Two writers of period fiction discuss what makes the genre so popular. Why do we continue to watch adaptations of the great 19th-century novels on the big and small screen and what is it about period fiction that makes it so attractive to both the writer and the reader.

Jane Sanderson has written two works of period fiction. Ravenscliffe is the sequel to her debut novel Netherwood. It takes the story on to 1906 and covers the early stirrings of the labour movement and women’s suffrage. Ronald Frame is author of 13 novels. His most recent, Havisham, tells the story of Miss Havisham’s life pre Dickens’s Great Expectations.