Fictional universes

When I'm reading science fiction or fantasy or historical fiction, the one thing I really enjoy is just immersing myself in the peaceful everyday life of the fictional/historical universe. I love the whimsy of everyday life at Hogwarts. I love the bucolic peace of the Shire. I love the very beginning of Gone With The Wind, before the Civil War starts. Unfortunately, these genres tend to demand that once the calm happy everyday existence in the universe is established, it is completley boulversé. The protagonist has to leave everyday life to go off on some grand adventure (which will take up most of the plot), and then introducing the reader to the universe is set aside in favour of the larger plot.

Some books are able to work around this. Judith Merkle Riley's Vision of Light has the protagonist in her optimal place narrating the events that got her there, so I got to enjoy the happy everyday life throughout the upheavel of the rest of the book. The Mists of Avalon doesn't have a single happy place, but rather a series of places are travelled through and there's no single grand quest, so, again, I get to enjoy everyday life throughout. But most often, the genre demands that we only get a fleeting, tantalizing glimpse of happy everyday life, before the protagonist runs off on a quest.

A genre that would be more conducive to showing us happy everyday life would be lighter, more domestic novels, like Little Women or Jane Austen. However, they don't really show the universe, because they were written in what was then the present, so the authors didn't focus on creating the universe with historical details because all those details were obvious at the time. So I guess a way to create the kind of historical fiction that makes me happy would be to rework these old novels in the form of historical novels, written for an audience who is unfamiliar with the details of the era. So then we could enjoy the universe, and we'd also get a plot that doesn't involve completely turning the universe upsidown. I guess that's why I tend to prefer movies of these older books. They have to create the universe rather than taking it as a given, so I get to immerse myself in the world even though that wasn't the author's original intent.