How does an author pick the era in which to set her historical romance? Certainly,
there are authors who have their favorite. Regency England, certainly one of the biggest. Now, and, it seems, forever. The Middle Ages - Medieval England - was also big. Certain times wax and wane in popularity. The Vikings were popular with 
Heather Graham, for example, but the Viking romance is rather a rarity now. Civil War America was huge (ibid, Heather). It, too, along with the American Western romance, has fallen on harder times. Czarist Russia had its day, as did the Classical world's romance. 
Rennaissance Italy and France, and the oh-so-alluring Arabian romance came and went.Some eras have never seemed to find favor or popularity. The Crimean War (one of my favorites). Georgian has some fans, as did the American Revolution, and the eras in America before the upheaval, including the tumult of the French and Indian War era.
Fortunately some of my favorite time periods are beginning to find fans - Victorian England is now getting more and more popular as the setting for romance and the American counterpart, the Gilded Age, likewise becoming a hot topic.
As we grow further removed from earlier 20th Century eras, they, too, are becoming popular fodder for the romance. The 1920's - the "Roaring" twenties could not be a more fevered period in which to place one's romance (after all, if it was good enough for F. Scott?). And the time period that captured my heart long ago, in my rather melodramatic teen years, when movies like From Here To Eternity, The Winds of War, 13 Rue Madelaine, Casablanca, The Great Escape, Stalag 17, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, The Guns of Navarone, The Yellow Rolls Royce, and one of my all-time favorites, In Harm's Way, introduced me to the climactic life and death struggles on all fronts - military and romantic.
Even as I write, more and more WWII romance novels are being published. Contrary to the ever-popular espionage and military fiction novels that have been written, the novels portraying the humanity - versus the tactics - are coming into print. The Kommandant's Girl got the ball rolling, and mainstream fiction titles like Charlotte Grey, Shining Through, and the keeper on my particular WWII shelf, Janet Dailey's Silver Wings and Santiago Blue - published decades ago - are keeping up the fight.
Unlike those authors who settle on a favorite period and keep to it, I'm a fan of many eras. And so I've got my work cut out for me. WWII, Crimean War, Gilded Age NY, the Civil War era and Reconstruction. Victorian England, the Vikings, and romances set in various time frames in Scotland, France, Russia and Germany.
And how can I forget the Wild, Wild West? Gold Rush? And don't forget those innocent years before World War I - when the industrial revolution had provided so
much, and a world conflagration had not yet taken it away, along with the remains of the innocence that still existed in the world.My. So many eras, so little time!
I guess I'd better start writing!
