As Bridgerton lovers prepare to jump back into another Regency England romance on Jan. 29, viewers will be thrust into a world of lavish parties, beautiful gowns, and Lady Whistledown’s gossip. While Benedict Bridgerton and Sophie Baek’s story unfolds on the screen, there could also be expanding questions about how the show handles consent.

Based on Julia Quinn’s popular historical romance novels, every season of the Netflix adaptation follows the love story of one of the eight Bridgerton siblings. Each of the first three seasons raked in more than 90 million views during their first 91 days on the streaming platform.

But while the love stories have captivated viewers, the show’s portrayals of consent—which the National Sexual Violence Resource Center defines as meaning “everyone involved has agreed to what they are doing and has given their permission”—have varied.

Season 1, in particular, drew controversy for a marital rape scene in which the protagonist, Daphne Bridgerton, forces her husband to ejaculate inside her after he repeatedly made it clear during other sexual encounters that he didn’t want to. Bridgerton fans criticized showrunners for including the scene from the original book when it premiered in 2020.

In the years since, the show has evolved in its portrayals of consent. Season 3 is perhaps the season with the best depiction of consent, with Colin Bridgerton asking Penelope Featherington for consent during different sexual encounters.

But there’s still room for improvement when it comes to informed consent—meaning that there’s open communication about boundaries before, during, and after the activities being engaged in, and what may result from their actions. Season 4 is an opportunity for Bridgerton, a show which mixes the historical and the modern, to improve how it depicts consent for a contemporary audience.

Evolution of consent in modern romance novels

While the Bridgerton series has reached new heights for book-based adaptations, the romance genre’s popularity is nothing new.

The concept of the romance novel as we know it today dates back to the romantic fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries, according to the New York Public Library. While the early days of romance novels mostly explored the stories of heterosexual, white women, the genre has slowly evolved to become more inclusive. New subgenres—like new adult romance and romance-fantasy (better known as romantasy)—have also emerged. Tropes such as friends to lovers, forced proximity, and fake dating have established certain frameworks that give structure to the stories.

Consent appears to be increasingly important to romance-enjoyers. As recently as this winter, the Heated Rivalry TV series—based on Rachel Reid’s best-selling Game Changers novel series—was praised for its portrayal of affirmative consent.

And the books we read, fictional or otherwise, can shape our real lives. Aashna Avachat, a literary agent and young adult romance author, said in an interview with Rewire News Group that growing up, her expectations of what romance would be like were based, in part, on the books she was reading.

“I remember when I was growing up, the romance books that I was reading, whether for teenagers or for adults, rarely had explicit consent,” Avachat said. “It always seemed to be sort of implied. And that was, I think, considered quite romantic.”

But as she began her writing and agent career, she noticed a shift: Books, especially in the young adult novel space, included more direct consent.

“[I] started noticing even for first kiss scenes, characters would ask, ‘Can I kiss you? Do you want me to kiss you?’” Avachat added. “And I think that that started to feel like sort of an important shift, and I think a positive shift, where we were seeing consent as a romantic gesture.”

The concept of consent has changed over time in American society, as has how it’s explored in literature. Given that romance novels are published at distinct times when the definitions of consent have varied, discussions about consent can be complicated.

In addition to romantasy and new adult romances, contemporary romance (taking place after World War II), historical romance (taking place before World War II), and romantic suspense (mixing mystery, thriller, and romance elements) are popular romance subgenres. Dark romance is growing in popularity and has faced criticism over what some readers consider to be romanticized portrayals of abuse and lack of consent.

According to Options Domestic & Sexual Violence Services, the subgenre can become harmful when it reinforces harmful myths about assault, blurs the lines of consent, and may not have proper context that can be important for younger readers. (It’s worth noting that not all readers and critics see dark romance as negative: It can help some people process their emotions and raise awareness about harmful behaviors.)

Historical context

Dr. Jayashree Kamblé, an English professor at LaGuardia Community College in New York City who teaches about romance narratives in fiction, popular culture, and literature, explained that “readers grow up under the politics of their times,” and that the time period in which readers come to romance novels can impact the lens through which they read them.

“Commercial romance novels have a 100-plus year history, and ones where sexual violence was more common, as were scenes of dubious consent or manufactured consent, can be most often found in examples from the 1970s,” Kamblé said. “By the 1980s, both readers and editors were asking writers to change that.”

She added that when examining texts through a cultural studies lens, especially those written in the past, it’s necessary to look at them from two time periods: when the text was written, and the current moment.

“You always have to be wearing both hats … because otherwise, everything else will fail based on your current yardstick,” she said.

“I don’t think we let anybody off the hook,” Kamblé added. “But we also don’t necessarily say, ‘Oh my God, can you believe that they were doing this and thought it was acceptable?’”

Kathleen E. Woodiwiss’ 1972 book The Flame and the Flower is often cited as a prominent example of the historical, “bodice ripper” style of romance novels, that tend to include sexual violence or questionable portrayals of consent. This particular book was a bestseller at the time, and the New York Times reported that it helped to grow historical romances in paperback form.

Since then, however, the story has been criticized because of the relationship between the main characters, Heather Simmons and Brandon Birmingham. During the unfolding of the story, he rapes her, resulting in a pregnancy. And they are forced to marry before eventually living happily ever after.

Older romance novels often depicted “rapist heroes.” As Salon reported, “In early 1970s romance novels ‘no’ sometimes meant ‘yes’ and a rapist could figure as a hero.”

Kamblé explained that the current cultural conversation around consent is fairly new and shaped by different factors, including feminist movements, the increasing awareness about bodily autonomy, and “the practice of sexual activity as having different stages.”

Different decades saw different phenomena: In the late 1960s and 1970s, during the women’s liberation movement, romance readers understood women’s rights—including the right to sexual sovereignty—far differently than the Baby Boomers, who linked sex and consent to marital responsibilities, Kamblé explained. And 1990s-era romance readers viewed consent through “the larger ideology of consumer-culture feminism, which equated initiating sex as a marker of one’s independence and with an implicit idea that such initiation made consent plain,” Kamblé said.

“The notion of consent itself is something that has evolved out of that new way of thinking about sexual engagement and one’s body,” she added. “We’ve also, especially in the United States, had changing laws about when and if you get to say no.”

What constitutes consent and marital rape, for example, is a concept that’s ever changing in the U.S. But, as the National Domestic Violence Hotline reports, the “perception of women seen as objects of property by common law, unable to handle their own legal affairs, continues to influence the perception of men, police officers, prosecutors, and judges.”

They report that it was only in July of 1993 that marital rape was considered a crime in all of the U.S. states, although how that is defined and its associated consequences differ from state to state.

The future of the romance genre

Figures suggest that the audience for romance novels will continue to shape dialogue, as readers continue to influence demand. The Guardian reported that “annual print sales of romance novels more than doubled” from $18 million in 2020 to $36 million in 2023.

The number of bookstores dedicated to selling romance novels has increased internationally, including the U.S., Canada, and Australia. The Romancing the Data database estimates that there are now 218 brick-and-mortar romance bookstores all over the world. More than a dozen have opened internationally in the last few years alone, including Books Ever After in Australia, Saucy Books in the United Kingdom, Dear Reader in Germany, and Perfect Match in Canada.

There is no one way to be a romance reader, Dr. Kamblé stated, meaning that what romance readers take away from a book—like if their ideas about consent are reinforced or challenged—is different for each person. A reader comes to a text with particular lived experiences, which are influenced by their culture and family, to name a few factors.

On the agenting side, Avachat mentioned that healthy depictions of consent are on her mind when she works editorially on her clients’ books. She believes in the positive possibilities of romance novels.

“I hope that consent continues to be explored more directly, in romance novels,” Avachat said. “But I do think that the industry sort of ebbs and flows with the type of content that it’s interested in. So I’m not quite sure what’s ahead.”