The series airs amid fanfare surrounding another popular period drama, Netflix’s The Crown. Both chronicle female British monarchs navigating a hostile patriarchal world. But The Crown doesn’t have the luxury of playing fast and loose with history—after all, many of its characters are still alive. Victoria, on the other hand, takes more license. It was created and written by novelist Daisy Goodwin, who studied the Queen and her namesake era at Cambridge. Goodwin aims to be as factual as possible in her depiction—but then again, as she acknowledged to Vanity Fair, “I am writing a historical drama. All history is a form of storytelling. But I have tried to keep it close to my vision of who Victoria was.”

That vision is of a woman far more openly passionate and conventionally modern than the dour doyenne we think we know. “Because she was on the throne for so long, and because she was the first monarch to be photographed, we all have this image of her as this old bag [with a] sour face,” Goodwin says. “But actually, when she came to the throne, she was just a teenager,18 years old. She was a woman who made more money than her husband, and had to juggle her job, her marriage, and her kids, all nine of them.”

The real Victoria may not have been as beautiful as Coleman (Clara on Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who), but she was certainly fetching. And according to most scholars’ understanding of Victoria’s diaries, the queen lacked no physical passion. “She’s not as far away from us as you might imagine,” says Goodwin, “apart from the fact that she had no access to contraception, the poor woman, which made her life a misery, because she loved sex but not its consequences.”

In Victoria, we meet the young monarch the day she learns she will take the throne. This is also when she escapes from beneath the thumbs of her mother and her mother’s adviser, John Conroy. (The two, who were rumored to be lovers, strictly controlled Victoria through her childhood, in an effort to eventually rule Britain through her as regents.) In the first episode, the young queen banishes her mother to the opposite wing of their new home, Buckingham Palace—an initial act of defiance cementing the headstrong, patriarchy-smashing Victoria we’ll come to know throughout the series.

Jenna Coleman as Queen Victoria

“It’s incredibly popular with young women in this country,” Goodwin explains—and not only because Albert is played by heartthrob actor and onetime model Tom Hughes. “Here’s a young girl who’s in charge. And that never happens on TV, really,” Goodwin says. “She’s a teenager. She’s unmarried. She’s Taylor Swift, but she’s a queen.”

It’s true that the series has majorly connected with viewers across the pond: it received a second-season order less than a month after its premiere, and consistently topped ratings on Sunday nights, beating a formidable competitor in BBC’s popular period drama Poldark.

The Taylor Swift analogy is also apt, not least because fans of the TV drama are obsessed with its lead character’s romantic endeavors—especially with Lord Melbourne. Lord M, as the queen referred to him in her diaries, was prime minister at the time of her accession. He quickly became her trusted confidant and mentor. About 40 years her senior, Melbourne has traditionally been understood as a father figure for the young Victoria, who lost her own father at a young age. But on Victoria, where he’s played by Rufus Sewell (The Man in the High Castle) Goodwin paints him as a love interest.

In the first episodes, before Albert arrives, Victoria chases Lord M, professing her love. He decorously rejects her, citing impropriety, her best interests, and his undying love for his deceased wife. But Sewell’s meaningful glances betray suppressed desires.

Professor and historian Jane Ridley took umbrage with that depiction: “The young Victoria most certainly did not fancy her fat, ageing prime minister,” she said in a piece she wrote in The Telegraph last summer. Writing in the Guardian, historian Matthew Dennison expressed frustration that such exaggerations were even deemed necessary: “[Victoria] published two volumes of diary extracts and became one of the century’s bestselling authors. If only TV producers trusted her.”

But whether this doomed love story is true or not, viewers have fallen under its spell and carried it to its romantic conclusion in numerous fan-fiction stories. In one, titled “The Heart Wants What It Wants,” Keira-House M.D writes, “And all is right because she loves him and he loves her. The rest is just detail.”

Some viewers, of course, will prefer the detail. Goodwin fills the series with historical context, through both socio-cultural story lines (the Chartists movement for equal suffrage, the introduction of gas lighting, Charles Dickens) and design (dresses and uniforms based on actual clothing, elaborate court dances, and no fewer than four heritage Yorkshire homes to meet your estate-porn needs).

On a scale of documentary to Downton Abbey, Victoria may land closer to the latter—leaning on melodrama to soap-opera effect, and turning its protagonist into a romance-novel heroine. But, in so doing, it achieves a different kind of historical accuracy: that of the alchemic translation of fact to fairytale. (In another piece of fan fiction, the author quotes Frozen.) The Victoria of this series is certainly not one dimensional—she can be as cold and petty as any teenager—but the show is still more hagiography than biography. The character is painted with a riot-grrrl brush: she is politically progressive, she dominates men, and she loves getting off.

When asked why American audiences are currently so enamored with British period drama, Goodwin laughs and demurs. But she does hazard a guess: “I think we all like to imagine a time when things were simpler or easier. Where we knew how the world was going to work out. It’s a very confusing time right now.” The story of a strong female ruler who vanquishes her villainous foes: that certainly sounds like the fairytale many Americans are looking for.