Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish - reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!
Last week, I explored Valentine's Day traditions in the British Isles. Tina reviewed The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves - the first of the Vera Stanhope mystery series.
As a follow-up to my Valentine's Day post, I watched A Very British Romance and learned many more details about how the traditions of romance developed in the English-speaking world.
PBS celebrated Christmas with Lucy Worsley's 12 Days of Tudor Christmas. They followed that up with a Valentine-themed special this month - the two-episode show by Lucy Worsley about the history of romance in Britain. Both episodes of A Very British Romance are available on the PBS website - the first episode until March 8 and the second until March 15.
The first episode is all about the Georgian period (including The Regency), ending with a lovely bit that visits the homes and haunts of Jane Austen.
The second episode covers the Victorians, starting with the story of a factory girl who wrote when she wasn't working on the factory floor and Walter Scott, one of the writers who inspired her.
As much as the history of romance, these two shows explain the change in the lives and expectations of women from Georgian through Victorian times-always an interesting topic for me.
Have you seen A Very British Romance? What did you think?
About Joy Weese Moll
a librarian writing about books
