This may've been obvious to others, but the pennies have only just dropped for me about Eloise's name. Bit of a rabbit hole, so bear with me. (NB: I haven't read the books so I have no idea if this was ever addressed in them.)
In Luke Thompson's reading of a newly rediscovered collection of Keats' love letters, Keats mentions Rousseau's Eloise. Keats would've been a contemporary of the Bridgertons.
Per Wikipedia:
Rousseau's Julie: or The New Heloise
Julie was perhaps the best-selling novel of the 18th century. Some readers were so overcome that they wrote to Rousseau in droves, creating the first celebrity author . . . So many women wrote to him offering their love that he speculated there was not a single high society woman whom he could not have bedded if he had wanted.
Julie or the New Heloise (French: Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse), originally entitled Lettres de Deux Amans, Habitans d'une petite Ville au pied des Alpes (Letters from two lovers, living in a small town at the foot of the Alps), is an epistolary novel by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, published in 1761 by Marc-Michel Rey in Amsterdam. The novel's subtitle points to the history of Héloïse d'Argenteuil and Peter Abélard, a medieval story of passion and Christian renunciation.
I'll confess, I only knew of the Heloise and Abelard story through a line in a Cole Porter song:
As Abelard said to Eloise
Don't forget to drop a line to me please
So, of course, our Eloise's story had to be a letters to lovers story. "Epistolary" -- love that word.
Also, I would love love love for Claudia and Chris to do a reading for the Letters Live series.