Lauren Gilbert Brings Real Regency to Life, and the Research Is Extraordinary

Jolene's Book and Writers Talk

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Lauren Gilbert Brings Real Regency to Life, and the Research Is Extraordinary

She Doesn't Write 21st-Century Heroines in Regency Gowns

Jolene MacFadden

Apr 10, 2026

Jolenes Book and Writers Talk - Interview with Author Lauren Gilbert

That’s the line that stopped me when Lauren Gilbert said it during our conversation, and honestly, it’s the best single-sentence summary of what separates authentic historical fiction from cosplay fiction.

Lauren is a Port St. Lucie-based author with a Bachelor’s degree in English literature, a minor in art history, and a lifelong fascination with the Regency period. She’s also a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America, a presenter at their Annual General Meeting, and the keynote speaker at the Jane Austen Fest in Mount Dora in 2022. Her novels, Heyerwood and A Rational Attachment, both published and available on Amazon, are character-driven stories about women coming into themselves within the actual social constraints of the time.

“The Regency era reminds me so much of our own time. You had people being stripped of their employment because of new technology, forced to move to different cities for new work. For the 1%, the glittering social life. For everyone else, the rest of it.”

Our conversation covered a lot of ground:

Her subscription to the British Newspaper Archive and why period newspapers are still the most vivid primary source available
Using genealogical records and wills from the British National Archives to track real lives
Why Jane Austen’s private letters reveal a level of snark and sharp social observation that her novels alone don’t fully show
Her ambitious nonfiction project: seven women of power from the Regency period, four of whom have almost nothing written about them
Why she parted ways with her publisher over that project, and why she is still writing it anyway
How she uses spreadsheets organized in five-year blocks to manage hundreds of sources and footnotes
Her use of ProWritingAid’s plagiarism scanner, which she calls one of her favorite tools for catching unintentional absorption of loved authors’ phrases
What she found in COVID-era digitized archives that she might not have been able to access otherwise

We also talked about advice for new historical fiction writers, her plotting-meets-pantsing process, and which three people she would seat at her fantasy dinner table: Jane Austen, the Duke of Wellington, and Oscar Wilde.