I find I don’t as much like books set in the past if they were written by modern day authors, because I don’t know if they really got it right. There ARE stories of characters wanting an education that is denied to them (Jude the Obscure, and in Middlemarch, Dorothea) but it doesn’t seem as though their search for it causes upheaval around them because they simply search in vain, and find that it’s not that others are physically blocking or preventing them, it’s simply that they don’t know how to reach their goals, and at most those around them are passively not-helpful. The ones where one educated person (almost always female) starts teaching those around her and it causes problems are almost always an indication of a 20th century mindset.