The Victorian era is the reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901, and it is one of the richest settings in historical fiction. On the surface, there are gaslit streets, railways, drawing rooms, and an empire at its height. Underneath there are slums, workhouses, a rigid class system and women with very few legal rights.
Novelists love the distance between those two pictures. This guide picks ten essential novels set in the period, then goes through the best of the rest by theme: mysteries, Gothic tales, stories of empire, and voyages into the ice.
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What Counts as Victorian Historical Fiction?
For this guide, a Victorian historical novel is one written after the period and set within it. That leaves out the great novels the Victorians wrote about their own time, though a few of those appear in a section of their own below, because modern writers keep answering them.
The period is long, and it has changed a great deal. The early years saw the railway boom and the Great Exhibition of 1851. The middle decades saw the 1857 uprising in India and Darwin’s theory of evolution. The last years of the century were a time of imperial expansion, new sciences, and new anxieties.
The setting is not limited to Britain. Victoria’s empire reached India, Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and several of the best novels here take place far from London.
The 10 Best Victorian Historical Novels
1. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (2002)
Setting: London, 1870s
Sugar is nineteen and works in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, and she wants a better life. Faber follows her climb through the layers of London society in a very long novel crowded with characters. It reads like a great Victorian novel written by someone free to say everything the Victorians could not.
2. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (2002)
Setting: London and the country, 1860s
Susan is a pickpocket raised in a den of thieves. She is persuaded to pose as a lady’s maid and enter the household of Maud, a young heiress, as part of a plan to get at her fortune. To say more would spoil one of the best-built plots in modern fiction. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
3. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996)
Setting: Canada, 1840s and 1850s
Grace Marks was locked up at sixteen for the murders of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. Her supposed accomplice was hanged in 1843. Years later a young doctor, Simon Jordan, tries to find out what she really remembers. The novel is based on a real case and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
4. Possession by A.S. Byatt (1990)
Setting: Victorian England and the present day
Two modern scholars, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, find evidence of a secret love affair between two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. They follow the trail through letters and journals while their own relationship changes. The novel won the Booker Prize.
5. The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles (1969)
Setting: Victorian England
Charles Smithson is engaged to a young woman of good family and considerable dowry when he becomes fascinated by Sarah Woodruff, an unusual woman who stands outside respectable society. Fowles recreates the feel of a Victorian novel while commenting on it from his own century.
6. The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell (1973)
Setting: India, 1857
In a remote British outpost, the colonial community hears rumours of trouble and stays confident of its own superiority. Then the uprising of 1857 reaches them and they are besieged. Farrell’s novel is darkly funny about the follies of empire and exact about what a siege does to manners and belief. It won the Booker Prize.
7. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (2013)
Setting: New Zealand, 1866
Walter Moody arrives in a gold rush town to make his fortune. On his first night he walks in on twelve local men meeting in secret to discuss a run of strange events: a rich man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and a fortune in gold has turned up in a drunkard’s cabin. It won the Booker Prize.
8. Jack Maggs by Peter Carey (1997)
Setting: London, 1837
Jack Maggs was transported to Australia as a criminal, and he has come back in secret and at great risk. He is watching a fine house in Great Queen Street. Carey’s novel is a reworking of Great Expectations from the convict’s side, and its young novelist, Tobias Oates, is a thinly disguised Charles Dickens.
9. Drood by Dan Simmons (2009)
Setting: London, from 1865
On 9 June 1865 Charles Dickens, the most famous novelist in the world, is in a train crash that changes his life. Afterwards he is drawn to slums, crypts and opium dens. Simmons asks whether that was research or something far darker, in a long gothic novel built from the real last years of Dickens’s life.
10. The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry (2016)
Setting: London and Essex, 1893
When Cora Seaborne’s controlling husband dies, she leaves London for the Essex coast with her son. There she hears that a legendary serpent has returned to the marshes of Aldwinter. Cora, an amateur naturalist, suspects an undiscovered species. The local vicar, William Ransome, suspects only superstition.
Victorian Fiction by Theme
Mysteries and Detection
Victorian London is the home ground of the detective story, and the largest body of Victorian mysteries belongs to Anne Perry. Her Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series begins in 1881 with The Cater Street Hangman and runs to 32 novels. Her William Monk series, which opens with The Face of a Stranger, is set earlier in the century and is darker in tone.
For a lighter touch, A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch introduces Charles Lenox, a Victorian gentleman who would rather be reading by the fire but cannot resist a mystery when a former servant of his friend Lady Jane dies of a rare poison. Things in Jars by Jess Kidd follows the pipe-smoking detective Bridie Devine as she searches for a kidnapped child who is said to have strange powers.
More recommendations are in our guide to the best historical mystery fiction.
Gothic and Hidden Lives
Sarah Waters wrote three novels set in the period, and all three are worth reading. Tipping the Velvet follows Nan, who is captivated by a male impersonator on the music hall stage, becomes her dresser and goes with her to London. In Affinity, Margaret Prior becomes a visitor at one of London’s most notorious prisons and is drawn to an inmate, the spiritualist Selina Dawes.
The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell is a ghost story in the classic manner. Elsie is widowed weeks after her wedding and sent, pregnant, to her late husband’s country estate, where behind a locked door she finds a painted wooden figure that looks very like herself.
Empire and Adventure
The empire supplied Victorian Britain with wealth and with wars, and it has supplied novelists with both ever since. Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser sends its cowardly anti-hero to Afghanistan and the retreat from Kabul, and the Flashman Papers go on to cover most of the century’s campaigns. The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye is the great romantic epic of British India, following Ash, an English boy raised as an Indian, through his service with the Corps of Guides to the Second Afghan War.
Tai-Pan by James Clavell is set at the founding of Hong Kong in the 1840s, and is part of the Asian Saga. When the Lion Feeds by Wilbur Smith takes Sean Courtney from a cattle farm to the Zulu wars and the gold fields, and opens the Courtney series.
Two novels look at the empire from Australia. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey, a Booker Prize winner, is the love story of an Oxford seminarian and a Sydney heiress with a passion for glass, who meet on a voyage out in 1864. English Passengers by Matthew Kneale sets three eccentric Englishmen sailing for Tasmania in search of the Garden of Eden beside the story of a young Aboriginal man whose people are being destroyed.
Ice and Sea
The Terror by Dan Simmons takes the true story of a lost Arctic expedition, its ships locked in the ice for two years, and adds something hunting the crews in the dark. The North Water by Ian McGuire puts a killer aboard a Yorkshire whaling ship bound for the Arctic. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize and has been filmed as a television series with Colin Farrell and Jack O’Connell.
Readers who like their history at sea will find more in our list of the best naval historical fiction.
Beyond Britain
The Wonder by Emma Donoghue is set in a small Irish village, where an English nurse who served in the Crimea is hired to watch an eleven-year-old girl said to have lived for months without food. It has been filmed with Florence Pugh.
An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris is set in Paris in the 1890s. It tells the story of the Dreyfus affair through Georges Picquart, the officer who comes to doubt the conviction, and it won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.
Written at the Time: Four Victorian Classics
These are not historical novels, because their authors were writing about their own age. They are here because so many of the books above grew out of them.
- The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (1860). An early landmark of the mystery novel, serialized in Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round.
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861). The novel that Jack Maggs answers. Read the two together.
- A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle (1887). The first Sherlock Holmes story.
- Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897). The source of a century of Victorian Gothic.
Just Before Victoria
The Quincunx by Charles Palliser (1989) is set in the early nineteenth century, a little before the Victorian period begins, but no guide to this kind of fiction should omit it. Young John Mellamphy and his mother hold a codicil to a will that a powerful family wants, and the long struggle over his inheritance takes him through every level of English society. It is written as if it were all of Dickens’s novels at once.
Authors to Explore
- Anne Perry: two long Victorian mystery series, the Pitt novels and the Monk novels, and more than 100 books in all.
- George MacDonald Fraser: the Flashman Papers, the funniest account of the Victorian army ever written.
- Wilbur Smith: adventure in southern Africa across the nineteenth century.
- James Clavell: British traders in Hong Kong and Japan.
- Robert Harris: the Dreyfus affair in An Officer and a Spy.
Related Best-Of Lists
- Best Historical Mystery Fiction
- Best Naval Historical Fiction
- Best Female Lead Historical Fiction
- Best Historical Fiction Series
Frequently Asked Questions About Victorian Historical Fiction
What is the best Victorian historical fiction novel to start with?
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters is the easiest recommendation: it is gripping, stands alone and shows the period from an unusual angle. Readers who want a long, immersive book should try The Crimson Petal and the White, and readers who want a mystery series should begin with The Cater Street Hangman by Anne Perry.
What years does the Victorian era cover?
The Victorian era is the reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901. It is often divided into early, middle and late periods, and it is followed by the Edwardian era.
Is Victorian historical fiction the same as Victorian literature?
No. Victorian literature means books written during the period, by authors such as Dickens, Wilkie Collins and the Brontës. Victorian historical fiction means later novels that are set in the period. This guide is about the second kind, with a short section on the first.
Are there Victorian historical novels set outside Britain?
Many. The Siege of Krishnapur and The Far Pavilions are set in India, The Luminaries in New Zealand, Oscar and Lucinda in Australia, Alias Grace in Canada, Tai-Pan in Hong Kong and When the Lion Feeds in southern Africa.
What are the best Victorian mystery series?
Anne Perry wrote the two longest: the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels, with 32 books, and the William Monk novels, with 24. The Charles Lenox series by Charles Finch, which begins with A Beautiful Blue Death, is another good choice.
Which Victorian historical novels have won the Booker Prize?
Four of the books in this guide: The Siege of Krishnapur in 1973, Oscar and Lucinda in 1988, Possession in 1990 and The Luminaries in 2013. Alias Grace, Fingersmith and English Passengers were all shortlisted.
What is neo-Victorian fiction?
It is a term for modern novels that are set in the Victorian period and consciously answer its literature. Jack Maggs, which reworks Great Expectations, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which comments on the Victorian novel as it goes, are well-known examples.
Why is the Victorian era so popular with novelists?
It offers rigid rules and plenty of people breaking them. Class, respectability and the legal position of women create high stakes for small actions, and the growth of cities, science and empire gives writers a huge range of settings, from London slums to Indian garrisons.