Sixpenny Octavo

"Well, it’s a sapphic Regency romance, so it’s about two women, but more importantly, it’s two lower-class women. There is an increasing number of authors that are doing non-titled characters in historical romances, expanding the history that way. Sixpenny Octavo is the story of a clock mender and a housemaid-turned-dancing master’s assistant. They meet in the context of helping to get a mutual friend out of prison because she’s been charged with sedition on the account of the reading club that she and the clock mender is in. The housemaid will in turn testify to get the clock mender’s friend released from prison. In the course of dealing with the prison system, reading club stuff, and the housemaid finding a new job, the housemaid and the clock mender fall in love. However, there might be an informant in the reading club, so they have a traitor in the midst. The thing that I love about this book is that yes, there are the sedition charges, and the prison element, and it’s frightening and real, in a way that we don’t often see in historical romance novels, but at the same time, this book is so cozy and warm. It’s about friends who get together in a pub and read aloud to one another. It’s so interesting and fascinating and richly detailed. There’s so much history in the Regency that we don’t usually get to see. With Bridgerton, even when they’re doing the big social scenes, it still keeps it socially focused. It’s very domestic, and while that’s great, there’s so much more happening in this time period. Getting out of this aristocratic mode really opens up the possibilities of the world. It reminds me of Spring Flowering by Farah Mendlesohn, another working-class lesbian Regency romance."