# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published August 14, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-18-greatest-british-novelists-of-all-time*

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

Tags: books, uk, authors, writers