Heroes and Heroines: What 3,661 Names Say About Romance

Why are there so many dukes?

A reader asked me that in an email last month, half joking, after an evening spent in the restored Leading Men index. She had scrolled for a while and started counting coronets. I told her I would find out, and then spent a weekend doing the counting properly, with a spreadsheet and more tea than was wise.

The two character indexes on the old site list 1,841 heroines and 1,820 heroes. Volunteers built them from reviewed books between the early 2000s and the site’s last active years, entering each lead with the name and title the author gave them. Nobody designed the lists as a census of the genre. They work as one anyway, and the patterns in them are hard to ignore.

The titled crowd

Start with the men, because the men are where the coronets pile up.

Word in the hero’s entry	Entries
Lord	144
Earl	125
Duke	56
Sir	48
Viscount	37
Captain	37
Marquess	16

These counts overlap. An entry such as “Lord Ashworth, Earl of Somewhere” contributes to both the first and second rows, so you cannot add the column and get a total. Counted once each, 460 of the 1,820 hero entries carry a title of some kind, roughly one hero in four, and almost all of those titles are British.

The heroines run a smaller version of the same pattern. “Lady” appears in 193 of the 1,841 entries, about one in ten. “Miss” appears in 19 and “Princess” in 15. The low count for “Miss” surprised me until I looked at how volunteers entered names: most untitled heroines went in as a plain first and last name, while a titled heroine kept her “Lady” because it told you something about the book.

More dukes than England ever had

The real peerage was small. In the Regency years Britain had, depending on how you count Scottish and Irish titles and royal dukes, a few dozen dukes at most, and plenty of them were elderly, married, or both. The index has 56 heroes carrying the word, and the index covers only a fraction of the romances published.

Romance writers know this, and the better ones joke about it. Readers know it too, and mostly do not care. A duke is shorthand. He has the most money, the most power, the most to lose by marrying the wrong woman, and the furthest to fall when he does it anyway. Julia Quinn put a duke in the title of The Duke and I (Avon, 2000), and the book’s opening joke rests on everyone at the ball knowing exactly how marriageable a duke is.

The marquess count tells a stranger story. Real marquesses existed in numbers not far off the dukes, and yet the index has 56 dukes and 16 marquesses. Part of the gap is spelling: 20 more entries use the French “Marquis”, which brings the total to 36. The rest is sound. “Duke” lands in one syllable. “Marquess” makes a reader stop and wonder how to say it, and editors in the 1990s did not want readers stopping.

Earls are the working horses of the historical romance. With 125 entries, the earl outnumbers every rank except the catch-all “Lord”, and he suits the plot: grand enough to matter, common enough that a heroine could plausibly meet one at a country assembly in Hertfordshire.

Getting the forms of address right

The glut would bother me less if the titles were used correctly, and a careful reviewer will mark the History rating down for exactly this. The rules are fiddly, and a few of them catch writers again and again:

• A man who holds a peerage is “Lord” plus his title: the Earl of Wexley is Lord Wexley, never Lord Edward.
• The younger son of a duke or marquess is “Lord” plus his first name: Lord Edward Carlisle, Lord Edward for short.
• “Sir” goes with a first name, for a baronet or a knight: Sir Thomas, never Sir Grey.
• The daughter of a duke, marquess or earl is “Lady” plus her first name: Lady Anne. The wife of a baronet or knight is “Lady” plus the surname: Lady Grey.

A heroine introduced as “Lady Grey” in chapter one and “Lady Charlotte” in chapter four has changed social class between scenes, and readers who care will notice. The guide to historical settings covers more of this, along with the reasons a Regency gentleman would not shake a lady’s hand at a first introduction.

The names on the list

Titles tell you about the market. First names tell you about the writers, and about what they thought their readers would find romantic. The table counts the first word of each entry, so a “Lord Nicholas” counts under Lord rather than Nicholas, which flatters the names that usually go without a title.

Rank	Heroines	Count	Heroes	Count
1	Elizabeth	22	Jack	21
2	Emily	17	Nicholas	18
3	Mary	16	Gabriel, James	16 each
4	Catherine	15	Adam	14
5	Anne, Kate	14 each	Lucien, Robert	13 each
6	Alexandra, Amanda	13 each	Daniel, Dominic, Ian, Marcus, Simon	12 each
7	Laura, Maggie	12 each

No name dominates. Elizabeth, the most common heroine, accounts for barely more than one per cent of the list. Romance writers clearly worked to avoid repeating each other, and the spread proves they mostly succeeded.

The heroine list leans traditional. Elizabeth, Mary, Catherine and Anne would all have been at home in an English parish register of 1810, and their presence reflects the historical share of the index. A Regency heroine named Elizabeth also comes with a literary ancestor, and I suspect plenty of authors chose the name with Miss Bennet in mind.

Kate and Maggie belong to the other half of the list. They are short, warm and slightly brisk, the names of contemporary heroines who own a bakery or run the family boatyard. Nora Roberts gave readers Maggie Concannon, the glass artist of Born in Fire (1994), and the type spread from there.

The Jack problem

Twenty-one heroes named Jack. Jack the Navy SEAL, Jack the rake, Jack the rancher, Jack the jewel thief who turns out to work for the Crown.

I understand the appeal. The name is one syllable with a hard consonant at each end, it sounds like a man who fixes things, and it works in any century. It has a long history as a diminutive of John, so a writer of historicals can use it without fear of anachronism. Jack also hints at a rogue, a man who prefers the casual name to the formal one, which suits a hero who is about to be reformed.

The problem is memory. Picture two readers in a book club trading ten messages about “the Jack book” before realising they mean two different novels. With twenty-one Jacks in one index, that confusion is easy to imagine. If you are writing a hero now and your first instinct is Jack, I would ask you to try three other names first and see whether one of them fits better. Your reader will remember the book more easily.

Gabriel, Lucien, Dominic: the dark-angel names

The second tier of hero names has a theme. Gabriel is an archangel. Lucien echoes Lucifer, whether the author meant it or not. Dominic carries the Latin for “of the Lord”. Writers reached for these names when they wanted a hero with something dangerous or wounded about him, and the paranormal boom of the early 2000s gave them extra reasons to do it. Stephanie Laurens named one of her Cynster cousins Gabriel, in a family where every man is a reformed rake with a nickname, and the name fit him.

Lucien is the one I question for historicals. It is a French name, and an English aristocratic family of 1815, a generation into war with France, would have been an unusual place to find one. An author can explain it with a French mother or godparent. Many did not bother.

Naming for the period

Period accuracy in names is a small thing that tells a reader a great deal about the author’s care.

Alexandra, which ties for sixth among heroines, is a useful example. The name existed in Britain in the early nineteenth century but stayed uncommon until Princess Alexandra of Denmark married the future Edward VII in 1863, after which a great many girls received it. A Victorian heroine named Alexandra born in the 1860s is right on trend. A Regency heroine named Alexandra is possible but would have stood out among the Marys and Elizabeths of her acquaintance, and the author should probably let somebody remark on it.

Amanda has an older history than you might expect, appearing in English plays at the end of the seventeenth century, so a Georgian Amanda passes muster. A Regency heroine called Brittany, Tiffany or Courtney does not, and I would not bet against finding one of them somewhere in the archive.

For writers working on a historical now, a few habits help:

• Check names against census returns or parish registers for the right decade and region. A Yorkshire mill girl and a Mayfair debutante of the same year would not share names.
• Take hero titles from places that do not hold a real peerage, and look up the real ones before you invent a surname.
• Save the unusual name for the character who has a reason to carry it, and let the story mention the reason.

The plotting guide has more on building characters before you build scenes, which is the order I would recommend.

Archetypes, and where the index hints at them

The indexes record names, not personalities, but the reviews attached to each entry fill in the rest. Read enough of them and the archetypes stand out.

The rake and the alpha

The rake is the historical romance’s favourite hero: a titled man with a reputation, a mistress or several, and a well-defended heart. The romance is his reform, and the pleasure lies in watching a sensible woman bring it about. Lisa Kleypas’s Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent, in Devil in Winter (Avon, 2006), is one of the better examples, and readers still argue about whether he deserves the heroine.

The alpha is a broader type, the hero who takes charge, protects by instinct and expects to be obeyed. Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels (Avon, 1995) gives you Sebastian Ballister, Marquess of Dain, who is about as alpha as heroes come, and Jessica Trent, who shoots him. That book turns up on readers’ all-time lists as often as almost any other historical, and the heroine’s response to the hero is the reason.

I do not accept the argument, common among romance readers, that the alpha hero is the essence of the genre and everything else is a variation. The alpha dominated the 1980s and 1990s, and in my experience plenty of readers had wearied of him by the mid-2000s, reaching for “jerk” more often than “masterful”.

The beta hero

The beta is the steady man. He is kind, competent, patient, and he waits. Nora Roberts wrote several, and Ethan Quinn in Rising Tides (1998), the quiet waterman of the Chesapeake Bay books, is the one I name first when anyone asks whether a beta can carry a book. He can.

Beta heroes appear less often in the index because they appear less often in titles. You do not call a book The Patient Accountant. That is a pity, and a gap some writer could still fill.

Wallflower, bluestocking, spitfire

The heroines split into types too, though the reviews describe them in more varied terms than they describe heroes.

The wallflower sits at the edge of the ballroom and watches. Kleypas built a whole series around four of them, starting with Secrets of a Summer Night (2004), and the premise worked because readers recognised the position. The bluestocking reads, argues, and has opinions about Greek grammar that alarm her mother. She tends to pair with a rake, since the plot needs someone who will not be impressed by him. The spitfire is the heroine with a temper and no filter, and Whitney Stone in Judith McNaught’s Whitney, My Love (1985) remains one of the most debated spitfires in the genre. Readers tend to love the book or never forgive it, and few land in the middle.

The index does catch one telling gap. Working-class heroines are rare. The 193 Ladies outnumber the shopgirls, governesses and farm widows by a wide margin, while the heroes include plenty of cowboys, soldiers and carpenters. Romance let its heroines climb the social ladder more often than it let them start at the bottom, and the Leading Ladies index shows it on every page.

What the counts cannot tell you

A few cautions before anyone builds a thesis on my spreadsheet.

The indexes reflect what reviewers chose to read and what volunteers entered. Historical romance is attached to 99 of the subject index’s 199 themes, far more than any other community, which inflates the titles. Category contemporaries, published in large numbers every month, appear less often than their sales would justify. A different site with a different membership would produce different counts.

The indexes also freeze in time. They show the genre as it stood when the site was active. The billionaire boom, the hockey-player boom and the rise of self-published series came later, and the names those books favour are not here.

Still, the patterns hold up across communities, and they match what any long-time reader would guess. The heroes are titled, the heroines are called Elizabeth, and somewhere in the list a man named Jack is about to fall in love against his better judgement.

If you are naming a character this week, open both indexes and search your chosen name before you commit. If it already appears thirteen times, you have your answer, and you have also found thirteen books by other authors to read for research.

Sources and further reading

• The Duke and I published by Avon in 2000, with Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings, at its centre: Wikipedia, The Duke and I.
• Lord of Scoundrels published by Avon in 1995, with Sebastian Ballister, Marquess of Dain, and Jessica Trent: Wikipedia, Lord of Scoundrels.
• Devil in Winter (2006) as part of Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers series: Wikipedia, Lisa Kleypas.
• Princess Alexandra of Denmark marrying the future Edward VII on 10 March 1863: Wikipedia, Alexandra of Denmark.