Once upon a time in the early nineties, a 24-year-old sat down to write a romance novel, looking to fill the time between graduating from Harvard and applying for medical school. This young woman – Julia Cotler (later Pottinger) on her official documents, “Julia Quinn” when she was writing love stories set in the Regency period – was deciding between Yale and Columbia when she found herself with an altogether more surprising choice to make.
Julia Quinn.Ricardo Borges/Supplied
Two publishing houses were fighting over the two novels she’d written. And if you know anything about Quinn’s story – more than 40 books, 19 consecutive New York Times bestsellers, 20 million copies in print in the U.S. alone – you’ll know that was just the gently flirtatious start of the world’s epic love affair with her writing.
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And that’s before we get to the Bridgerton series, Quinn’s eight-book epic about one aristocratic set of siblings’ various paths to true love. A success by any publishing metric when they were published in the early 2000s – one even won romance writing’s highest honour, the RITA Award, in 2007 – the series went stratospheric when it was adapted for Netflix by showrunner Shonda Rhimes in 2020.
With each new season – Season 3, a loose adaptation of the fourth book, Romancing Mister Bridgerton, drops in two parts on May 16 and June 13 – Quinn’s original text gets recatapulted up the bestseller charts. It’s spawned collector’s editions and an astonishing array of Bridgerton-branded tie-in products: a Bath and Body Works collaboration, a “Bridgerton Berries and Cream” flavour of International Delight creamer, a toile-print leash in partnership with pet outfitter Maxbone.
Harper Collins
What might surprise you more than Penelope Featherington forgiving Colin Bridgerton after she overheard him saying he’d never be seen dead courting her? Quinn’s advice to that college grad sitting in front of that very first blank page.
“Be patient,” she says from her home in the Pacific Northwest. “My career was in no way an overnight success.”
It wasn’t until her 11th book, An Offer from a Gentleman, was published in 2001 that she hit the New York Times bestseller list. “I built a career very slowly,” she says. “I don’t think I would tell her that ‘You’re going to get a TV deal’ because I don’t think she would have believed it.”
The Globe and Mail chatted with Quinn about the pressure to follow up on Bridgerton, playing within the lines and why the Regency is her preferred era to set a romance.
The whole Bridgerton concept – eight siblings, eight love stories – is beautiful in its simplicity. When did it first come to you?
Well, it didn’t start out as eight books. The character who first came to me was Simon [the titular hero of the series’ first book, The Duke and I]. I had met somebody who had a pretty severe stutter, and he was quite successful in life but it just made me think, what must it be like to have that much difficulty communicating? What would it be like if you didn’t have support?
So, I created Simon, and I gave him such a terrible father that I felt like he needed to fall in love with somebody from the coolest family ever. That’s how they came about.
But what I think made the series take off was that with The Duke and I, I did something that I don’t know was done in romance at the time. One of the key things about romance novels is that they wrap up nicely with a happy ending, and you tie up the loose ends. I absolutely had that happy ending, but at the same time, I didn’t reveal the big secret of the sub-plot [the identity of gossip columnist Lady Whistledown.] I remember people saying, “I didn’t even like that book, but I have to read the next one to find out.”
It was a bit of genre-bending, playing with that thriller-like cliffhanger.
It was, in a tiny way, just leaving that one thread hanging so you have to come back. But at the same time, I was very careful to make sure the actual romance wrapped up well, because that’s what the books are at the core.
Does that ever feel confining? Or is the joy in that structure, the happy ending you’re moving toward?
I find joy in that structure. If I ever wanted to do it differently, it just wouldn’t be a romance idea. I can’t imagine sitting down to write a romance and being like, “Hmm. What if we kill him off?” It just wouldn’t happen.
What is it about the romance genre, with all its conventions, that still interests you?
I enjoy exploring the characters, and the challenge of making sure I don’t write the same book every time, even though I’m working within the same parameters. I once heard a great quote from an author named Jennifer Crusie, who started out writing Harlequin-category romances. She called writing a category romance “performing Swan Lake in a phone booth.” I thought it was a great idea, because chances are, you might do it very badly. But boy, if you do it well, it’s incredible.
And I don’t quite know if it’s doing Swan Lake in a phone booth, but I’m on a playground that has lines of the edge, and if I’m going to step out of them, I have to be very deliberate. And I have with some books – I haven’t jumped into the next field, but I have pushed the boundaries a little bit. And when I have, it’s been really rewarding.
What are some examples of that?
When He Was Wicked is the sixth book in the Bridgerton series. It’s about Francesca, and she’s a widow. The book is in two parts, and the first four chapters take place when her first husband is alive. It’s actually a very happy marriage, which is not something you see in romance, where it’s only really focused on the ultimate hero. My publisher was very nervous about this at first, and they even suggested that I didn’t have those four chapters. But I thought without them, you don’t fully understand the conflict the hero and heroine have, and the guilt they have about falling in love without understanding their relationship to the man who died. It made for a much richer book.
Is the extraordinary success of Bridgerton hard to follow up?
I haven’t released a completely new book, other than Queen Charlotte, which I co-wrote with Shonda Rhimes, since the show came out. That’s for a number of reasons. Part of it is just that, “Yeeks, there are going to be so many eyes on me.” But honestly, that’s not the biggest thing. It’s just that it’s kind of freed me not to have to write a book very fast, and I’m kind of enjoying taking my time. But I don’t know. We’ll see.
Traditionally, the subject matter for romances has been people in their 20s. As someone who is not at that life stage any more …
I’m 54, you can say it. [laughs]
For the next thing you do, do you think you will still want to write about a 23-year-old falling in love for the first time?
I don’t see myself writing about somebody my own age falling in love for the first time, maybe because it’s so far out of my experience. I don’t think I could write a contemporary romance with somebody that age now, because I don’t live in that world. I mean, I don’t live in the Regency world either but neither do my readers so we’re kind of safe.
Is the reason you’ve set all your books in the Regency period because of that safe remove from reality?
That would presuppose that I thought deeply about that decision. It was really just that it was what I liked to read. Simple as that.
This interview has been edited and condensed.