anything by Anya Seton is good, IMHO. She did her research well. And while there is romance, I think the historical parts are extremely accurate and the romance fits in where it should. I like Philippa Gregory's books; you may not. Her theory of the way women were used as sexual pawns in Tudor times is intriguing and possibly accurate. R.F. Delderfield's A Horseman Riding By series is one of my favorites also, spannin the late Victorian to just pre-WWII times in Devonshire. I like alt-history too, and The Virgin's Spy etc. series by Laura Anderson is quite fun.
Bodice-rippers are a whole other category and I agree should be put there. When I was in nursing school we passed those from one hand to another. They were such a relief from what we had to read and do! I don't read them any more, nor do I (or ever have I) read Regency romance, which I find icky.
Oh, my favorite historical? Easy, but nobody knows it now, even though it won a Pulitzer for fiction in 1933. Lamb in His Bosom, by Caroline Miller. I stumbled across it many years ago in a bookshop and wore out a paperback copy before I found a hardback in a thrift shop. It chronicles the life of a woman in backwoods Georgia before the Civil War. Amazing read. Second favorite? Song of Songs, by Beverly Hughesdon, the story of a young woman who grows up in an upper-class English family in Edwardian times and volunteers as a VAD nurse in WWI. Amazing, and definitely NOT a bodice-ripper!
= new reply since forum marked as read