Mad and Bad by Bea Koch (Review)

Title: Mad and Bad:
Real Heroines of the Regency
Author: Bea Koch
Type: Nonfiction
Genre: History, Regency, Feminism
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
(Hachette Book Group)
Date published: September 1, 2020

A physical copy of this book was kindly provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Regency England is a world immortalized by Jane Austen and Lord Byron in their beloved novels and poems. The popular image of the Regency continues to be mythologized by the hundreds of romance novels set in the period, which focus almost exclusively on wealthy, white, Christian members of the upper classes.

But there are hundreds of fascinating women who don’t fit history books limited perception of what was historically accurate for early 19th century England. Women like Dido Elizabeth Belle, whose mother was a slave but was raised by her white father’s family in England, Caroline Herschel, who acted as her brother’s assistant as he hunted the heavens for comets, and ended up discovering eight on her own, Anne Lister, who lived on her own terms with her common-law wife at Shibden Hall, and Judith Montefiore, a Jewish woman who wrote the first English language Kosher cookbook.

As one of the owners of the successful romance-only bookstore The Ripped Bodice, Bea Koch has had a front row seat to controversies surrounding what is accepted as “historically accurate” for the wildly popular Regency period. Following in the popular footsteps of books like Ann Shen’s Bad Girls Throughout History, Koch takes the Regency, one of the most loved and idealized historical time periods and a huge inspiration for American pop culture, and reveals the independent-minded, standard-breaking real historical women who lived life on their terms. She also examines broader questions of culture in chapters that focus on the LGBTQ and Jewish communities, the lives of women of color in the Regency, and women who broke barriers in fields like astronomy and paleontology. In Mad and Bad, we look beyond popular perception of the Regency into the even more vibrant, diverse, and fascinating historical truth.

⤖ My Review ⬻

I don’t pick up a lot of nonfiction book, but Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency by Bea Koch I just could not resist! I absolutely love the Regency Era but have not read much about the time period aside from snippets about authors from that time (like Jane Austen). So, I was definitely eager to read about the badass women from the Regency that Koch researched and compiled into Mad and Bad! When it comes to nonfiction, I either had to really take my time, reading a tiny big here, a tiny bit there, with a lot of fiction reading in between…or I just can’t put it down!

Well, the latter was definitely the case with Mad and Bad! Some of the stories about the Regency women mentioned were so fascinating. I really got a glimpse into what life must have been like for real middle-to-upper-class people of the Regency rather than reading about it through a fiction novel (where you don’t know how much is based in reality and how much isn’t). I’ve always been a such for historical periods that interest me, and if you’re a fan of the Regency too, or even if you’re just curious about it, I recommend Mad and Bad by Bea Koch!