The setting was usually urban: the world in which the characters lived and acted was mid-century industrialized England, with its great developments and its even greater social evils. Social and economic problems then became the themes of many novels: the negative aspects of many Victorian institutions, such as the school, the prison, the workhouse, the electoral system, were known and criticised.

Victorian novel covered a period of about fifty years, from the thirties to the eighties, going from Charles Dickens [S 1] to George Eliot [S 1], and including, besides many minor novelists, William Makepeace Thackeray [F 1], Anthony Trollope [I 1], Elizabeth Gaskell [I 1], and the Brontė sisters [I 1].

An outstanding feature of the Victorian novel was, therefore, the presence of an increasing number of women novelists, who often published their works under male pseudonyms: they found it difficult to publish books with their real names, given the Victorian view of women, who were considered incapable of any public or creative activity. For example, this was the case of Emily Brontė, who published the novel Wuthering Heights under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. This novel stands apart from the mainstream of Victorian fiction because of its structure, themes and setting. Emily Brontė [E 1] [S 1] was an innovator: she introduced two narrators speaking in the first person, so that there is a story within the story, and the plot is complicated by these two narrative frameworks.