History and magic are a powerful combination.
Time travel can be a form of magical realism fiction, depending on the writer’s approach. In a magical realism treatment, you’re in one world and then another opens around you like a blossom. In my magical realism style of time travel, there are laws to the ability to move through time, but the focus isn’t on the mechanisms (science fiction style), nor on characters living in a different time period (historical fiction style). It’s on the overlapping of two eras of history, like two dimensions of consciousness. I like it when history looks at its future, and the future regards its origins, via two characters who meet and love across time.
Why Jane Austen?
I’m working on a new book, with Jane Austen as the time traveling main character. I like bringing an actual historical figure into this century to see our world through her worldview. I’m hoping to create a universe where she can choose which world is best for her, in a story tthat’s by turns funny, whimsical, thought-provoking, and poignant. I want Jane Austen to see how women in our time live, as compared to hers. I want to give her a vision of how she might change, whether she stays in the 21st century or returns to the 19th.
Time traveling allows me to investigate history by superimposing one century over another.
Through the eyes of a historical figure, especially women artists from the past, I can explore the changes in our daily life and emotional nature of our relationships.
Grand adventure is the plot of many time travel stories, but I like to play the what-if game, reimagining how changing history might give different consequences for my life. Altering events and their outcomes would change us all. The villains in my time travel stories — notably in The Time Gatherer — are always trying to change humanity for what they believe would be the better.
Altering history — would it really improve humanity?
If you envision history as the evolution of civilization and human awareness, you could conclude that every event and turning point — however terrible — was needed to bring us here. 
Magical realism time travel can play this what-if scenario. By juxtaposing otherworldly images or events, it heightens a story’s wonder, terror, joy, and other emotions. A giraffe poking its head into your window.
A melody sung by a cloud? Someone calling your name from the meow of a cat. The stars befriending you on your nighttime walk? Magic interwoven into reality can be the best way to evoke feelings and capture history like a firefly in a jar — a wink of truth that lets us remember who we are and how we came to be here.
Read more about my magical realism version o ftime travel in these novels:
Nice one. An area I will like to explore