What I’ve Learned from 19th Century Novels

Chances are, you were forced to read 19th century novels in high school—and, chances are, you might have hated reading them.

Well, I did anyway. No one really explained to me the importance of reading Charles Dickens, so reading Charles Dickens was rather aggravating. My Junior year, I started to appreciate Victorian literature when I read Jane Eyre, which remains one of my favorite novels in the canon. But, as a writer, it took me a long time to care about those long, meandering sentences, replete with semicolons and colons, with nouns physically remote from their verbs and so many abstractions.

Somehow, my feeling has changed, and I actually find myself loving these novels much more than novels written in the 21st century. I recently finished Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and I’m looking at my summer stack, which includes Middlemarch, The Mayor of Casterbridge, several Henry James novels, Little Women, and Bleak House—that aforementioned Dickens.

As a writer, it took me a long time to care about the 19th century novel. 

So, what’s to be learned? After all, this a newsletter for writers of contemporary fiction, and as someone who also writes contemporary fiction, I’m aware enough to know that the 21st century novel takes a very different approach to storytelling. 

For example, contemporary novels tend to have shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs, more concrete images, and fewer characters. Debut novels rarely exceed 100,000 words—the sweet spot seems to be 70-90k. Stylistically, contemporary novels often exchange interiority for dialogue: the characters in these books have inner worlds, but they are far more likely to speak those inner worlds, perhaps because these novels are meant to play like movies in our minds.

And there are countless novels being published right now, which means there are plenty of exceptions to be found. But I’m interested in what we’ve lost in the craft of successful fiction, and what we might be able to regain.

What is the 19th Century Novel?

Scholars of classical literature often cite what’s called “the long 19th century.” The long 19th century begins with the French Revolution (1789) and ends with the start of World War I (1914).

Art, literature, and philosophy from this 125-year period have a lot of similarities, including a grappling with the industrial revolution, newfound ideas about self-conception, the proliferation of liberal democracy, and a growing awareness of class, race, and gender in rapidly complexifying societies.

As a result, you get Dickens’ meditations on British class mobility, Dostoevsky’s explorations of God and bureaucracy in tsarist Russia, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s incitement for American racial equality. You also get an emerging genre of women authors (often publishing pseudonymously) exploring a woman’s place in society: Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontë sisters, etc. crafted women protagonists with the same richness and complexity that male protagonists had long been afforded.

These novels occurred during a time of greater literacy, in part because the cast iron printing press made book printing faster, cheaper, and easier. The novel itself became a form of middle class leisure, and the middle class—those readers who weren’t working 14-hour days in coal mines or factories—suddenly had more leisure to spare.

The very idea of a sentence, thus, became a form of entertainment.

The very idea of a sentence, thus, became a form of entertainment. Of course, you then get those lengthy sentences that explore tawdry, mundane details because these novels were often first serialized in magazines—which paid their authors by word. But that doesn’t mean these authors wasted words.

Here’s a sentence of Jane Austen’s that wowed me (spoken by her character Elizabeth Bennet):

“The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense.”

A craft workshop in the 21st century would call this “purple prose.” After all, who dialogues in semicolons? And why does the sentence bear so much abstraction? Someone in a workshop would certainly tell you to rewrite this into one or two shorter sentences. Something neat and orderly, like “I hate the world and people disappoint me.”

But I prefer Austen’s sentence! I prefer the truth of it, its nuance and detail. And the sentence’s length offers a sense of unfolding drama: a thought unfurled climactically.

I have not lived in 19th century England, so I can’t assess whether how people talked back then approximates how people talk in Austen’s novel. But realism be damned: the 19th century novel gives me a detailed world whose words are doorways, whose sentences roll out like red carpets.

Why these novels are at odds with modernity

If the long 19th century found entertainment value in a sentence, the 21st century seems to find entertainment value in plot itself.

That’s not a bad thing. A fair critique of Pride and Prejudice (and one that critics have levied across two centuries) is that the plot is fairytale-like. In it, a woman of limited class status rejects, then accepts, the love of a higher class gentleman—whose proposition for her love is unlikely, given the drama of her family, and given her own sharp, unladylike tongue.

If the long 19th century found entertainment value in a sentence, the 21st century seems to find entertainment value in plot itself.

The point of the novel is to situate female independence against the patriarchal and classist norms which constrained a woman’s freedom. But the plot meanders, and the central relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy requires a lot of unlikely coincidences. The novel is not so much interested in documenting how the world works, how people behave. Pride and Prejudice requires people to act against expectation in order to critique the world, even if it results in an unrealistic storyline.

Austen is sometimes described as a didactic writer. Her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, feels as though it is imparting lessons on good conduct to its presumably female readers. Regardless of the question on authorial intent, 19th century novels privilege a point over a plot: a desire to explore a theme, critique a topic, or juxtapose unalike things and see what happens.

Today, the pudding is in the plot.

At least, that’s the case with the recent contemporary novels I’ve read, all of which bucket under the “literary” genre. Someone tries to win a prize; someone tries to save their relationship; sometimes tries to get some sleep; someone tries to get through college—and wackiness ensues.

There’s an explicitly stated goal around which all of a contemporary novel’s events are organized.

There’s an explicitly stated goal around which all of a contemporary novel’s events are organized. Whereas 19th century novels feel more experiential. Sure, Elizabeth wants to secure her future living, but she’s rather ambivalent about the goal of marriage that society has forced upon her, so much so that she rejects the proposition of an eligible, but annoying, suitor.

Or take some other novels. In The Brothers Karamazov, three different brothers experience the clash of their life philosophies (religious/altruistic, sensual/hedonistic, rationalist/nihilist) in a morally ambiguous Russia. In Wuthering Heights, the new tenant of a country house learns about the tortured relationship and mental health dramas of his landlord’s past. Moby Dick is perhaps famous for its stated goal—Ahab killing the white whale—but the point of the novel is its philosophical inquiries into life, labor, pursuit, destiny, and God. This philosophizing is what canonized Herman Melville, eventually, although Moby-Dick was initially a commercial failure.

The inverted privileging of plot over point did not happen overnight. Really, I think emerging technologies are a huge part of this story. The invention of the moving picture created a broader audience for visual storytelling; television truncated these stories episodically. And don’t get me started on the internet, the smartphone, our fraying attention spans, etc.

Simply put, a plot sells books, and potentially also movie scripts. Contemporary novels have themes, but they’re lean and auxiliary to a well-plotted story. Modern craft books espouse the virtues of plot. Perhaps you’ve heard of some? The three act structure, Freytag’s Pyramid, “Save the Cat!”, the snowflake method, The Hero’s Journey, the Fichtean curve, A plots and B plots, etc. But discourse around “the drama of a sentence,” or the art of thematic inquiry, remains in the realm of theory and criticism, perhaps in a university’s literature program—but not the Barnes & Noble’s bestsellers shelf.

What old novels tell us about great stories

But people still read 19th century novels. Some of us even love them. And while there’s necessary discourse to be had around not worshipping the literary canon—I really liked this recent essay on the topic by Ed Simon—the fact remains that the canon preserves literary achievement.

Here’s the dilemma: although the social relations and preoccupations of 19th century novels are fundamentally different from my own, 19th century novels make me feel less alone.

I feel a voice speaking to me from beyond the page, the grave. Someone telling me not just their concerns about society, but creating a space in which we can share our concerns together.

I feel a voice speaking to me from beyond the page, the grave. Someone telling me not just their concerns about society, but creating a space in which we can share our concerns together.

For example, I’m not a woman encountering the dynamics of gender and class in 19th century England. I’m not a monomaniacal sailor. I’m not an Eastern Orthodox monk in a Russian monastery, with an alcoholic father and brother and another brother who worships the scientific method. But these characters encounter a moral friction in their respective stories, and I experience that friction through their meandering sentences and philosophical inquiries. By contrast, a novel with a cogent plot and meticulously efficient sentences might film well, and it might even speak to the problems of the 21st century, but that doesn’t create a space where we meet on the page.

My tastes are not yours, not anybody else’s. And I have no problem with novels consumed strictly for their plots. I’m just also aware that plot alone does not satisfy. Agatha Christie, for example, is an author whose plots are exciting and inventive. How did the killer do it? How is the killer found out? But the mystery genre’s plot conventions do not prevent her from exploring wealth, gender, or nationalism in her novels. In the same genre, and to contradict my own musings about new technologies, I really liked the most recent Knives Out movie, which asked us how we can find God in a world where God is so politicized.

So, regardless of who you are and what you write, I think the following holds true:

1. A story is a trellis for the mind.

Plot, character, point of view—these elements of fiction are essential. They make a story possible.

But what a story makes possible is the author’s own ability to think about the world—about people, life, philosophy, anything. A great story is entertaining, but what excites me is what blossoms off the page: the writer’s mind. After the story is drafted, after the characters have finished their journeys, has the author asked their own questions, gotten answers, found new questions to ask?

2. We meet each other across a theme.

Theme is not some lofty invocation of abstract wondering. It is where our humanity happens.

The plot of Jane Eyre involves a headstrong and independent woman who keeps refusing marriage—until the man she loves is humble enough to love her as she deserves. It is a bildungsroman: a coming of age story, and thus a coming of womanhood. But the story of Jane Eyre is the story of a woman whose self-worth and self-knowledge are constantly threatened by a society that affords women neither.

I understand that story. In my own way, I’ve lived it. Chances are, you have too.

Theme is where that struggle is named, explored, pushed back against, resolved. It is where a problem evolves, where tension and friction are heightened and alleviated, where people are transformed. Plot alone cannot generate this, even a plot with interesting conflict; a plot needs theme to become a story that resonates.

3. Prose is a tapestry of sentences.

I still think a sentence should be a form of entertainment. But, rather than dispense my own advice for doing this, I’m going to leave you with a craft essay I adore:

“The Sentence is a Lonely Place” by Garielle Lutz.

Lutz identifies the musicality and magic that makes certain sentences become breathing, sentient things, capable of conveying something dynamic and essential about living. Give it a read when you have the chance.

19th century novels might sometimes offend Lutz’s advice. But I’m not advocating for writers to write like Jane Austen, even though I love the world of her language. Rather, I’m advocating for a relationship to language that is unique, particular, unusual, and honed. For sentences that end somewhere surprising and unexpected; for prose that knits together these sentences into a yarn, a fabric, a carpet, a story, a world.

After all, we come to language because it is the thing that best conveys our selves, our lives. Clean, utilitarian sentences can convey information, but we are not just megabytes or dots on a graph; we contain the kind of complexity and strangeness that words attempt to carry. In my opinion, contemporary novels are starved for this relationship to language—the kind that canonized authors like Toni Morrison or William Faulkner.

I still believe in those sentences, in our ability to craft them. And, if the only goal for novel writing today is to get optioned for a Netflix script, I might just stick to the 1800s.