In this final post in the series, it’s important to remember that not all novels that are set in the past are classed as historical fiction. Some classic novels from the nineteenth century are often incorrectly described a historical fiction. Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations all take place in the past, but this is also when the authors wrote them. Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, and Charles Dickens were not historical novelists in these cases but were writing stories set in their own time period.

This doesn’t mean that historical fiction wasn’t being written at that time. Sir Walter Scott, writing in the early decades of the nineteenth century, set the novel Ivanhoe in 12th-century England. Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, published in 1831, takes place in the medieval period. Dickens depicted the era of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities, which was first published in 1859. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace was published in 1869 and the story takes place around the time of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia earlier in the century.