This is an IHeart podcast. I was on the phone with some people from Shandaland, including

Betsy Beers, who is Shonda's partner, and she said, you know, we're going to send you the first

script. They just said, we just want to warn you that, you know, it is structured a little bit

differently and it opens a little bit differently than the book, but in some

ways we need to teach our audience what a romance novel is. And I thought, well, that's interesting.

Welcome to Bridgeton, the official podcast. I'm Gabby Collins. And I'm Hannah Craig. Today we're going way behind

the scenes and getting next to Julia Quinn to learn about her inspiration for the Bridgeton series

of romance novels. And we're going to touch on romance novels altogether. How did a former

physician find her voice in Regency Lingo? And what was it about this series that led to executive producer Shonda Rhymes,

getting her hands on them and dropping them right in show creator Chris Van Dusen's lap?

You may have heard that Bridgeton is a product of the romance genre and that it's also not your grandmother's Jane Austen Nightcap.

Dr. Hannah, did you find yourself reading a lot of these romance with a capital R novels and Silver Fork novels?

I have a secret love for Silver Fork novels.

There was this kind of whole spate of novels

that were these exposés of high society life that gave people an inside look on what it was like

to be a member of the Ton to go to a fancy ball, to go to the pleasure gardens, to be kind of caught up in

this world of courtship and scandal.

And, you know, they're sort of supercharged and they're coloured with all kinds of illustrations

of life. It was sort of this self-publicising world where it became the soap opera of the day

to be in these novels. And then there was also these novels where they were publicised as being exposés of real society

and that the characters were drawn from life.

And one of the games of the book was to try and figure out who the characters were.

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