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Regency novel


The Regency period in the United Kingdom is the period between 1811 and 1820, when King George III was deemed unfit to rule and his son, later George IV, was instated to be his proxy as Prince Regent. It was a decade of particular manners and fashions, and overlaps with the Napoleonic period in Europe.

Regency novels are of two main types:

In both cases the setting is typically Regency England, although the settings can sometimes be extended to the European continent or to the various British colonies of the same time period. Traits often found in both types include a highly developed sense of social standing on the part of the characters, emphasis on "manners" and class issues, and the emergence of modern social thought amongst the upper classes of England.

This includes works which were actually written between 1811 and 1820, during the Regency era, which is well known for romantic fiction, including the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, Susan Ferrier, Maria Edgeworth, ETA Hoffman, and Jane Austen, who is perhaps the best-known author from this period, with many of her novels having been adapted into film in recent years. All of these writers published most of their best-known works during this period. While not novelists, the poetry of writers such as Lord Byron, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and John Keats are worth mentioning, as most of their best-known works were also written during the Regency.

Many of these classic Regency writers are also associated with Romanticism, which is an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Western Europe in the late 18th century. Romanticism expressed a revolt against the aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period which preceded it. Works during this period stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as anxiety, horror, and the awe experienced when confronting the sublimity of nature. All of these themes are evident in the best-known classic Regency works.


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