Books Like Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend: 15 Sapphic Regency & Victorian Romances (2026)
Books like Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend are the gateway into sapphic Regency and Victorian romance for a lot of readers, and Emma R. Alban’s debut earned it: two young women in 1850s London scheming to marry off their widowed parents and falling for each other instead. If that mix of ballroom comedy, parental matchmaking and two girls who realize what they actually want left you looking for more sapphic historical romance, this list is built for you. Below are 15 books sorted by era and mood: sapphic Regency romance with the door open, Victorian and Edwardian sapphic novels from Sarah Waters to KJ Charles, Georgian women who lived it, and queer historical picks beyond the ballroom, each with a heat rating. At the end, three Inferno-heat sapphic historicals and gothics from our own shelf.
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What Makes Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend Work
London in the 1850s. Beth Demeroven is in her first Season, with a newly widowed mother who wants her married. Lady Gwen Bertram is in her fourth Season with no engagement and no intention of getting one. When they discover their parents were once in love, they hatch a plan: get Beth’s mother and Gwen’s father to marry each other, which would get Beth out of marrying anyone. Somewhere between the dinner parties and the schemes, Beth and Gwen fall for each other. It’s light, tender and funny, closer to Bridgerton than to Sarah Waters, and it gives two women in a world built around husbands a real, joyful ending. The best readalikes keep at least one of those things: the Season and its rules, two women discovering each other under everyone’s nose, or the warmth of a historical romance that refuses to end in tragedy.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️ Mild
See Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend on Amazon →
Sapphic Regency Romance Like Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend
The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite
The book most sapphic Regency readers start with. Lucy Muchelney, bitter after her lover’s wedding to a man, answers a call for a translator of a groundbreaking French astronomy text and turns up at the London home of Catherine St Day, the widowed Countess of Moth. A scientific mind, a guarded widow who spent her marriage deferring to her husband, one roof and a slow burn with the door wide open. The first of Waite’s Feminine Pursuits books.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Explicit
See The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics on Amazon →
The Hellion’s Waltz by Olivia Waite
Sophie Roseingrave is a piano teacher who suspects Madeline “Maddie” Crewe, a silk-weaver, of running a scheme against a local draper, and Maddie decides the best way to deal with Sophie is to win her over. A heist, a feud and a romance between two working women, for readers who loved Beth and Gwen’s scheming more than the ballrooms.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Explicit
See The Hellion’s Waltz on Amazon →
The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows by Olivia Waite
In the seaside town of Melliton, widow Agatha Griffin keeps a printing business afloat while the government suppresses radical printers, her son among them. Penelope Flood is the beekeeper who comes to remove a colony from Agatha’s warehouse, and whose long-absent husband comes home just as things get serious. Two older women, a business, politics and bees: the grown-up version of Gwen’s refusal to be married off.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Explicit
See The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows on Amazon →
The Perks of Loving a Wallflower by Erica Ridley
The closest tonal match to Alban. Thomasina Wynchester is a master of disguise from the most chaotic found family in Regency London, quietly in love with a highborn woman who has just become her family’s client. Philippa York is a bluestocking who swore off love after a broken engagement and needs help decoding a centuries-old manuscript, and she’s delighted to discover her clever “baron” is a woman. A sapphic Regency rom-com, second in the Wild Wynchesters series.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See The Perks of Loving a Wallflower on Amazon →
Mortal Follies by Alexis Hall
London, 1814, with magic. Maelys Mitchelmore is a cursed debutante in the middle of her Season, and the only person who might help is Lady Georgiana Landrake, a woman rumored to be an enchantress. A sapphic Regency comedy with the same gleeful ballroom chaos as Beth and Gwen’s matchmaking. Our Alexis Hall reading order has the rest of his Regency books.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See Mortal Follies on Amazon →
The Covert Captain by Jeannelle M. Ferreira
Captain Nathaniel Fleming has passed as a man for more than a decade; the name on the baptismal record is Eleanor. Staying at the country house of a friend after the war, the captain is drawn to his spinster sister, Lady Harriet, who recruits him as an ally against an unwanted cousin and falls for him in return. Quiet, literary and tender, and the question at its heart is whether Harriet’s feelings survive the truth.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️ Mild
See The Covert Captain on Amazon →
Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller
Connecticut, 1816, the Regency’s American cousin. Patience White has money of her own and lives in her brother’s house; Sarah Dowling is poor and does men’s work in men’s clothes. When Sarah’s father finds out what’s between them, Patience denies it, and Sarah heads west alone disguised as a man. First published in 1969 and the first novel to win what is now the Stonewall Book Award, with a happy ending on a farm.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️ Mild
See Patience and Sarah on Amazon →
Victorian and Edwardian Sapphic Romance
Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
Nan Astley, eighteen and working in her family’s oyster restaurant in Whitstable, sees male impersonator Kitty Butler on stage in the 1890s and follows her to London as dresser, then stage partner, then lover. When Kitty marries her manager, Nan reinvents herself in a suit and on the streets. Waters’s 1998 debut, explicit and riotously sexy, and adapted by Andrew Davies for the BBC in 2002. The book to read when you want Alban’s Victorian London without the chaperones.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Explicit
See Tipping the Velvet on Amazon →
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Sue Trinder, raised among thieves in a London slum, is recruited by a con man called Gentleman to become lady’s maid to Maud Lilly, a sheltered heiress, so he can marry her fortune and have her locked away. Sue was never supposed to care. A scheme, two young women and a plan that goes wrong in the best way: Beth and Gwen’s matchmaking plot turned into a Victorian thriller. Shortlisted for the Booker and filmed by Park Chan-wook as The Handmaiden.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See Fingersmith on Amazon →
Affinity by Sarah Waters
London, 1874. Margaret Prior, nearly thirty, unmarried and smothered by her mother, becomes a Lady Visitor at Millbank Prison and falls under the spell of Selina Dawes, a spiritualist medium jailed after a séance went wrong. Told in alternating diaries, it’s the darkest book here and the one that shows exactly what Gwen’s “fourth Season, no husband” would have cost in another family.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️ Mild
See Affinity on Amazon →
Proper English by KJ Charles
England, 1902. Patricia Merton is a champion shot who arrives at a remote country house for a shooting party and finds herself very drawn to the host’s lively fiancée, Fen Carruth. Then the guests start causing trouble, the affairs and blackmail come out and a body turns up with a knife in its back. A practical heroine, a femme much sharper than she looks and a house party: the most fun sapphic historical on this list after Alban’s.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See Proper English on Amazon →
Backwards to Oregon by Jae
A sapphic marriage of convenience on the Oregon Trail. “Luke” Hamilton is a woman who has lived as a man for years; Nora Macauley is a former brothel worker with nowhere left to go. They marry and head west in a covered wagon, and the arrangement becomes the real thing mile by mile. For readers who loved the scheming-marriage engine of Alban’s plot and want it to be about the two women themselves.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See Backwards to Oregon on Amazon →
Georgian Women Who Lived It
Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue
York, 1805. At the Manor School for young ladies, fourteen-year-old Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, meets Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress sent to England from India at six. Donoghue built the novel from years of research and Anne’s own journals, and it’s the real-life version of two girls finding each other inside a world designed to marry them off. Our books like Gentleman Jack list has the rest of the Anne Lister shelf.
Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See Learned by Heart on Amazon →
Life Mask by Emma Donoghue
London, 1787 to 1797. Anne Damer is a widowed sculptor, financially independent and Horace Walpole’s goddaughter. Eliza Farren is the Drury Lane comic actress who becomes her closest friend, while the Earl of Derby waits to marry her. When rumors about Anne threaten Eliza’s career, Eliza has to choose. A big, slow novel about society’s rules and the women who live just inside them.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️ Mild
See Life Mask on Amazon →
Queer Regency Beyond the Ballroom
A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall
Viola Carroll was presumed dead at Waterloo and used it to finally live as herself, giving up her wealth and title. Years later she meets Justin de Vere, the Duke of Gracewood, her oldest friend, who has withdrawn into grief and doesn’t recognize her. A trans Regency romance with the emotional scale of a Brontë and the manners of an Austen. Our books like Sense and Sensibility list has more queer Regency in this vein.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See A Lady for a Duke on Amazon →
Read Next: Hotter Picks From Fractal Enigma
Alban keeps the candlelight soft. Evelyn Ashcombe writes the same world, the leaking houses, the leases, the women nobody bothered to ask, and lets them say what they want out loud, at Inferno heat. Our guide to the new sapphic historical romances explains which era to start in.
The Lady in the Next Room — Evelyn Ashcombe
The sapphic Regency. Bath, 1818. Frances Bellamy is a widow with nine pounds in a tin, two empty rooms and a locked drawer of pages she has never shown a soul. On a wet October night a runaway gentlewoman knocks under a borrowed name, having fled a marriage arranged to pay her cousin’s debts. The room has a connecting door with two bolts. Neither stays bolted. Beth’s escape from the marriage market, with a widow who has stopped pretending the ache is only friendship. Also in audiobook and paperback.
Heat: Inferno 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Landlady/Lodger, Forced Proximity, Thin Walls, Runaway Gentlewoman, Secret Writer, Hidden Identity, Mutual Pining, Sexual Awakening, Class Difference
Start reading The Lady in the Next Room →
Her Ladyship’s American Wife — Evelyn Ashcombe
The sapphic Victorian. Sussex, 1896. Constance Vale, the widowed Countess of Mereford, has a hundred and seventeen days to find three thousand pounds or lose Seabrook, a house on the sea that lets the Channel in through the roof. Beatrice Alden of Boston is a sculptor with a fortune in her own name and a mother booking passage home. Beatrice rents the coach house, Constance strikes the word “gift” out of the lease with a ruler, and the connecting door between their rooms hasn’t been locked in years. An ice-queen countess, an heiress who pays for everything and the one thing that can’t be bought.
Heat: Inferno 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Ice Queen, American Heiress, Landlord/Tenant, Artist Romance, Late Bloomer, Class Difference, Written Terms, Only Soft for Her
Start reading Her Ladyship’s American Wife →
The Portrait of Lady Ash — Maeve Hollow
The Victorian lady who never got her Season back. She has been painted shut inside her own portrait since 1867. Celeste Arden is a conservator who doesn’t believe in anything she can’t test, sent to an island house to clean a painting whose subject turns out to be very much awake inside it. The woman in the frame has waited 159 years for someone to ask permission. A gothic sapphic romance with a 242-year age gap, scar worship and a lady who has been touch-starved for a century and a half.
Heat: Inferno 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Conservator × Witch, Trapped in a Painting, Immortal × Mortal, Age Gap, Gothic, Haunted House, Island Forced Proximity, Instruction Kink, Touch Starved
Start reading The Portrait of Lady Ash →
For the full Regency and Victorian shelf, see the Evelyn Ashcombe author page.
FAQ: Books Like Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend
Is Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend Regency or Victorian?
Victorian. It’s set in London in the 1850s, though the Season, the matchmaking mothers and the ballroom comedy will feel familiar to anyone who reads Regency romance. That’s why readers shelve it next to sapphic Regency books like The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics.
Which sapphic historical romance should I read first?
The Perks of Loving a Wallflower for the same rom-com tone, The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics for more heat and a slower burn, Tipping the Velvet if you want the Victorian classic.
How spicy is Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend?
Mild. The romance is tender and the book is more about the comedy and the feelings than the bedroom. Olivia Waite’s books and Tipping the Velvet run hottest on this list, and the Fractal Enigma picks are Inferno. Our romance spice levels guide explains the chili scale.
Are there sapphic Regency adaptations to watch?
Tipping the Velvet was adapted by the BBC in 2002, and Park Chan-wook turned Fingersmith into The Handmaiden. For Regency-adjacent sapphic television, Gentleman Jack, about the real Anne Lister in the 1830s, is the one fans start with.
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