What Inspired Julia Quinn to Write 'Bridgerton?'

The question of what inspires artists to create their masterworks has long intrigued fans. We may never know the entirety of what motivated Emily Brontë to write Wuthering Heights, but that hasn’t prevented scholars, historians, and lovers of her tragic romance from speculating about how the decaying mansions of the English moors may have helped shape this story. 

Meanwhile, countless great songs have been inspired by other works of literature and historical events. Certainly, many famous stories ultimately have their roots in Shakespeare—though even many of his greatest works are based on much older narratives.

Today, authors tend to be quite forthcoming about their inspirations—or their lack of memory about them. One is Julia Quinn, the author of the Bridgerton series that, of course, has become a wildly successful Netflix show. 

How Did Julia Quinn Start Writing?

Like most authors, Quinn was inspired by a childhood love of reading. Her father was a writer who exposed her to classic novels like Crime and Punishment and Heart of Darkness, but Quinn found an early love of romance books and developed a particular fondness for the Sweet Dreams series. To combat her father’s disapproval, she told him she was reading all these books so that she could write her own teen romance. Once she actually tried her hand at writing, though, a lifelong love affair was born.

The idea to write a romance book emerged when she was a senior at Harvard University. One night, she sat down and ate a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream while reading a romance book, and was suddenly inspired to attempt a full-length novel.

Where Did Julia Quinn Get the Inspiration For Bridgerton?

Despite her passion for writing, after graduating from Harvard, Quinn decided to become a doctor and briefly attended Yale Medical School before her writing career took off. While a medical student, she met a fellow student with a severe stutter who helped inspire the Duke of Hastings, Simon Basset, the romantic protagonist of the first Bridgerton series.

“I basically gave Simon the worst family in the world, and then I created the Bridgertons as a foil. So, I thought, let’s give this guy the best possible family to marry into,” Quinn said of her vision for the character.

The Bridgerton novels were also inspired by Quinn’s love for Regency-era romances. “It’s far enough in the past that it’s imbued with a fairytale-like quality in ways that something set in the 20th century can’t be,” she told Shondaland of the era. “And it’s close enough that people behaved in ways that were still fundamentally very similar to modern people.” She has also noted that she originally intended the series to be a trilogy that followed Daphne, Anthony, and Colin Bridgerton.

Still, she has said that she can't recall exactly where she got the idea for the now-iconic series. “I don't remember how they came about. I figured out recently that I would have started writing The Duke and I in 1998. So this book now, if it were a person, it could drink legally,” she said in an interview with Bustle when asked about the books' origins. “I honestly don't remember how the Bridgerton family was born...But while I can't remember how I came up with the Bridgerton family, I can tell you how I came up with Lady Whistledown.”

Lady Whistledown was apparently created due to Quinn's desire to explain the logistics of the Bridgerton world without having to stuff characters’ conversations with information. “If someone—perhaps a gossip columnist—were to gossip about the Bridgertons, it would make perfect sense that the basic facts of the clan would be laid out in a single, tidy paragraph. And so Lady Whistledown was born,” Quinn wrote. “I loved her,” she added of Whistledown. “She was arch and witty and cutting without being cruel, and she provided structure to the novel that would otherwise have been difficult to achieve.”

Quinn also drew some inspiration from historical figures like the real Queen Charlotte and King George III. Interestingly, Quinn’s book Queen Charlotte was actually written after the TV series Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, making it one of the few books out there inspired by a movie or TV show and not vice versa. 

At the end of the day, Quinn is still as passionate about romance fiction as ever. “I think [society] tends to minimize the importance of things we define as feminine. Romance novels are written almost primarily by women," Quinn wrote in an essay for Netflix. “They’re read almost primarily by women. They’re edited almost exclusively by women. So you have a lot of men saying, 'Well, that’s women’s stuff.' And we live in a society that tells us women’s stuff isn’t that important. It’s sexism. We’re trained to look down on things that are primarily for women.”