# The 45 Greatest British Novels of All Time

> Victorian doorstoppers sit next to slim modern masterpieces, and every Booker winner here has to get past Austen and the Brontes first. Back the one you would actually reread.

*By YPB Team · Published October 27, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-45-greatest-british-novels-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Frankenstein** — score 1000/1000
   Mary Shelley's 1818 Gothic novel of a scientist and the creature he brings to life.
2. **Mrs Dalloway** — score 805/1000
   Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel following one London day of society hostess Clarissa Dalloway.
3. **To the Lighthouse** — score 772/1000
   Virginia Woolf's 1927 modernist study of the Ramsay family and the passage of time.
4. **Middlemarch** — score 677/1000
   George Eliot's 1871-72 panorama of provincial English life, topping the BBC Culture critics' poll.
5. **Lord of the Flies** — score 648/1000
   William Golding's 1954 allegory of schoolboys descending into savagery on a desert island.
6. **Clarissa** — score 648/1000
   Samuel Richardson's vast 1748 epistolary tragedy, among the longest novels in English.
7. **Great Expectations** — score 595/1000
   Charles Dickens's 1861 coming-of-age story of the orphan Pip and his mysterious benefactor.
8. **The Way We Live Now** — score 595/1000
   Anthony Trollope's 1875 satire of financial fraud and greed in London society.
9. **Jude the Obscure** — score 595/1000
   Hardy's bleak 1895 final novel about a stonemason barred from Oxford's scholarly world.
10. **White Teeth** — score 534/1000
   Zadie Smith's 2000 debut tracing two families in multicultural north-west London.
11. **Vanity Fair** — score 534/1000
   William Makepeace Thackeray's 1848 satire following the social climber Becky Sharp.
12. **Wuthering Heights** — score 534/1000
   Emily Bronte's 1847 tale of Heathcliff and Catherine's destructive passion on the Yorkshire moors.
13. **Pride and Prejudice** — score 534/1000
   Jane Austen's 1813 comedy of manners about Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy.
14. **Alice in Wonderland** — score 534/1000
   Lewis Carroll's 1865 nonsense fantasy of a girl who falls down a rabbit hole.
15. **Brideshead Revisited** — score 463/1000
   Evelyn Waugh's 1945 elegy for an aristocratic Catholic family seen through Charles Ryder's eyes.
16. **Bleak House** — score 463/1000
   Dickens's 1853 satire of the Court of Chancery built around the endless Jarndyce case.
17. **Midnight's Children** — score 463/1000
   Salman Rushdie's 1981 Booker of Bookers, tying one man's life to India's independence.
18. **The Picture of Dorian Gray** — score 463/1000
   Oscar Wilde's only novel, about a beautiful man whose portrait ages in his place.
19. **Tess of the d'Urbervilles** — score 463/1000
   Thomas Hardy's 1891 tragedy of a Wessex milkmaid undone by Victorian morality.
20. **The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie** — score 463/1000
   Muriel Spark's 1961 novel of a charismatic Edinburgh teacher and her chosen girls.
21. **Women in Love** — score 463/1000
   D. H. Lawrence's 1920 novel of two sisters and their turbulent relationships.
22. **Emma** — score 379/1000
   Jane Austen's 1815 novel about a well-meaning, meddling matchmaker in Highbury.
23. **Animal Farm** — score 379/1000
   Orwell's 1945 fable of a farmyard revolution betrayed by its pig leaders.
24. **Persuasion** — score 379/1000
   Austen's final completed novel, a story of second chances between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth.
25. **Dracula** — score 379/1000
   Bram Stoker's 1897 epistolary horror novel that defined the vampire for good.
26. **The Lord of the Rings** — score 379/1000
   J. R. R. Tolkien's epic fantasy of the quest to destroy the One Ring.
27. **A Clockwork Orange** — score 379/1000
   Anthony Burgess's 1962 dystopian novel narrated by the violent teenager Alex in Nadsat slang.
28. **Atonement** — score 379/1000
   Ian McEwan's 2001 novel about a child's false accusation and its lifelong consequences.
29. **The Waves** — score 379/1000
   Virginia Woolf's 1931 lyrical novel told through the soliloquies of six friends.
30. **Wide Sargasso Sea** — score 379/1000
   Jean Rhys's 1966 prequel to Jane Eyre giving voice to the 'madwoman in the attic'.
31. **Tristram Shandy** — score 278/1000
   Laurence Sterne's digressive, playful 18th-century comic novel that anticipated modernism.
32. **Robinson Crusoe** — score 278/1000
   Daniel Defoe's 1719 castaway tale, often called the first English novel.
33. **Wolf Hall** — score 278/1000
   Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning 2009 portrait of Thomas Cromwell's rise at Henry VIII's court.
34. **Never Let Me Go** — score 278/1000
   Ishiguro's 2005 quietly devastating story of students raised at the mysterious Hailsham school.
35. **Howards End** — score 278/1000
   Forster's 1910 novel of class and connection between the Schlegel and Wilcox families.
36. **Nineteen Eighty-Four** — score 278/1000
   George Orwell's 1949 dystopia of Big Brother, thoughtcrime and Room 101.
37. **Brave New World** — score 278/1000
   Aldous Huxley's 1932 vision of a pleasure-drugged, genetically engineered World State.
38. **Heart of Darkness** — score 278/1000
   Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella of Marlow's journey up the Congo to find Kurtz.
39. **Tom Jones** — score 278/1000
   Henry Fielding's 1749 picaresque comedy following a lusty, good-hearted foundling.
40. **The Remains of the Day** — score 278/1000
   Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker-winning 1989 novel of an English butler reckoning with his life of service.
41. **Jane Eyre** — score 0/1000
   Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel of a governess, Mr Rochester and the secret of Thornfield Hall.
42. **The Golden Notebook** — score 0/1000
   Doris Lessing's 1962 experimental novel of a writer's fragmented life told through four notebooks.
43. **Nostromo** — score 0/1000
   Conrad's 1904 political epic set around a silver mine in a fictional South American republic.
44. **Rebecca** — score 0/1000
   Daphne du Maurier's 1938 Gothic thriller haunted by the first Mrs de Winter.
45. **Gulliver's Travels** — score 0/1000
   Jonathan Swift's 1726 satirical voyages to Lilliput, Brobdingnag and beyond.

Tags: books, uk, classics, fiction