Post-Jane Austen Novels
Victorian historical novels about women are great for book clubs.
Jane Austen's Regency era heroines were genteel, but these gritty Victorian era heroines rise from the middle and lowest classes. Good books, great reading!
While Jane Austen wrote about the Upper and Lower Rooms of Bath and country house manners, England as a whole had many fascinating stories to tell. The minor nobility country house lifestyle, as celebrated in Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma, was enjoyed by a small percentage of the population. In London during this time, there were approximately 50,000 prostitutes out of a population of 1.1 million, according to some sources. The stories of women in the 1800s are far more varied than Jane Austen’s novels show.
Learn more about Jane Austen and Jane Austen Fandom in this short essay.
These two recommended novels each feature an intelligent, bookish heroine who runs headlong into the male-dominated Victorian world. This was a sad fact of life in Victorian England, that women had very few options in life: wife, governess, or prostitute. In the first, the heroine deal with their lot. In the second, the heroine survives and changes her circumstances. It must be noted that Jane Austen and George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) circumvented these fates.
After Jane Came George
Though Jane Austen wrote during the Regency period about her contemporaries, George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) wrote during the Victorian Period. While Austen wrote about young girls getting married, Eliot wrote about what happens after marriage, especially to women who choose wrongly, in Middlemarch.
George Eliot created the town of Middlemarch, a town caught in the social upheaval of Victorian England and the rise of the middle class (hence, the name.)
The heroine of Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooks, is wealthy, pretty, and witty, like a Jane Austen heroine. However, instead of marrying the appropriate local baron who her family and friends are trying to match her with, a “good” match, she chooses a cold, heartless, older clergyman who, she thinks, could even teach her Hebrew. She wants to live an intellectual life, and she thinks that their days will be spent discussing literature and philosophy. It’s a disastrous match. Instead of marrying for love, she marries for intellect, and Jane Austen would agree that brains are not enough.
Other storylines include that of Dr. Lydgate, who is married to a frivolous, idiot wife who likes only new clothes and furniture. This storyline is the antithesis of the Dorothea storyline. Dorothea marries for philosophy; Lydgate, for beauty. Neither marries for love.
If Jane Austen’s stories are about young girls falling in love, Middlemarch is about marriage and being trapped in a hell of one’s own making. It’s a grown-up novel about adults and the results of choice that adults make, and it’s one of the best novels ever written.
If you’d like to read another book that’s a grown-up book with vividly drawn characters, try this one.
The Victorian Underclass
Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White is another novel of the Victorian period. Jane Austen wrote about the genteel upper crust. Eliot wrote about the rising middle class.
Faber, however, jumps into the London gutter and rummages around. It must be noted that Faber is a contemporary author, and this book was published recently. It is therefore a historical novel that looks from the present back to the Victorians, and Faber is not from the era.
The main character of The Crimson Petal and the White is Sugar, a well-read, intelligent prostitute with literary and political pretensions. This book is not for the faint of heart, nor the reader who doesn’t care to read about sex. The first part of the book details what Sugar will do to a man for money.
If you like books that deal with the ramifications of sex, try this one.
A wealthy, profligate playboy falls in love with Sugar, or rather, he loves what Sugar is willing to do to him and what it means for him to have a kinky mistress. He sets her up in an apartment and gives her an allowance, but Sugar has never lived outside a brothel and is out of her element. Eventually, Sugar must find a new place for herself in the world.
Faber is also, it must be noted, not only contemporary but male. He does, in a few circumstances, truly not understand the emotions of the women that he’s writing about and what it means to be helpless and regarded as property in such a society as Victorian England.
George Eliot, a woman who lived during that time, understands much better what it means to be trapped. Faber tried, and he wrote a fascinating novel that I whipped through because it was such fascinating reading and well-written.
Big, Lush, Long Victorian Novels
The Crimson Petal and the White is a long book, and so is Middlemarch. Indeed, Middlemarch is an eight-book series. Reading it all at once would be like reading the entire seven-book Harry Potter series in one go. You can’t read a book like Middlemarch in one sitting, but you can’t watch an entire season of Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, or Lost in one sitting, either, not without developing blood clots.
Long novels, novel series, and continuing-plot television series should be doled out slowly in enjoyable portions.
If you’d like to read shorter books that are still great, try these books.
If you’d like to read books with great central characters, try these books.
If you'd like to read more about creating unforgettable characters, read this article.
