other historical romance genres wax and wane, Scottish romance remains popular. Why do readers love it, with a particularly steadfast devotion to the Highlander hero archetype?

Let’s start with Scotland itself, especially the Highlands. They are a place of astounding beauty, what the Romantic poets would have characterized as awesome in the original sense of the word—inspiring awe. Scotland is a land of myth and magic, rich in cultural traditions and history. As Diana Gabaldon said in an interview, “there are stories under every rock in Scotland.”

That sense of Highland magic and story is beautifully captured in Outlander and its TV adaptation. Who can forget the mythic dance at Craigh na Dun on the Eve of Samhain, or the dramatic settings of loch, mountain and sky that form the backdrop of so many Scottish-set tales? The reader senses that almost anything could happen in the Highlands, not the least of which is stumbling upon a rugged Highlander with a brogue (let’s not underestimate the appeal of that brogue).

Ruggedness is a key element to the appeal of the Highlander hero. When it comes to manly men, it’s hard to find a more fitting archetype. Highlanders have to be rugged. They confront a physically challenging landscape, an often-wretched climate and frequent attacks from outsiders—or sometimes battles among themselves, quite honestly. Before the English invaded Scotland, clan often fought clan. The Scots could be notoriously argumentative and grudges led to feuds that lasted for decades, especially when a clan’s honor was at stake (this is a theme in my latest book).

You certainly won’t find our Highlander hero sitting around the gentlemen’s club, getting sloshed on brandy and staggering home to his plush bed, waiting for the over-worked valet to pull off his exquisitely polished boots. No, our heroes are facing down the elements, the enemy and sometimes each other. They are the epitome of the competent, courageous and canny alpha male.

And what does every good alpha male need? A strong, smart woman, of course. The archetypal Highlander hero is attracted to a verra strong woman, because he needs and wants her as much as she needs and wants him. Think of Jamie Fraser’s sister, for example. Jenny Murray is tough, smart and pretty, a classic Highland heroine who keeps the castle fires burning and takes no guff from her menfolk. They love her all the more for it, because they know she always has their backs.

For today’s romance reader, what could be better than a hero who truly appreciates a strong and capable woman?

Speaking of readers, I asked some of mine to list the qualities they most love in Highlander heroes. By far, the most important was loyalty—loyalty to family, to clan and to their women. These are men who fight for honor and love, and to protect their family and traditions, often against forces far superior in numbers and technology. As one of my readers noted, the English tried for decades to destroy the Highland culture. And even though they eventually did conquer the country and outlawed many Scottish traditions, they never truly conquered the soul of the Highlander.

Fiercely protective and committed to honor against all odds, the Highlander hero is the ultimate romantic. Even when he knows the cause is lost, he fights to the end, because he knows his fight is just. He’s willing to sacrifice everything, and rarely if ever takes the easy way out. That kind of self-sacrifice can be deeply, if often tragically, romantic.

The hero of my latest book, The Highlander Who Protected Me, is a true Highland warrior. Like Jamie Fraser, Royal Kendrick is a wounded warrior. But despite the damage he’s suffered to body and spirit, Royal remains true to the code of honor and loyalty, willing to make any sacrifice for family, clan and the woman he loves.

Coincidentally, my heroine is a sharp-witted, independent sassenach who, like Claire, chafes at the notion that she needs a man to protect her. In every way that matters, Lady Ainsley Matthews is Royal’s equal. When she does need a man to shield her from a truly terrible set of circumstances, she turns to her rugged Highland hero, knowing he won’t let her down.

Fierce, loyal, protective, honourable, courageous—these are the bedrock qualities that make the Highlander hero so special, and consistently bring readers back to the romance and magic of the Scottish Highlands.

Finally, let’s not forget the kilts. Always and forever the kilts.

In Amy Jarecki’s The Highland Earl, John Erskine and Evelyn Pierrepont are on opposite sides of the first Jacobite uprising. They’re also husband and wife. In this essay, Jarecki shares how the life of John Erskine, Earl of Mar, inspired her action-packed and emotionally complex new historical romance.

One of my favorite things about writing Scottish romance is weaving historical fact into my books. My editor dubbed my latest release as Mr. and Mrs. Smith meets Outlander, and though the comparison made me laugh, she was pretty close to the truth.

I always like to base my characters on real-life people, and the first Jacobite uprising has a particularly fascinating cast. This was a tumultuous time period in which England was mercilessly squeezing Scotland for taxes, Queen Anne had an almost psychotic fear of popery (Catholics) and nearly half the Kingdom of Great Britain believed in the succession of James Francis Edward Stuart, the son of England’s deposed King James II. These “traitors” were ostracized as Jacobites, from the Latin form of “James.”

In The Highland Earl, I chose John Erskine, the Earl of Mar, as my hero. He was a Scot who served in Queen Anne’s cabinet, holding many positions, including Secretary of State, for Scotland. It’s hard to imagine how difficult it must have been to balance his duty to England with his loyalty to his homeland. He signed a number of controversial documents, his hand forced on some, to keep his beloved country from bankruptcy. Because he had to walk that delicate balance, he was highly criticized by the public and dubbed “Bobbin John.”

Historians have little information about Lady Frances Pierrepont, the woman I chose as the inspiration for my heroine, Evelyn. We know that she was the daughter of the Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull and that her dowry was sizable enough to release Mar from his debts. Sometimes the most fun you have as a writer is getting to fill in the details, so I made my Evelyn a spy sympathetic to the Jacobite cause—something that would put her in direct opposition to her husband, who served Queen Anne. Let the spy games begin. . . .

Inside Alloa Tower: portraits of John Erskine, Earl of Mar, with his son, Thomas, and of Frances (the inspiration for my character Evelyn), Countess of Mar.

During my research, I was fortunate enough to visit the ancestral home of the Earl of Mar, Alloa Tower. There I met with a historian with whom I spoke for hours and learned things about John Erskine I never would have found in a book. His life was tumultuous, and after the period in which The Highland Earl takes place, he became the Stuart prince’s general and led the Jacobites into the Battle of Sherriffmuir. He was also a brilliant architect and engineer. He designed and built an extensive manor onto Alloa Tower (pictured below), but it unfortunately burned down. However, in the picture you can see marks where the manor was added. He also designed and built a canal from his mine to the Firth of Forth to more easily transport his coal. It is fascinating to uncover these tidbits of historical fact and weave them into my stories.

Alloa Tower, side

Alloa Tower, front

I hope you’ll join me on this adventure where fact meets fiction and where lies and deceit nearly ruin a love that will grow to transcend time.

In Minerva Spencer’s Scandalous, missionary Sarah Fisher is rescued by dashing, sensual privateer Martín Bouchard, a former slave who uses his position to liberate other African captives. Here, Spencer shares why the pirate life is so appealing—and lists her five favorite pirate romances.

I have a knack for doing things backward, and writing my first pirate romance novel is a case in point. Instead of doing some reconnaissance to see what kind of pirate books were already out in the world, I just sat down and started writing.

I’d read the most well known of the pirate tales when I was a kid—Treasure Island, Peter Pan and Captain Blood, for example—but I’d never read a pirate romance. I never even knew such a subgenre of romance existed.

It wasn’t until I’d sold my first three books, the beginning of my Outcasts series, that I discovered I’d inadvertently fallen into a sister/brotherhood of sorts: pirate fanatics.

Now, when I say pirates, I’m also including privateers—those ships that sailed under the authority of a government. Martín Bouchard, the hero in my new novel Scandalous, sails under a letter of marque granted by the king of England. Since most privateers operated during a time of war, it’s easy to see how one nation’s privateers were often another country’s pirates.

Pirates and privateers weren’t the only ones who engaged in capturing ships for prize money. The navies of the world also seized enemy vessels and divided the bounty among the crew—sharing out the profits from the captain all the way down to the lowest scrub boy.

Selling a captured ship wasn’t easy. Privateers couldn’t just nail a “Garage Sale” sign on the ship and start selling parts. They had to take their claims before special courts set up for that purpose.

Incidentally, the practice of rewarding a crew with prize money continued well into the 20th century. The last U.S. naval vessel to seize an enemy ship and distribute the bounty among its crew was in 1941!

Whether you like bad boy pirates or you just enjoy nautical tales in general, there are lots of great stories. Since discovering pirate romance, I’ve read every book I could get my hands on.

I’d like to share a list of my favorite novels—just a few I recommend if you are a novice when it comes to romance on the high seas. (It would be difficult to pick a favorite, so I’ll just list them alphabetically by author.) I warn you—once you begin reading pirate romances, it’s hard to stop!

The Rogue Pirate’s Bride by Shana Galen

This pirate romance has the added bonus of the heroine masquerading as a boy.

Beauvallet by Georgette Heyer

This is Heyer’s only pirate novel, and it has a distinct nautical feel while having that same great Heyer banter.

Scandalous Desires by Elizabeth Hoyt

Charming Mickey O’Connor is a pirate to die for. This story packs so much emotional punch, you won’t care that the story never leaves dry land.

The Pirate Lord by Sabrina Jeffries

This is another one-of-a-kind romance—a pirate and his crew capture a ship full of female prisoners bound for New South Wales.

Captured by Beverly Jenkins

I have to admit Dominic is my favorite sort of hero—on land or sea—an intelligent alpha with a mission.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Scandalous.

Joanna Shupe’s latest historical romance series, Uptown Girls, follows three Gilded Age society girls as they find love outside the stifling ballrooms of high-class New York City society. In The Devil of Downtown, Shupe’s conclusion to the series, kindhearted activist Justine Greene falls for a man who would, by all accounts, appear to be her exact opposite: ruthless crime boss Jack Mulligan. But how can an author write such a character without making him too violent or amoral to be a believable love interest, nor defanging him so much that he loses the allure of the forbidden? In this essay, Shupe reveals her secrets.

Why do we love a bad boy?

It’s an age-old question, but one that perhaps a romance reader understands best of all. Many of us have loved stories with a charming rake or a ruthless billionaire.

But how bad is too bad? What about when the hero is a criminal?

All of the books in the Uptown Girls series have featured Gilded Age “bad boys”—men who make their own rules and profit handsomely for it. They each live by their own code of honor and can justify the reasons for their actions . . . both legal and illegal. The Rogue of Fifth Avenue’s Frank Tripp is a slick-talking lawyer who bends the law to fit his needs. Clayton Madden, the dark casino owner in The Prince of Broadway, is out to fleece every man in town with deep pockets.

In The Devil of Downtown, however, I went a step further. The hero, Jack Mulligan, is the criminal kingpin of Gilded Age New York City.

He’s a good guy, I swear. (But not too good. ☺)

“Good” vs. “Bad”
Part of what makes writing a criminal hero easier for me is the Gilded Age itself. Corruption was rampant in late 19th-century New York City. Many of the “good guys” were actually bad—such as the police, judges and politicians. And let’s not forget about the wealthy tycoons who underpaid their workers, used child labor and busted unions every chance they got. There were no rules, no laws, if you had enough money.

As long as you were rich, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted. So, the wealth of each Uptown Girls hero allows him enough power to create his own world, one where he makes the rules.

Using History
Historical research also helped when I was crafting each hero. Jack Mulligan is loosely based on a real-life Gilded Age figure, Paul Kelly. A boxer turned gangster, Kelly founded the Five Points Gang, which absorbed the smaller gangs of the area to become a large organization. He dressed like a dandy, spoke many languages and entertained members of high society at his clubs, and Kelly is widely considered the father of American organized crime. Lucky Luciano, Al Capone and Meyer Lansky are just a few of the men who gained experience within Kelly’s empire.

But there were parts I had to rethink for a modern audience. For example, while the real Paul Kelly owned brothels, this was a line my heroes would not cross. So I had to write in backstories for both Jack and Clayton Madden as to why they avoided the sex trade.

In Jack’s case, he was raised in a brothel and saw the violence sometimes inflicted upon women. It’s well known in his territory that he doesn’t tolerate the mistreatment of women, ever.

Show, Don’t Tell
I struggled with how to show the reader that a dangerous dude is really dangerous, even when he’s the hero. Because you can’t just tell the reader he’s bad, you have to prove it. Yet, the reader still has to like the character and root for him in the end.

It’s a delicate balance.

In fact, early beta readers of The Devil of Downtown told me the story needed more “devil,” that the hero was too nice. So I wrote some scenes where the violence either just occurred or was directed at someone he cared about.

Also, it helps to have another person who is even worse as a foil for the hero. Jack Mulligan has a rival trying to encroach on his territory. So most of Jack’s violence is directed at the book’s antagonist, a man who tries to kill Jack multiple times. In The Prince of Broadway, Clay’s ire is directed at the cops who try to swindle him and the men who try to cheat in his casino.

Gone, Baby Gone
All of the Uptown Girls heroes are head over heels for the heroines from practically the start of the book. This allows the reader to see a tender side, a squishy marshmallow center that contrasts his public badass persona. In a romance, this can help with likability because we need to believe that he’s lovable, that even someone who flirts with danger—or is knee-deep in danger—is worthy of a happily ever after.

He Did It His Way
We’ve all heard the phrase “honor among thieves.” The Uptown Girls heroes all have a very strong sense of what is honorable to them. Frank, the lawyer in The Rogue of Fifth Avenue, can justify anything that helps his client, even if it’s shady. Clayton Madden will never tell a lie, not for any reason.

And Jack Mulligan looks after the people in his neighborhood as if they were his family. Yes, he’s running the biggest criminal enterprise in the city, but he employs thousands. He punishes anyone who hurts women and children. He’s trying to make the Bowery and the Five Points a safer place for families.

So there are some tricks of the author trade that I used in The Devil of Downtown. Hopefully readers will find Jack Mulligan as compelling, sexy and dangerous as I envisioned him in my head.

After taking readers on a dazzling tour of Regency astronomy, naturalism and embroidery in The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics, Olivia Waite is back with another gloriously nerdy, rigorously researched historical romance. The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows follows printer Agatha Griffin and beekeeper Penelope Flood as they fall in love, against the tumultuous, chaotic backdrop of Britain circa 1820.

In this essay, Waite explains why printing and beekeeping are not only fascinating topics in and of themselves, but also perfectly suited to tell a story of radical love, together.

Bees and people have an ancient relationship. There are cave paintings of honey hunters dating back eight thousand years, before the dawn of anything like modern history. And for nearly as long, people have been seeing in beehives a utopian idea of what human society could be. In newly imperial Rome, Virgil wrote of bees as both valiant warriors and obedient subjects bound in service to their king (as he mistakenly called the queen bee). People saw from very early on that different bees performed different jobs to support the hive as a whole, and this combination of communal good and social stratification made bees a popular symbol for political idealists of nearly every stripe.

When you start thinking of bees as people, you want them to have the best possible home.

So it’s not surprising that during the late 18th and early 19th century—a time chock-full of Western revolutions, uprisings, monarchist backlash and democratic zeal—one of the great goals of science was designing a new and better beehive. Skep hives, round domes woven of straw, had been in common use in Northern Europe for centuries; they were cheap to make and easy to care for. They were not, however, easy for people to get honey out of without killing every bee inside, often using sulphur smoke that tainted the taste of the honey. The killing wasn’t necessarily a problem for many farming folk—after all, people raised cows and pigs and chickens for butchering—but it increasingly became a problem for scientifically minded beekeepers.

After all, if bees are a bit like people, then killing them is a bit like murder.

So while the American colonies and the French political classes were flinging off their monarchist chains (while keeping Black slave labor shackled), there was also an explosion of new hive designs, many of them strange and ambitious and weirdly charming. They were built of wood and glass and metal; they were cylinders or cabinets or jars, or the bold octagonal shape of the Stewarton hive (1819). The Langstroth hive, still used today, would eventually triumph over all these after the middle of the century, but there is something irresistibly earnest about the designs that occupied this transitional era. They’re so hopeful—ideal worlds in miniature, as utopian as the political optimists who were redesigning human societies according to democratic principles (howsoever unequally applied across race, gender and so on). When you start thinking of bees as people, you want them to have the best possible home.

My favorite design by far is the leaf hive, or folio hive, developed by blind Swiss entomologist François Huber. Using observations from his wife, Marie, and servant François Burnens, Huber made several important discoveries about honeybee anatomy, and developed an observation hive with separate rectangular sections that hinged at the back. At the front, the sections could be spread open like the pages of a book.

Reader, I fell in love.

My own relationship to bees began with my great-grandfather, who kept three Langstroth hives on a hill overlooking the sea. There was something mystical in the way he approached the hives in his veiled hat and leather gloves and removed one humming frame at a time, checking for brood and honey. I found bees in children’s books defending the protagonists against witchcraft, and bees as reincarnated human souls in Greek myths. Even nonfiction books full of bee facts gave me that telltale throb of good poetry: bee dances as complex language, their sensitivity to magnetism and electrical charges, the discovery that every worker bee’s sting was also a suicide.

And then I came across Huber and his leaf hive while reading about the history of science for The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics—and I knew I had to write a lady beekeeper for the sequel set in 1820. Too early for Langstroth, but perfect for a hive that looked like a book full of bees. I paired her with a stubborn printer, a woman and artist who was trying to walk the difficult line between vital political critique and seditious material that could get her imprisoned or worse.

There was plenty for a printer to be seditious about: 1820 was a famously tumultuous year in English social history. King George IV’s animosity for his wife burst into full flower as she returned from Italy demanding to be officially crowned. Rather than share the throne with a woman he loathed, George attempted to divorce her via a Bill of Pains and Penalties. Caroline was essentially put on trial in both in Parliament and the press: Her servants were interrogated, her household surveilled by George’s agents, her every action scrutinized for propriety by people who had reason to wish her the worst.

If I were to sum up the way the English public reacted to this threat against their queen, I could do it in one word: They swarmed.

Everyone who could write put out a pamphlet and the caricatures were passed around and chortled over like today’s best memes.

Letters were written in defense of the queen from cities and towns and trade guilds all over the country, and crowds presented them to her en masse at Brandenburg House. Londoners rioted; soldiers mutinied; angry crowds broke windows in country towns; everyone who could write put out a pamphlet and the caricatures were passed around and chortled over like today’s best memes. Women became part of the public political conversation in larger numbers than ever, despite still being barred from the vote. Some of this agitation was the result of George’s political opposition sensing an opportunity and grabbing onto it with both hands; some of it was sincere patriotism or chivalry in defense of a royal lady.

Despite the fall of Napoleon, despite the failure of the French revolutionary experiment, the English government trembled to its foundations. The divorce Bill passed the House of Lords—but was dropped since it was clear it would never make it out of the Commons, which was thronged with pro-Caroline votes.

The English people celebrated the failure of the Bill as if they’d won a great military victory. Despite the corruption of the government, the power of the landed gentry, the lack of suffrage for women and many men, the people knew their voices had been heard and their collective power felt.

Caroline never was crowned queen. She died painfully of cancer the following summer. Her funeral procession turned into a riot; two men were killed by soldiers. She had been a symbol for the radicals and reformers, but never a supporter of their ideals and push for political change. But in organizing for her cause, the reformers had developed effective tactics to appeal to the public and in print. The next few decades saw the passage of the Great Reform Act and the rise of Chartism and the early cooperative movement, among other advances.

The increasing industrialization of the Victorian era used bees more and more metaphorically, even as beekeeping itself became standardized and a foundation of the agricultural industry. In 1867, caricaturist George Cruikshank—who had drawn many of the Georgian era’s most popular and enduring cartoons—produced a reworked engraving of his British Beehive, which depicted a conservative view of English society, as orderly as any honeybee could wish. Don’t change what’s already perfect, Cruikshank implied. The same year saw the publication of the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital, which used worker bees to argue that human labor was more than merely physical—that it had an ideal, reflective aspect that created value. People: better than bees, said Marx!

Today, bees as pollinators are vital to global food production—and yet they are increasingly threatened by environmental hazards, climate change and good old-fashioned human theft. It turns out that if we lose bees, we’ll also lose a lot of people. Domestication goes two ways: We can’t be in a historically long-term relationship with another creature and then continue normally if it vanishes.

I’m almost as worried about the bees these days as I am about people. I have to hope the story of this relationship is a romance, that people and bees will manage somehow to live happily ever after, together.

Suzanne Enoch’s Hit Me With Your Best Scot transports romance fans away from glittering ballrooms and polite country lanes and into the exciting and under-explored setting of the Regency-era theater. Enoch shares how she brought to life the backstage romance of actress Persephone Jones and Scottish aristocrat Coll MacTaggert.

In the 50ish books I’ve written, this is the first time I’ve featured an actor or actress as a main character. Having spent most of my writing time in the English Regency and doing the research that goes with that, there were names I’d heard of: Edmund Kean, Joseph Grimaldi, Fanny Abington, Sarah Siddons and, of course, the Drury Lane Theater, the one at Covent Gardens and the famous Lyceum.

For the tale of actress Persephone Jones and her romance with Coll MacTaggert, Lord Glendarril, I didn’t want to use an actual theater, so I invented the St. Genesius, a rival to the royal theater of Drury Lane. (Genesius is the patron saint of actors.) There were a couple of specific things I needed, including a small dressing room for an actress, catwalks galore, a backstage area filled with old props, backdrops and lots of places for a big Highlander to feel claustrophobic. All the backstage antics made using a fictional theater much simpler than trying to adapt the story to a real one.

I love doing research and probably have over 500 books on topics from the history of the lavatory to the scourge of gout, but for this story I needed to add a couple more to my shelves. (Yay, book shopping!) The Time Traveller’s Guide to British Theater: The First Four Hundred Years by Aleks Sierz and Lia Ghilardi gave me a good overview, while Rival Queens: Actresses, Performances, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater by Felicity Nussbaum gave me lots of specifics—and they both made me jealous of long titles. Oh, and I looked through Roaring Boys: Shakespeare’s Rat Pack by Judith Cook just because I wanted to.

In the course of writing, I’ve discovered that atmosphere is more important than specifics, but it’s also important to have a grasp of the topic so you’re just not flinging words like “blocking” and “downstage” and “stage right” around willy-nilly. That said, it was great fun to invent a close-knit acting troupe, have some theater rivalries and make some hopefully amusing use of “the Scottish play,” including one actor who refuses to say “Macbeth” even when the name appears in the text of the play.

I chose Macbeth as the play being performed during the course of the book because my hero, Coll, happens to be Scottish, and because of the supposed bad luck that frequently accompanies the performance of that particular play. That allowed me to keep the characters guessing over whether the mishaps that keep befalling Persephone Jones are simply because of the play, or if something more sinister is at work. Plus, all the male actors could be envious of how very fine Coll looked in a kilt.

There’s lots more to Hit Me With Your Best Scot than the theater, of course—including a cat named Hades, picnics in the park, fires, a masquerade ball, a lost heiress and a viscount who has 28 days to find a bride or he loses his fortune. The entire book was so fun to write, and I’m kind of wishing I’d given the MacTaggert family more than three Highlander brothers so I could keep writing in this warm, wild, witty world.

Author photo by Dinamariephotography.com