I'm not sure I did anything pre-20th century for GCSE apart from some Shakespeare, but that kind of months-long chapter-by-chapter study would kill anything. (On the other hand, doing an English degree and being expected to read three or four books a week, at least some the length of Middlemarch, didn't do much for my ability to read for pleasure either!)

I was listening to the Galactic Suburbia podcast last night and they were talking about Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing, and one of the things they mentioned was the tendency to regard writing by/about women as being less universal than writing by/about men, and the tendency to pigeonhole writing by women as being "romance" and then dismiss it because of that, when actually a focus on marriage and relationships doesn't make a book a romance. (Jane Austen Never Wrote A Romance In Her Life is a hill I will die on.)