Regency Noir: Romance, Race, and Jane Austen

This research focuses on Regency romance narratives and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies scholarship that foreground Black women’s lives. Leigh-Michil George explores how romantic narratives, like Netflix’s Bridgerton (2020-), Vanessa Riley’s Island Queen (2021), and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010), do important recuperative work as they reimagine the historical record. These twenty-first century narratives, which I term “Regency Noir” are examined alongside Jane Austen’s unfinished 1817 novel Sanditon and its depiction of Miss Lambe, a wealthy woman of color from the West Indies. Building on the work of Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and other Black feminist scholars, the project shows how Regency Noir is invested in the restorative representation of Black women’s desires and pleasures in contrast to an archive that is filled with records of violence against Black women’s bodies.

In her book project, Regency Noir: Romance, Race, and Jane Austen, Leigh-Michil George contrasts Regency Noir’s comforts with the whitewashed comforts that often appear in adaptations of Austen’s fiction. Austen is often viewed as a progenitor of Regency romance, and many readers turn to Austen’s novels and the adaptations for the familiar comforts of genteel societies and country estates. To read Austen in this way often means to read colorblind. Such readings often ignore the existence of enslaved labor and the great wealth it generated for many in the period, including the fictional Sir Thomas Bertram in Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814).

Regency Noir, however, shifts our way of reading and reimagining Austen’s fiction, and the subgenre of Regency romance more broadly, from its traditional focus on a white female gaze to a Black female gaze. The depiction of empowered Black female gaze is alluring and it offers, I argue, a respite from the violent erasures of a whitewashed Regency world. This respite, though, is often interpreted (sometimes negatively) as escapism, but my contention is we should not understand the escapism of Regency Noir in a pejorative sense because it operates through the liberating lens of fugitive relief. In this context, the escapism is less about avoiding the reality of history and more about finding ways to reckon with it.