What makes a great historical novel?

I grew up in a system of historical novels, especially the romantic, with an R so small. However, when I graduated from the classics, I knew I had found my true gender. "I'm in the wrong time" was born, I thought.
And then I became a writer, and I entered a historic period of my dreams, tiptoe quietly collect atmospheric, facts, food, language, Zeigeist quite different from my own existence pedestrians. And yet I do not have everything right. First I studied why these classic novels were great that I could dare to do so, to be published.
Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoevsky, Gaskill, Bronte, Austen, what made them so big that they are relevant to be dramatized, resume, and studied? I really think the answer is that they wrote the redemption of the characters. The authors believe in a world where the difficult issues of life had answers. They believed in right and wrong.
Margaret Hale, North and South Gaskill, is my favorite heroine. Given the difficult issues through the industrial revolution in England made barriers of class, poverty and greed, they managed to buy all those in the circle of his existence and his love for his righteous principles. His influence went over his district and acquired strategic nature in an industrial town in Victorian England. This was no fairy tale. It was very real, because it shows love as it really is, a commitment that recognizes the error, but works of the past, about the innate goodness of man. Elizabeth Gaskill believed in the innate goodness, like Tolstoy, Hugo, Bronte, etc.
Why is it that today's younger generation turns to fantasy literature in overwhelming numbers? Due to the imaginary worlds are built on the existence of good and evil. Up to this time of the relativism that has been the nature of art. And deep inside we still know.
Internationally renowned critic John Gardner, said the measure with more eloquence than I am, talking about my favorite author and his work. "Leo Tolstoy knew about the universe of despair and perhaps suffered [spiritual crisis similar to the change of Sartre], a deep crisis, and all of them. He was not there a theory that every man must make his own rules, values are for all men of all time, but with a theory of reference, a theory also emphasized the freedom, but argues that a person is doing his freedom to observe silence, and listen to attempt, in his heart and bones, what God he demanded, as Levin feel in "Anna Karenina" or to Pierre in War and Peace. "(Gardner, John, of moral fiction, Basic Books, Inc.: New York, p. 25)
Gardner also argues that great art is always based attempts to improve the lives not degrade.
Why "Les Miserables" one of the greatest productions of modern times? For he was heroic. It could be made us believe and buy into the idea that man can change, could saved enough to want to sacrifice love, even in a time of great darkness and despair. Although the revolution was the mid-nineteenth century French, is Valjean was victorious in his heart and soul.
So if I wanted to write a novel about the triumph of the soul in the dark ages, I took a lesson from the greatest. I have it overhauled in the past, where it would be impossible. Is it too late for us? Genre Fiction always deals with good and evil. If literary fiction is not a lesson of the popularity of these books, maybe even a mission there?