Bath is the new black: Regency-set historical romances in a resort city

Theresa Romain, author of Secrets of a Scandalous Heiress (out this week!), has lots of reasons for setting her newest Regency in Bath.

Theresa: As a setting for historical romance novels, Bath is far less well-trodden than London. Though there might be a thousand fictional dukes striding through Mayfair, only a handful crowd the Pump Room. But there's something special about the resort city, with its ancient hot springs and buildings of golden stone.

My newest Regency-set historical romance, Secrets of a Scandalous Heiress, is set entirely in Bath, so I welcomed the chance to do a roundup of other Regencies set there. From Jane Austen's books to this week's new releases, Bath holds powerful appeal for writers. Maybe because …

Bath offers a change of pace.

For Jane Austen's Catherine Morland (Northanger Abbey, 1817), a trip to Bath in the company of family friends is her first journey away from her parents and nine (!!) siblings. Guileless and trusting, she encounters enough false friends to fill a Gothic novel. But eventually she meets a true friend, and a hero, in the Tilney family.

Austen's last completed novel, Persuasion (1817), also includes many scenes in Bath. Vain Sir Walter Elliot withdraws here to cut down expenses, though his sensible daughter Anne regrets having to leave her home. (A viewpoint similar to Austen's own thoughts about her years in Bath?) But Anne too reconnects with friends, and it's here she's reunited with her longtime love, Captain Wentworth.

To avoid social embarrassment, Freyja Bedwyn flees to Bath in Slightly Scandalous (2003), the third book of Mary Balogh's Bedwyn saga. At first Freyja brings desperation and resentment with her: Bath is just a place to hide from the happily married man she'd once hoped to wed herself. Once she crosses paths with her own rakish hero, that indomitable Bedwyn spirit reawakens and Freyja brings a touch of delicious scandal to the staid town.

Bath is a place to explore one's gifts.

Lady Alessandra della Giamatti, an antiquities expert, is drawn to study Bath's Roman ruins in Cara Elliott's To Surrender to a Rogue (2010). In Erin Knightley's Prelude to a Kiss novels (The Baron Next Door, 2014, and The Earl I Adore, out this week), a prestigious music festival links the series' musically talented heroines.

The resort city allows space for heroines to exercise social gifts, too. Three of Georgette Heyer's novels with scenes in Bath — Bath Tangle (1955), Black Sheep (1966) and Lady of Quality (1972) — feature older, independent heroines. Serena, Abigail and Annis head their own households and take responsibility for their relatives. So does Felicity Harrison, the widowed heroine of Cheryl Bolen's The Bride Wore Blue (2002). Removed from the strictures and expectations of London society, these women find a new scope for their talents.

Bath is therapeutic.

Literally! The healing properties of the mineral springs are as legendary as the water's foul taste. But Bath is a place to heal figuratively, too. In Shana Galen's novella The Viscount of Vice (out this week), the hero is hunting for his lost brother in the shadiest parts of this proper-seeming city. As he finds love with the heroine, he also finds answers to a mystery that has torn apart his family.

And in my own Secrets of a Scandalous Heiress, shrewd but misfit heroine Augusta Meredith accompanies an ailing friend who needs help in a time of grief. Augusta's dealing with her own grief, too, and she hides from it with a false identity. When she runs into the oh-so-familiar Joss Everett, a mixed-race hero hunting his cousin's blackmailer, she can't lie about who she is anymore. From Pump Room to White Hart, from Queen Square to an attic lodging, the city of Bath cradles Augusta and Joss as they help each other out of their social tangles — and, of course, fall in love.

For 200 years of Regency romances, Bath has been a place of renewal and of the unexpected — for characters, for authors and, one hopes, for readers. It's a vacation from the everyday. And as Erin Knightley put it, "Aren't we all just a little more daring when we are on vacation?"

Find out more about Theresa and her books at theresaromain.com.