“Nothing Extraordinary: Feminist Everyday History in Victorian Novels of the Recent Past” argues that Victorian novels of the recent past written by women leverage the decades-long gap between publication and plot to proffer alternative modes of practicing history that accommodate — and even prioritize — ordinary life. The nineteenth-century novels studied in this dissertation delineate the limits of traditional modes of history and historical fiction, namely that history does not typically attend to the ordinary, gendered concerns of women such as marriage, child-rearing, and homemaking. In addition to highlighting the conspicuous absence of women’s everyday lives from history, these novels also demonstrate that ordinary life is a complex, mutable assemblage of phenomena. Consequently, these Victorian novels of the recent past engage in a feminist mode of alternative retrospection that both expands what qualifies as historical to encompass the ordinary and complicates the authority of traditional historical knowledge. This dissertation includes three chapters focusing on novels of the recent past written by Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Flora Annie Steel, and George Eliot. Each chapter understands the gap between plot and publication as a different relational, gendered structure of time that emphasizes the vitality of ordinary life: the first chapter traces the significance of generational gaps between women in Shirley and Wuthering Heights, the second chapter sketches how commemoration enshrines racialized gender roles in On the Face of the Waters, and the third chapter illustrates how women in Middlemarch enact symbolic homecomings making new homes through marriage. Together, these chapters conclude that these novels of the recent past are distinctly gendered forms of history that rely on ordinary, domestic life to accomplish the work traditionally reserved for public history, especially garnering nationalism and national identity.