Ten Ways That Jane Austen Is Not a Victorian Novelist
Jane Austen was born in 1775 and died in 1817. Most of her work was published between 1811 and 1818. Yet she is repeatedly lumped together with authors from a much later time, such as George Eliot (1819-1880), Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), and Anthony Trollope (1815-1882). Together, they and many others are referred to as "Victorian authors," even though Queen Victoria didn't come to the throne until 1837. The reason seems to be because these authors, and more, frequently set their works in the English countryside, where towns were small, life was slow, and old landed wealth reigned supreme. Of course Victorian authors covered much more than that, as anyone who has read Charles Dickens would know. And while the countryside did, in many ways, seem suspended in time throughout the 19th century (something I comment on in a Downton Abbey post ), it still experienced fundamental changes. Changes that were beginning during Austen's lifetime, but would be more fu