One of my favorite Victorian novels is Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. Not many people had even heard of this before the excellent Masterpiece Theatre version a few years ago. Some people who don't care for Dickens or Thackeray imagine they don't like the Victorians, but Gaskell is worlds away from them in this work, a little more in the late Austen tradition. Certainly there is Austenian genius in how characters like Mrs Gibson reveal their moral qualities unwittingly in their speech - it's really rare in novels to have dialog which places the characters so perfectly. It's also like Austen in having an extremely sympathetic main character set in the midst of a very mixed, difficult family situation, as in Pride and Prejudice. And the family is surrounded by an immense, varied, beautifully painted rural community. The action never lags, working itself out in unpredictable ways. I'm really working myself up to a rereading!