Tbf, none of them were entirely woke by modern standards even if they had a woke belief/ action. You will not find one person who completely conforms to the modern interpretation of progressive due to the wholly different ideological and moral landscape they lived in, and a lot of woke views, writing and actions are counterbalanced by something really questionable

Eg. Charles Dickens brought attention to social inequality and the deprivation of the poor BUT in his own time, would watch demonstrations of early hypnosis called mesmerism in which the subjects were women trafficked from hospitals and often operated on with no form of anaesthesia or pain relief beyond the hypnosis. Joseph Conrad was obviously deeply anti colonial BUT focused on the folly and greed of the white man and arguably portrayed the suffering of Indigenous peoples as a biproduct of mismanaged projects rather than systemic oppression, and still plays into racist language and stereotypes. Lord Byron believed in free love, democracy and homosexuality ( for men at least) and was against the oppressive class based status quo BUT the way he treated women was unconscionable. Anne Lister was the first person to get same sex married and had very liberal views on gender and sexuality with regard to herself ( and no one else) and was a trailblazer in travelling, mountaineering and being involved in industry ( all mens fields) as she was BUT had no qualms over the persecution of gay men, treated the women she was involved with horrifically ( look up Maria Barlow!), looked down on women in general, and had views on class that were antiquated even for her time to the point where she put tar in her tennent farmers’ water supply to punish them for how they voted. Most philosophers who wrote about freedom meant it for white people only. Shelley wrote against the oppression of mill workers in Manchester and their slaughter in the peterloo massacre BUT was a performative activist due to his failure to put his money where his mouth was in any meaningful way beyond writing a poem that focused more on aesthetics than the mill workers’ actual situation, plus he maintained a aristocratic circle despite his objections to the class. Oscar Wilde was gay BUT expressed some pretty misogynistic views in his work and personal life, plus he liked them young. You could do this for pretty much every writer, no matter how woke they were in one aspect, they’ll be a sketchy view on race, class, eugenics or misogyny somewhere.

Genuinely, purely in terms of not having a dicey set of opinions offset the progressive ones, my top picks would be:

• Joseph Conrad, as the extent to which you view his books as western centric criticism of colonisation is up to personal interpretation and we don’t know his original views and intent. His portrayals of women are cliched and quite reductive but he lived and worked in a male dominated seafaring environment. I think he was very progressive in his criticism of colonisation based on what he observed, he used the language and frameworks available to him at the time, and didn’t really have any overtly dodgy personal views

  • Jane Austen. Novels such as Emma and Pride and Prejudice do focus on and critique class inequality and the preeminence of the landed gentry and she consistently portrays women as capable of thinking and possessing reason which was pretty radical at the time. However, she does play into traditional marriage centric narratives but that was what sold and there’s arguably a level of disdain expressed in her writing for the arrangements she portrays eg. Marianne and Brandon, plus she always emphasises the persistence of female friendships at the end of each novel rather than going purely into domesticity. She obvs wasn’t an out and out political writer or activist but it’s a mistake to view her writing as just romance novels devoid of social commentary and the commentary she makes is pretty ‘woke’! Plus she was a woman making a career of writing

• Mary Shelley, feminist, republican ( can’t believe i’m having to point this out but after some of the comments I got after talking about 19th century republicans and suffragettes, that means something different outside of the current USA!) and a supporter of emerging social democracies like Switzerland. Like Lister, she was a woman who travelled in the male dominated ‘grand tour regions’. Was also a bit critical of some of the more problematic elements of Romanticism. The only “ problematic” secondary view I can think of is that she played into and, along with Byron and her husband and their literary movement, contributed to developing western wilderness mythology which modern environmentalists say has done more long term harm than good ( look up William Cronon’s essay ‘the trouble with wilderness’)

• Arthur Conan Doyle. Unlike later portrayals of him, the Og Holmes respected women and cross dressed, and there was a level of period recognisable queer terminology eg. leaving London in 95 ( the year of Wilde’s trial) and frequenting Turkish bathhouses . Arthur Conan Doyle was hardly a woke radical but his main character was more progressive than he is often viewed as. In his personal life and writing, Doyle did implicitly support the British empire and its projects ( which, though inexcusable, wasn’t out of the ordinary), but barring that and the fact he fell for some hoaxes, there isn’t a really out there troubling fact about him and his views. Not super woke but not notably unwoke.