For readers, the appeal of the reformed rake is not just that the heroine has ensnared a man who has known a lot of women and decided she is the best one of all, though that is part of it.
“The reformed rake plot is one of liberation,” argues Rodale convincingly. A rake, romance writer Maya Rodale explains in her Dangerous Books for Girls: The Bad Reputation of Romance Novels, Explained, is driven by sex: He has “a heart of stone if he has one at all.” In typical “reformed rake” plots, Rodale writes, the rake and the heroine meet, the rake falls in love at last, and the heroine gets to enjoy the benefits of that previous experience. In our day, the rake lives on in romance novels, especially those set (as the Bridgerton books are) in the Regency period. It does not, Hogarth insisted, pay to be a fuckboy. In Hogarth’s series, a young man comes into money when his father dies, spends it in London at orgies and brothels, is almost arrested for his gambling debts, marries a woman for money, goes to debtor’s prison, and dies in an asylum. The series of etchings titled “A Rake’s Progress,” done by artist William Hogarth in the early 18 th century, scolded those who idolized the rake by telling the story of one such person’s life. Sometimes, they were subjects of titillated gossip other times, they provided a nice morality tale for the instruction of the young. Their lives were, for obvious reasons, quite interesting to onlookers.
A libertine, who saw life as a playground, the rake was all about breaking rules and having sex. The rake-short for “rakehell”-was a stock character in English history, drama, and literature from the 17 th through 19 th centuries. This wealthy and liberated man is a familiar character to anyone who reads historical romances.
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