How did the 'quiet, subtle' style of 'classic' British novels develop & why are they boring?

This isn't a homework question. I'm just curious why a whole century or more of British novelists from George Eliot to Jane Austen to E. M. Forster have such established reputations. I understand that they address subtleties of human interaction, relationships and behavior, but to me they are SO boring I can barely read a whole chapter before I start feeling that I'm getting mentally tortured. How did this style develop in the first place? It seems that either these writers had good press agents (i.e., English teachers) or people's lives are even more boring than those depicted in those novels.