That's what I didn't like about Wharton's Age of Innocence, because I'm sure it was subversive in the 1920s, but reading it almost 100 years later it was just like "Oh, a woman flouts the rules of her rigid social class. Big fucking deal." I don't know what my HS English teacher was thinking assigning it and not really addressing it as a period piece, because the themes were really boring on their face.

I did enjoy Austen's Northanger Abbey in college though. I think we read it as an examination of the Gothic genre though, so it wasn't just reading it in a vacuum.