The Bridgerton Showrunner Teases Eloise’s “Surprised By Love” Season

Spoilers ahead for Bridgerton Season 4. Eloise hive, rise up — her season is nigh, and it’s going to shake up the Bridgerton love story as we know it.

Throughout the latest season (which dropped its second half on Feb. 26), Eloise goes through an evolution. She begins proudly telling her mom that she’s an on-the-shelf “spinster.” But by the finale — after an eye-opening conversation with a happily married Cressida — she sees things with a new perspective.

As she tells a despondent Hyacinth, who’s feeling hopeless about marriage in the wake of John’s death: “Some things are out of our control. But what is in our control, is our ability to support one another. And ensure that we do not allow fear to keep us from experiencing something that could be truly special.”

Off her sister’s surprised reaction, Eloise clarifies that she’s no “proponent” of walking down the aisle. But, she acknowledges, “I can see that, on occasion, marriage might have its advantages — companionship, family, a prime seat at a soirée. And then, if not for mother and father’s marriage, we would not all have each other, which seems a rather large reward. Most of the time, anyway.”

Showrunner Jess Brownell was proud of this arc for Eloise. “I think she’s a character who’s been resistant to change — and fair play,” she tells Bustle. “I love her politics. I think her stance about marriage and the relations between men and women in this time period is dead on. But what we were really interested in was expanding her empathy and allowing her to see that she has a bit of privilege as a Bridgerton sister that she can abstain from these things, to a certain extent. But for people like Cressida or Posy this season, marriage, in fact, is really important for their lives.”

Seeing Eloise encourage Hyacinth, Brownell says, shows that the fan-favorite character is “stepping into her maturity in a really beautiful way, which I do think sets her up to be, hypothetically, ready for love.”

Her experience with romance, however, will look a little different from that of her siblings. “I think for Eloise, it’s always going to be more of a story of being surprised by love, rather than yearning for it and seeking it out,” Brownell explains.

A New Trope Enters The Chat

If you’ve read Eloise’s book, To Sir Phillip, with Love — and spoilers ahead if you haven’t! — you know that she gets to know her love interest, Phillip, by writing letters to him in the wake of his wife Marina Thompson’s death. She runs away in the middle of the night (unchaperoned!) to meet him at his home, and they don’t get along well in person. But after tracking her down, Anthony forces the pair to marry to spare Eloise’s reputation.

“I love the structure of Eloise’s book — that she has feelings for someone over letters, it’s an epistolary romance, and that they get married really early on in their story,” Brownell says. “Whereas most of our stories are like yearning, yearning, yearning ... [with] her story, they get married early, early, early. And you actually watch what it’s like to be in marriage, and it’s not all roses and puppies and sunshine right away. So that kind of trajectory feels really different from any love story that we’ve told on the show before, and it gets me really excited about Eloise’s season.”