The second season of "Bridgerton," which arrives on Netflix on March 25 (opens in a new tab), begins where the previous one left off. As you may recall, while the family's eldest daughter, Daphne, has happily married the Duke and is already expecting her first child, the family's de facto patriarch, the eldest son, Anthony, decided at the end of season 1 (opens in new tab) that it was time to stop womanizing and find himself a suitable marriage partner.

Of course, as Anthony soon learns, that is easier said than done. It is made even harder by the fact that his definition of "suitable" includes a list of rather stringent criteria for a wife that includes no mention of actual love. He ultimately sets his sights on the delightful Edwina Sharma, new to the ton, despite her headstrong sister Kate's open antipathy toward the viscount. As a Regency romance story (opens in new tab), there is little room for subtlety.

The eldest of the sisters, the more prickly Kate Sharma, is played by Simone Ashley (opens in new tab). She is a British actress who has played smaller roles in British television shows such as "Detective Pikachu," "Broadchurch," and "Strike"; starting in 2019, she will play Olivia, a member of the "untouchable" faction in Netflix's "Sex Education," a more She has also taken on more important roles.

Kate's half-sister Edwina is played by Charitra Chandran. She graduated from Oxford University in 2019 and immediately landed the lead role of Sabina in the second season of Amazon's Alex Rider.

The Sharma family are half-sisters: Kate is the daughter of a working-class merchant who fell in love with Lady Mary, the daughter of an earl. Kate was the daughter of a working-class merchant and fell in love with the Countess Lady Mary, but Mary's parents opposed the relationship, so Mary fled with him to India, where she soon gave birth to Edwina. When the father of her daughters died, Mary and Edwina continued to raise Kate as their own daughter.

At the beginning of Season 2, the Sharma family returns to England to stay with Lady Danbury ("Remembering Lady Danbury" (open in new tab)). This is because Queen Charlotte has declared Edwina the new "incomparable" of the social scene. It fits perfectly with Kate's semi-secret plan to find Edwina a husband whom her estranged grandparents would approve of and pay her dowry.

Unfortunately for all involved, things (obviously) do not go according to plan. After Anthony Bridgerton sets his sights on Edwina, he is unable to stop himself from clashing with Kate, raising sexual tension to the point of a knife cut in the process. To say the least, being with his beloved sister's fiancée is not an ideal situation.

The core of the Sharma sisters' story also survives the jump from page to screen in Julia Quinn's romance series (opens in new tab): Kate is a frank and smart woman, fiercely protective of her sister and determined to live the rest of her life single. Edwina, on the other hand, is a wide-eyed, hopeless romantic who, though seemingly sensitive and relatively soft-spoken, is just as determined to be herself as Kate is.

The biggest change between the two versions of the sisters is thanks to the TV version's tendency to add much-needed diversity to the fictional early 19th century London. In the book, Edwina is described as blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and the family is only from rural England to the city, not India, and their last name is Sheffield.

"Making the Sharma family South Asian was actually a very simple choice," Shonda Rhimes, one of the show's producers, recently told her Shondaland platform (opens in new tab). 'We wanted to feel that the world we live in is as three-dimensional as possible, and we wanted to feel that our representation is as three-dimensional as possible.'

She continued, " Finding dark-skinned South Asian women and making sure they are authentically and honestly represented on screen feels like something we don't see nearly enough of."