Regency Noir: Jane Austen’s Afterlives in Sanditon and Bridgerton

¹ Geffen Academy at UCLA.

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that Regency romance narratives that foreground Black women’s lives do important recuperative work reimagining the historical record. At the same time, though, these narratives, which I term “Regency Noir,” reveal the limitations of the romantic mode to restore voices that were silenced in the past. First, I look at Sanditon, a television adaptation based on Austen’s unfinished 1817 novel, which was released in the United Kingdom on ITV in August 2019 and in the United States on PBS’s Masterpiece in early January 2020. Second, I turn to Bridgerton, the television series created by Chris Van Dusen and produced by Shondaland, based on Julia Quinn’s Regency romances; Bridgerton was released in December 2020 and quickly became one of Netflix’s most popular shows. Both Sanditon and Bridgerton reveal the possibilities and problems that manifest in Regency Noir narratives. They expose tensions within the genre by reflecting the ways we read and write about Jane Austen and her afterlives. The novelist is often viewed as a progenitor of the Regency romance genre, and many readers turn to Austen’s novels seeking comfort in the moral and marital stability her heroines’ happy endings seemingly symbolize. But Regency Noir narratives that engage, implicitly or explicitly, with the history of chattel slavery challenge those “comforting” readings that rely on a whitewashed moral order. Even still, my contention is that Regency Noir narratives offer their own comforts because they are invested in the restorative representation of Black women’s desires and pleasures in contrast to a Black Atlantic archive that is filled with records of violence against Black women’s bodies.