The best Victorian novels that have lessons for today

There is so much that is magical, mysterious, and surprising in this delightful tale. But at its heart is a story we all can learn from.

The young hero of the novel, an orphan named Pip, wishes to become a “gentleman” in order to overcome the shame he feels at his treatment by a haughty but beautiful girl with whom he falls in love.

When Pip unexpectedly comes into money, he mistakenly thinks that this is what will make him a gentleman, win the girl, and help him achieve all his big expectations.

The lessons he learns about what it really means to be a “gentle” person are ones most of us need to learn, or at least be reminded of.

Of this novel, Virginia Woolf famously remarked, “The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to forget her.”

The voice of Jane is so powerful, so real, that some thought that she and her author were one. But no.

In Jane, Bronte presents a truly modern self that all can relate to.

We may not be orphaned, abused, and alone as Jane is. But we do have to, like her, fight for our own sense of self and dignity in a world that too often insists we choose as it would have us choose, live as it would have us live, and compromise our beliefs in order to fit in.

Jane does not (hard as that choice is), and through her example of strength and courage, we might find our own. 

Structured as a classical tragedy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles devastatingly exposes what Hardy saw as the worst Victorian hypocrisy: the sexual double standard that deemed a woman to be “ruined” for what was easily excusable for a man.

Despite the novel’s harsh judgment on society, Hardy renders the characters as complex, human figures torn by competing desires, faulty teaching, and innate human nature.

Even the various settings, described in the lush, often arcane prose that is Hardy’s signature, are vivid enough to become characters, too, in this story that will break your heart in the best way.

No less than in 1854 when North and South was first published, our world is marked by the rise of industry and technology, clashes between geographical groups and socio-economic classes birthed by the industrial world, and the rise of religious doubt.

All of which serves as the background for this love story that requires two characters to bridge all of these wide chasms.

As in the best Victorian novels, in this one we are introduced to characters from all walks of life who come from a range of life experiences.

Meeting them in their trials and triumphs and seeing life from their various perspectives through the artful narrative voice Gaskell employs accomplishes what literary fiction does best: enlarge our imaginative horizons and expand our empathic range.

This literary masterpiece employs some of the most common tropes of early novels: letters, a diary, an old mansion, forbidden love, rumors, gossip, and an overall air of foreboding mystery.

These are the ingredients that make for a gripping story. Yet, Anne Bronte does so much more in this remarkably pioneering work.

In fact, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is one of the earliest novels address head on alcoholism and domestic violence. It is at once a feminist novel and one that celebrates love that endures—but, most importantly, love based on equality.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall resists the age-old myth that a woman can change a man (or vice-versa).