Book Review: Mad & Bad

Koch, Bea. Mad & Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency. Grand Central Publishing, 2020.

As I expected, this is a light and fun history book about women from around the Regency era. It’s especially for fans of Regency romance novels (the author is co-owner of a bookshop called The Ripped Bodice), but it’s also for fans of Jane Austen and her contemporaries (Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, etc.). Since I write Regency fantasy, I anticipated some inspiration and wasn’t wrong.

I had no idea that Queen Charlotte really was part African. The makers of Bridgerton didn’t make that up. She was also part Portuguese.

This book is a collection of short biographies of a diverse cast of women from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They include royalty, but they also include artists, mistresses, Jews, women of color, and working class women.

My only grouse is… the book claims Black women were barred from the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, but I’ve read a lot of suffrage history and have never come across that. It’s true no Black women attended, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t welcome. Frederick Douglass was there and spoke. Seneca Falls is a tiny town in upstate New York (I’ve visited) — Maybe Black women were too busy to attend or didn’t know about it. Sojourner Truth began speaking at women’s conventions in 1850.