When a wallflower blossoms

Unpicking Bridgerton’s complex coding.

Bex Chapman

Bex is a freelance journalist and consultant who writes about culture, the church, and both government and governance.

A young lady in Regency dress, holds a fan while looking around a garden.

Lady Penelope Featherington, played by Nicola Coughlan.

Shondaland.

Dearest gentle reader, are there any among us who do not love that most marvellous of transformations, a makeover? Something about a new dress, a new hairstyle, even a new lipstick, somehow has the power to make you feel full of potential. Maybe today will be different. Maybe today I won’t stand on the sidelines. Maybe today, I will be different. A lipstick isn’t going to dramatically change how you look of course – the power is in how it makes you feel. But what do you do when how you feel inside seems so different to how you behave on the outside? When you know that you can be witty, and funny, and charming, but somehow what comes out is shy silence, or worse, utter waffle?

And so, in series three of Bridgerton, the hugely popular Netflix show from Shondaland that brings together regency romance, pop-anthem string covers, colourblind casting and some very modern sensibilities – we see Penelope Featherington, to-date the wallflower of the show, step out from the shadows. She has given herself the most modern of regency style transformations. Her clear instructions to the modiste about her new colour-scheme, her hair, how she wants to present, brook no argument. And she pulls it off with aplomb – the gasps as she descends the inevitable staircase, looking stunning as the strings belt out a-b-c-d-e-f-u, are gratifying. It is hard not to be thrilled for her at the response elicited – the garish citrus florals are gone, and in their place is a new, soft, romantic look, complete with Rita Hayworth hair. She is owning it, finally full of confidence, and it’s fabulous. Our fan-favourite sidekick has become a compelling heroine in her own right.

This third series is full of romance, but also relationships. It is only in figuring out who we are, that we can best relate to others.

But this isn’t the end. This story is just getting started. She might look fabulous, but as Pen tries to launch herself at the town's marriage mart (third time lucky?!) she anxiously fluffs it on an epic scale. And she knows it. Flinging herself onto her bed, she throws down her fan in despair; ‘deep inside, I know I can be clever and amusing but somehow my character gets lost between my heart and sometimes I find myself saying the wrong thing, or more likely, nothing at all’ she explains subsequently. Her work is thriving – as gossip columnist Whistledown she is the talk of the town, making money, with a pen that gives her a power she never dreamed possible as she shares all of Mayfair’s secrets. But her personal life is a mess. On paper she is nailing it; in person she is a disaster.

Charm school isn’t a new concept in a romcom, but nonetheless upon Pen pouring her heart out to long-time crush Colin Bridgerton, he decides to offer a My Fair Lady approach, promising that he has picked up plenty of tips in Paris that he can share. This won’t go exactly according to plan, and the judgement of the town comes down on poor Penelope again, but this series she isn’t going to retreat in shame or fear; the Whistledown in her isn’t prepared to let her go back to just being an accepting wallflower. This series the colours are brighter, the wigs are that much higher, the ballgowns are even more brilliant, and this time, Pen is going to get herself a husband, despite the assumptions and agendas of her truly awful family. And we are here for it - 3.6 million UK-based viewers watched the season 3 premier within a week of release, outperforming the season 2 opener. 'Polin', as fans have named the burgeoning romance between Pen and the newly-buffed up Mr Bridgerton, is perfect for binging.

If the first series of Bridgerton was all about the steamy sex, the second series seemed like it was all about longing and yearning for what couldn’t be, then this third series is full of romance, but also relationships. It is only in figuring out who we are, that we can best relate to others. That might be with potential partners, as Pen rejoices as she finally pulls off a successful interlude with a suitor she concedes – ‘I was feeling so low, in fact it somehow allowed me to stop caring so much about how I was perceived and … I was simply myself’.

God knows us inside and out. He can discern our thoughts from far further away than across a crowded ballroom.

Being confident in who we are is appealing, even in the Bridgerton world, and Lord Debling (her paramour of the moment) acknowledges ‘I want to be with someone who knows who they are and embraces their own peculiarity as I do’. This isn’t purely about who we are on the outside, or on image, but about identity. And how we make that identity authentic, even when we act differently depending on who we are with. Nicola Coughlan who plays Penelope calls this code switching and notes Pen is ‘code switching a little more than most people do’ as she juggles her public role as a debutante with her private role as Whistledown. Maybe we aren’t exactly the same at work as we are with friends, or with our grandma as we are with our partner, but does this make each aspect less authentic?

We may try to choose which aspects we present to our peers or even our partners, but none of those different parts of us can be hidden from God. Terrifying though this might sometimes seem, because as humans we are prone to anxiety and awkward mistakes, God knows us inside and out. He can discern our thoughts from far further away than across a crowded ballroom, and yet he knows how many hairs are on our head (however high it is styled!) – and yet he loves us so much. He already knows the parts of ourselves that we chose to show, and those we try to hide from the rest of the world. As author Philip Yancey wrote ‘There is nothing we can do to make God love us more and there is nothing we can do to make God love us less.’

People, however, are easier to keep secrets from. Pen is still hiding the secret of her alter ego from almost all her friends and family. It’s a secret that has already ruined her relationship with BFF Eloise. Showrunner Jess Brownell has described the will they/won’t they of the wreckage of their friendship as the ‘secondary love story of the season’ noting that like any relationship, friendships just aren’t linear. Nor do all relationships develop in the same way – this series we have seen Mama Bridgerton have her own meet-cute to a Sia soundtrack, and Francesca Bridgerton has herself a very reserved romance incorporating silence and sheet music. This has led to discussions online about whether Fran’s character is on the autistic spectrum due to her introvert nature and rich internal world. Love can come in all shapes and sizes here in the Bridgerton universe – literally as well as figuratively. This reality has room for everyone. But it remains to be seen if Pen and Colin can have a future in a world where both her identities are revealed; he has sworn to ruin Whistledown… when he discovers the truth, will he want to marry his former wallflower?

Bridgerton series 3 part 2 will be released on 13 June.

Article

Culture

Holidays/vacations

Mental Health

Wildness

18 July 2025

5 min read

This is why we must go down to the sea

Stepping off the shore restores more than our sanity

Paul Bradbury

Paul is a pioneer minister, writer and researcher based in Poole, Dorset.

A sunset over an island casts golden light on the sea and a beach.

An Argyll beach.

Nick Jones.

It’s that time of year again. Much of Britain has been enjoying (or possibly enduring) a heatwave, the summer holidays are approaching, and our thoughts naturally turn toward an escape from our ordinary, often urban, landlocked, lives. And for many of us that escape will be to the sea. It’s true, we really do like to be beside the seaside. As a nation our souls seem to suffer from an annual experience like that described in John Masefield’s poem Sea-Fever as we head coastwards muttering ‘I must go down to the sea again...’

We want to holiday by the sea – as the market for second homes in places like Cornwall will confirm. We also want to live permanently by the sea, or at the very least by the water. Some experts estimate that properties by the water have an average increased value of around 48 per cent. Water sells. It does so perhaps because proximity to it provides something of a mental escape from the overwhelming rigidity and linearity of our predominantly urban environments.

Iain MacGilchrist has argued that our modern lives suffer from the triumph of the left-brain hemisphere’s attention to the world. This is a focussed attention that is all about controlling and getting. It leads to the creation of a self-contained and ordered world with little attention to context. And so little attention to the natural, complex, fluid reality of creation. MacGilchrist goes on to correlate the rise in a variety of mental illnesses characterised by what he calls ‘right hemisphere deficits’ with industrialisation and the development of our culture of modernity.

In his book Blue Mind Wallace Nichols explores the evidence for the positive effect of water on the brain. He highlights how a proximity to water can heal, restore, give us a sense of connection and promote calm. He argues that water can shift our minds into what he calls ‘drift’, the kind of mental attention which generates calm. Being with, on, better still in water, is undoubtedly good for us. No wonder we are drawn to it.

Yet at the same time water, and particularly the sea, has been a source of terror. A no-go area ‘where there be dragons’, OK, lobsters for sure, probably sharks, and whales like Moby Dick. The sea remains one of the last places of mystery, an unfathomed, unfathomable place of endless dark water. We know more about the far reaches of the universe than we do about the truly deep ocean. Mythical creatures of the deep, whether Nessie, or one of various giant specimens hauled unsuspectingly from the ocean, continue to populate the diminishing space of our wonder and fear of the unknown.

So whilst elucidating the psychological benefits of water is certainly helpful, it’s all a bit…tame. Is it just another way of humans turning the wild and numinous into something we now think we understand? Something we can now control and apply in our lives for our own benefit and comfort? Have we demystified the sea? Reducing its mysteries to little more than a balm for our troubled modern minds? A lure for our attention and our debt in an overheated housing market?

In the Christian tradition the sea is a place of profound paradox. Creation begins with God’s Spirit hovering over the water. However, the Hebrew scriptures also present the sea as a place of God’s absence. The sea is the place of monsters and mystery, and death. It’s also the place of perhaps the most famous whale in all literature. The whale that swallows the hapless Jonah. Jonah’s story expresses the deep paradox of the sea as a place of death and yet also a place of divine encounter. It is in the depths of the sea, and the digestive system of the whale, that Jonah’s epiphany takes place and his journey starts anew.

Stories of Jesus also deal with this paradox of wildness and encounter in the chaos of the sea. In the story of the calming of the storm the wild threat of the sea is not rendered as simply something to be avoided. Jesus is not a fixer making all daily dangers obsolete. Rather the story says that it is precisely in such moments of wildness, fury and terror that his powerful presence can be encountered.

To step off the shore and into the sea is to enter the possibility of the death and (paradoxically) the real possibility of deeper life.

It’s for these reasons perhaps that, John Good, a friend of mine, has formed a Christian community that’s based around encounter with the sea. Located as it is in an area almost surrounded by the sea, it started as a social enterprise helping people access the water who otherwise lacked the equipment or resource to do so. Pretty soon it became clear that this was transformational for people. Enabling families otherwise excluded from a life-giving resource to enjoy it as much as anyone else was powerful. One person referred to the experience by saying that on that day the sea had been ‘her saviour.’ Ocean Church began with a gathering on three large, tethered paddleboards some metres offshore. They now run retreats and pilgrimages on the sea, practice centering prayer (a form of Christian meditation or contemplative prayer) on the sea and continue to explore what it means to meet God on the water.

We yearn for the sea, and the water, for more than a balm for the mind. The sea remains that place, in our mechanised, technological world with its constant lure of control and mastery, where an immersion in dangerous mystery can still be experienced. To step off the shore and into the sea is to enter the possibility of the death and (paradoxically) the real possibility of deeper life. To be held buoyant by the sea and look to the horizon is to get it touch with our finitude in the context of the vastness of the seas. It is to engage with our utter dependency on the creation which we inhabit and to connect with the presence that holds that creation together.

To step into the sea is even therefore a step of faith. A step in the direction of our own vulnerability. A brave step away from the world in which our technology, our algorithms, our machines and our skyscrapers dupe us into a faith in our own control, our own supremacy. A step into the depths. ‘Deep calls to deep’ says the psalmist as ‘all your waves and breakers have swept over me.’ As many of us step into the sea this summer it may certainly be a step toward a restored sanity, but it might also be a step toward a restored soul.

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