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.

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.