And what a typical female writer Penelope Featherington (Nicola Couglan) is: shy, over-weight, awkward (when sex comes to her, she falls over in the street and lands on a shoe). Since the last journalist to grace a worldwide TV hit was Carrie Bradshaw of Sex in the City, who thought that if you bought the right desk the right novel would follow, I love Penelope with a weird intensity. She is close in spirit to anti-social Jane Austen (she hated Bath) and raging Charlotte Brontë (she hated children), though her object of hatred is herself, at least until she picks up a quill.  

this Regency-era drama is more about courtship, less about marriage, and the focus this season is on what happens between Penelope and Colin. Their romance is like a leaf out of the pages of Jane Austen’s Persuasion or Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, sticking to the trope of a highly coveted man falling for the most unexpected, least noticeable woman. (Sanghamitra Chatterjee)

The things Bridgerton does well, however, it does very, very well. The dynamic between Colin and Penelope – high-status guy falls for apparently undesirable girl – is stock (see everything from Jane Eyre to She’s All That), but here it hasn’t lost one iota of its centuries-old appeal. That’s partly to do with the acting: Coughlan is sensational as a woman who wallows in humiliation but cannot bring herself to relinquish hope, while Ruth Gemmell and Polly Walker’s performances as the meddling mamas of the Bridgerton and Featherington clans give the show its meatiness. (Rachel Aroesti)