First, we should define romance. The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us, “Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.” Please note in this definition there is no mention of the usual plot most of us nowadays think of as a “romance”: Boy gets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl again.

Romance and romantic stories do not completely align. A story of romantic love, especially. one which deals with love in a sentimental or idealized way is what we think of when people use the word “romance,” when say, referring to a Hallmark movie. Romantic love does “emphasize the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotion, “etc., mentioned above.

The Romantic period describes an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that emerged throughout Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and moving into the nineteenth century. Alternatively, Collins Dictionary describes romantic love as “an intensity and idealization of a love relationship, in which the other is imbued with extraordinary virtue, beauty, etc., so that the relationship overrides all other considerations, including material ones.”

Wikipedia provides us a simple comparison: “Romance comes from Roman, and first meant a story translated into French from Latin (the common language of old Rome), usually about the amorous adventures of chivalrous knights, which is how romances came to be associated with love stories. Now it’s used to mean a love relationship, in a story or not.”

The term “romance” had two competing definitions during the Regency period, which makes it even more difficult when the late 1700s and 1800s are seen as the move from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Period. In any case, Coleridge attempted to delineate the two, of course, one being bad and the other good. In 1798 he wrote about  Radcliffe’s Gothic novel, “The Italian”:

“It was not difficult to foresee that the modern romance…would soon experience the fate of ever attempt to please by what is unnatural, a departure from that observance of real life, which has placed the works of Fielding, Smollett, and some other writers, among the permanent sources of amusement.” [Coleridge’s italics].

Coleridge and Wordsworth  saw a ‘romantic’ as someone sensitive to real life and the emotions, as opposed to the ‘unnatural’ or works of art created purely for the purpose of exciting the senses, but having no ‘truth.’ They collaborated on a set of poetry to illustrate that dichotomy. It is called “Lyrical Ballads”, 1798/1800.

Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey displays some of the same view between unnatural/artificial feelings and ‘true’ romantic sensibilities… as does her novel Sense and Sensibility in character, comparing Marianne to her older sister.  

So someone being ‘romantic’ could be romantic about anything, from the sunset to the opposite sex. It was an emotional, sensitive approach to the world in opposition to the rational, objective view of the Enlightenment. Johnann von Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” of the mid-1700s seen as one of the first ‘romantic’ novels as opposed to such earlier novels such as Robinson Crusoe and Pamela, which were more ‘Lesson-focused’ morality tales. “Romance” even crept into dress and politics, with the Whigs being considered far more of a ‘romantic’ bent than the Tory’s.

It was only later that ‘Romantic Novels’ became strictly ‘romance’ novels, love stories.  So, romance was a period term, but had a much broader set of meanings for Regency folk.