The best books on courtship

This sweet story told in rhyme begins with the usual trope of a royal family holding a ball to find a bride for the prince. One maiden, the bravest in the land, is not thrilled. The racially diverse cast of characters, illustrated in bright colors, find an ending satisfying to all when the maiden falls in love with the prince’s sister.

This book combines a lot of potentially tired gothic signifiers into one slim package. You’ve got the tortured ghost of the young mother. The scarred young shut-in nearing spinsterhood. The domineering aunt tasked with marrying her off. The cold and distant father just as eager to unload her. However, none of these tropes go where you expect them to go. Iseult Wince, the titular unsuitable young woman, has an inner life and motivations that are deeply weird—borderline horrifying, but most importantly, weird, and all her own. Spinsterhood is the least of her problems. 

While we can hardly think about couples today without the idea of dating, the practice was new and very edgy in the early 20th century.

Beth Bailey shows how the classic “dating and rating” complex emerged and became not just accepted but expected among middle-class couples. She also takes us through the transition to the “going steady” complex later in the century.

I had a great deal of respect for this author from reading her Psychology Today columns. Sophia Dembling is an introvert and from her research and personal experience knows that relationships between different personality types can be challenging to say the least. 

She takes us through all aspects of the dating process and doesn’t slam extroverts. What she does is show us, through her great wit and transparency, how we are not perfect but that we can balance each other. 

Dembling teaches introverts “how to let someone into their hearts while honoring the solitude we need..” I found myself laughing many times, even while reading the table of contents. “Whee! Fun With Extroverts” and “I Love you But Please Don’t Call Me.” And she helps extroverted readers understand and empathize with introverts who don’t find joy in too much socializing. 

It might seem strange that this outrageous and thoroughly enjoyable comedy wound up on my list of workplace comedies.

In the original version of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet was stuck in a Regency-era comedy of manners. Her only choice of life “careers” was “wife.”

Grahame-Smith has taken Austin’s words and turned this classic upside down by giving her a very important job—Zombie Killer.

It’s a hilarious take on the power of women, and, strangely enough, adding a Zombie apocalypse has made some of the characters’ motivations much more understandable.

Elizabeth’s workplace is her small village in England, and, always on call, she has lots of work to do.

I loved this book, and I think Austin would have, too. It’s my kind of humor.

Clement explores the working class environment that produced what we think of as “normal” relations between young men and women.

The commonly used term at the time, “treating,” has disappeared. But in the early 20th century this practice, which shared some features with prostitution, turned a search for fun, gendered scripts, and wage discrepancies between men and women into the general model of what would become the classic practice of dating.

Elizabeth was one of those characters that really stuck with me as being an independent woman in a time when it was frowned upon for women to behave as she did.

She doesn’t spend her time kissing up to rich men just to get their attention, and even though she does end up with a man of high status, she makes him earn her affection. Everybody around her is shocked that she doesn’t seem interested in playing the same game that they are, and I love that about her. She made the choices that most benefited her and it works out in the end. 

Gaiman’s fairytale-like writing gives it a nostalgic feel I didn’t even know I was looking for, and the idea that stars aren’t just big balls of hot gas, but people? That lines up with the idea that every star is an attendant angel, for me—or older ideas of religions past, that the stars themselves were the “visible gods” of our world, watching over us from the cosmos.

All fiction comes from something someone said before, and it’s one of the things I love most about fantasy. Stardust is one of those books that really just gives you the old-school whimsy and magic and romance that, when you’re trying so hard to think of something never-been-done-before, reminds you that there’s a reason stories like these are called classic.

When Darwin proposed the two mechanisms of sexual selection, one was almost immediately embraced by his Victorian contemporaries: male competition. Female choice, on the other hand, had to wait almost 100 years to be fully recognized. This book is an account of the history of female choice and provides fascinating insights into the development of a scientific discipline and how it is intertwined with society. Well written and very accessible, this is a great read.

This is a brilliant book that you will want to read in print—not digitally—because, for every single page of Jane Austen’s classic novel, there is an accompanying page of annotations. This is a great book if you want to dive deeper into Pride and Prejudice. The annotations include pictures of carriages and locations in the novel; historical details that helped me understand property laws, relationships, and societal expectations; definitions and connotations of how words were used in Austen’s time, and much more. It’s written in a very readable style, and you can either read it from start to finish or skip around to your favorite passages.

There is something alluring about the regency era that makes you want to curl your hair and go to a ball. The genre is full of beautiful, well-written books. Lakeshire Park stands out in the crowd thanks to its gentle honesty, delightful prose, and believable romance. Sprinkled with comedic scenes, regency-era details, and a couple you can’t help rooting for! I read this one in one sitting and didn’t want to come back to reality.