The 18 Greatest British Novelists of All Time
Empire-era satirists, moor-dwelling sisters, a philologist and the woman who outsold all of them. English literature never agreed on a first name.
1Agatha Christie
The Devon-born crime writer whose 66 detective novels outsold every other British author.
2Charles Dickens
The Victorian novelist of Great Expectations and Bleak House, serialised to a mass audience.
3Jane Austen
The Regency novelist of Pride and Prejudice, still the most adapted author in English.
4George Orwell
The essayist and novelist behind Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.
5Virginia Woolf
The modernist of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and a founder of Hogarth Press.
6Charlotte Brontë
The author of Jane Eyre, published first under the name Currer Bell.
7Emily Brontë
The author of Wuthering Heights, her only novel.
8Thomas Hardy
The Wessex novelist of Tess of the d'Urbervilles who turned to poetry after the backlash.
9J.R.R. Tolkien
The Oxford philologist whose Middle-earth invented modern epic fantasy.
10Graham Greene
The novelist of The Third Man and The Quiet American, nominated for the Nobel but never awarded it.
11Daniel Defoe
The author of Robinson Crusoe, often credited with the first English novel.
12Mary Shelley
The author of Frankenstein, written when she was eighteen.
13Evelyn Waugh
The satirist of Brideshead Revisited and Decline and Fall.
14Kazuo Ishiguro
The Nobel laureate behind The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go.
15Iris Murdoch
The philosopher-novelist of The Sea, the Sea, a Booker Prize winner.
16Zadie Smith
The novelist of White Teeth and NW, the defining voice of multicultural London.
17Ian McEwan
The novelist of Atonement and Amsterdam, a fixture of the Booker shortlists.
18George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans, author of Middlemarch, writing under a man's name to be taken seriously.
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