BBC Culture contributor Jane Ciabattari polled 82 book critics from outside the UK, to pick Britain’s best novels ever.
BBC Culture contributor Jane Ciabattari polled 82 book critics from outside the UK, to pick Britain’s best novels ever.
They were asked to name the 10 greatest British novels ever published, with their top pick receiving 10 points in the tabulation. This list includes no nonfiction, no plays, no narrative or epic poems, no short story collections – novels only, by British authors.
Here are the top 10:
1. Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1874)
2. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf, 1927)
3. Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925)
4. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens, 1861)
5. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
6. Bleak House (Charles Dickens, 1853)
7. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)
8. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens, 1850)
9. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)
10. Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848)
