A period romance changed my life. I’m not the only one

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From where I’m sitting, the world has fallen out of love with love. Indicators across a wide variety of trends point to a society-wide romance recession. Young people are having fewer relationships and much less sex than previous generations. Marriage rates are continuing to fall. Divorce rates among older Australians are rising, and while the broader divorce rate is falling, there is some very depressing evidence to suggest that it is cost-of-living pressures, not love, that’s keeping younger generations in their marriages.

The proliferation of dating apps and AI chatbots seems to be driving genuine connection and intimacy towards extinction, all while promising to do the opposite.

Every other day a new article (read: short form video) about the rise of “heteropessimism” crosses my feed, as straight women give up on the possibility of finding decent partners. But in one area of our lives at least, the yearning continues. I speak, of course, of period romance.

There has never been a better time to be a fan of the genre. This year finally brings a new mini-series of Pride and Prejudice, more than three decades after Colin Firth rewrote the rules of the wet shirt competition. On the big screen, Sense and Sensibility, starring Gen Z It Girl Daisy Edgar-Jones, arrives next month.

They follow The Other Bennet Sister, which became a social media sensation earlier this year, when its unlikely protagonist, Mary Bennet, lodged firmly in my heart. Bridgerton released its fourth season and started shooting its fifth. My Brilliant Career (admittedly something of an anti-romance) got the Netflix treatment and a wildly successful theatrical adaptation.

Australian stages have also seen two separate Pride and Prejudice adaptations, and will get an adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View opening in Sydney next month, before it travels to Melbourne in November. This production of A Room with a View is the main subject of this article for one very good reason.

Reader, I adapted it.

To the untrained eye (or perhaps one trained by the 1985 film adaptation), A Room with a View’s story of Lucy Honeychurch’s break with convention after a trip to Florence seems quaintly outdated. Lucy’s “view” is so restricted by the societal expectations of Edwardian England that her story seems almost irrelevant to modern young women. Yet when I picked it up for the first time in Florence in the summer of 2022, I had that out-of-body feeling you get when a book feels like it is speaking specifically to you.

I was walking around the Uffizi gallery alone, battling the worst hangover of my life. I had prebooked a ticket and was not about to waste €30, but instead of appreciating the otherworldly masterpieces of Botticelli and Caravaggio, I was trying not to vomit.

I had just had one of those awful, magnificent, life-changing nights that seem to only happen when you travel, during which I was sick in a gutter, chased a phone thief several blocks, and ended the night in the back of a police car. (I offer my apologies to the citizens of Florence.) In the jumble of all these terrible choices, I made a far bigger one – I blew up my life back in Australia by kissing someone I shouldn’t.

With hindsight, it’s easy to see how the vague discontent that I had been suppressing for years finally found its opportunity (six negronis) to erupt out of my subconscious in a series of actions that I could no longer ignore. But back in the Uffizi it was much too soon for me to understand this – I was just trying to stay upright.

I downloaded an audiobook of A Room with a View to listen to while I wandered, and to distract from the excavation works taking place in my intestines. I knew of the book from the Merchant Ivory film, which I remembered finding slow and uninspiring as a teenager, but the idea of listening to a story set in Florence while in the city appealed to me.

The book hit me like a tonne of bricks. There I was, walking around that extraordinary city, hearing Forster describe it more than a century prior; listening to his story of a young woman, travelling in Florence, whose path towards self-understanding begins when she kisses someone she shouldn’t. I finished it the next day while queueing at the gate for my flight to London. Still in the queue, I took out my phone, downloaded the eBook, and started it again from the beginning.

I had been gripped by a long-ago love story before. When I started high school in 2007, my parents decided it was time I was trusted to have a computer in my bedroom. Finally, I was untethered from the enforced moderation of watching shows on the living room TV or in the computer room. Moderation? Who is she?

After a week of barely seeing me and a note from school to say I was somehow already behind on homework, my parents began to worry about what kind of content I was consuming. Some light interrogation revealed the truth; I had borrowed my friend’s DVD of the aforementioned Pride and Prejudice miniseries, and had been watching it, in its entirety, nightly. It was three years before I was allowed to have a computer in my room again, but my love of period romances never wavered. The tidal wave of adaptations of these works suggests I’m not alone.

I have some theories as to why love stories that would seem to have little to do with the realities of modern love are excellent fodder for dramatisations. Any good high school drama teacher will teach you that higher stakes equals better drama, and in these novels the stakes are sky high. Before women were allowed access to education and employment, marriage was the only means of achieving financial security for all but the very wealthy. Any hint of a scandal – the kind that came from “improper” contact with a man – could render a woman unmarriageable, and therefore destitute.

If such a character knows what’s at stake and still cannot resist the merest touch, or kiss … I don’t care who you are, that’s hot. There’s a reason every woman between the ages of 30 and 45 knows exactly which frame in Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice I am referring to when I write the words “hand flex”.

In A Room with a View, Lucy Honeychurch knows exactly what she’s risking, yet she cannot resist kissing the unconventional George Emerson. It’s the kind of situation that lets us, as readers/viewers, feel deep in our bones how strongly these characters want each other. When a society demands that all sexual urges be repressed, it is exhilarating to watch that control break down, and to see what might burst forth.

It can be very easy to dismiss romance as a genre. For one thing, it’s written largely for and by women – a fact that generally excludes it from being considered “important”. It’s also a comfort genre – beautiful places, sexually charged plots, and happy endings all make for easy viewing – and easy derision. There’s a common attitude that fiction works need to be sad (preferably riddled with deaths) to be worthy, or meaningful.

But as the world becomes a darker, less friendly place for so many people, it’s getting harder to convince audiences to engage with heavy viewing. Sometimes radical ideas need to come in disarming forms. I would suggest that romance is the perfect genre to explore challenging ideas. Forster certainly saw the potential in the genre – though A Room with a View is easily the lightest of his works, most of his novels have a love story at the centre of them.

For me, these stories haven’t just comforted me in my darkest days – they’ve helped me to live a better life. When I was a repressed, sexless young person, Jane Austen novels and adaptations helped me along my journey towards finally feeling able to open myself up to physical and emotional intimacy. And when I was stuck in a long-term relationship that wasn’t right for me, A Room with a View gave me the courage to do the difficult thing and leave. We might live in a more sexually liberated age than Forster, but most of us still interact with systems of control and repression – pressures that can be exerted most strongly by ourselves.

When I began to reimagine Forster’s novel for the stage, I was expecting a lot of the adaptive process to be about updating the politics for a contemporary, liberal theatre-going audience. There are elements of the book that feel regressive on a first reading. Lucy goes on this radical journey of independence only to end up darning her husband’s sock on their honeymoon. I wanted to fix it.

But the longer I sat with those words, breaking down the story into its components, and the more I got to know Forster, his other work and his life story, I began to realise how many of my own preconceptions I had brought to the task.

For Forster, a gay man living in Britain while homosexuality was outlawed, writing romance was radical, political, and dangerous. A Room with a View features heterosexual protagonists, but its themes of living truthfully and without shame allow the subtext to shine through. He leaves us with the image of Lucy darning a sock not because she must settle for a life of domestic servitude, but because she has made the courageous decision to give up her wealthy existence and embrace a harder – but more authentic - life.

I know I won’t have convinced everyone that period romance can be truly progressive. There is naturally baggage involved when you write a story in 2026 where love and marriage is the happy ending. We’ve spent so long fighting against the narrative that a woman can only be truly happy once she’s partnered – preferably to a cis man with whom she can immediately procreate – that it’s very natural to want to leave the genre that propagated this myth behind. But we were never fighting for singledom, but for the freedom to choose.

In A Room with a View, denying our desires means turning our back on our authentic self. Romance now has to embrace the fact that we don’t need a partner to be fulfilled, but that many of us still fall in love. That we should get to love authentically, without fear of being in line with, nor opposing, patriarchal norms. That we can be free from shame.

Grace Chapple’s adaptation of A Room with a View is at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre, October 3-November 1, and Melbourne’s Southbank Theatre, November 14-December 19.