They taught you that you can choose your future? In my experience the only thing Victorian novels teach a woman it's that if she isn't a blonde or a redhead adolescent life will be hell for her and she'd be lucky not to end up dead or afflicted with chronic depression. But hey, if she does end up surviving absurd circumstances that the author jumps through hoops trying to give the appearance of plausibility, losing everybody dear to her, and being pursued by people who have actual pshychopatic personalities on every side, after which she ends up being chronically depressed the man of her dreams will marry her in the end. Lucky her.