A Very British Romance with Lucy Worsley

Lucy's romp through three centuries of love's rituals begins with the Georgian age, when the rules of courtship were being rewritten. Traditionally, marriage had been as much about business as love. Now, a glamorisation of romantic love inspired women and men to make their own romantic choices - they could flirt in newly-built assembly rooms, or elope to Gretna Green as an act of romantic rebellion. But the main force of change was the arrival of the novel - Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney, and Jane Austen didn't just map out women's changing desires, they made people seek out the feelings and emotions described in their own lives, permanently changing how the British feel.

Lucy Worsley journeys into the Victorian way of love in the second part of her series on the changing face of British romance. She discovers how medieval chivalry shaped Victorian courtship, and explores theinfluence of valentine's cards and flowers on romantic lives. Lucy uncovers the way that literary passions - in novels by writers such as Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Henry Wood, and HG Wells - translated into real-life desires, changing the way the British felt. This is a new view of the Victorians in love, which takes us from romance on the factory floor to the curious erotic possibilities of the seance.

Lucy Worsley concludes her series with the most dramatic transformation of romance yet. Out of the carnage of World War I came a racier species of romantic love. It could be found in the novel The Sheik, the Fifty Shades of Grey of its time, while in real life Marie Stopes urged husbands and wives to explore their sexual desire. New entertainments like dining out for two allowed couples to get to know one another without a chaperone, while going to the cinema provided a dark environment where hands could roam free. But as the hedonistic era of World War II encouraged these more permissive attitudes, divorce rates soared. Romance, though, would prevail, with a fightback led by the queen of romance herself, Barbara Cartland.