The world has spoken, and the greatest British novel of all time is Middlemarch, though hot on its heels are two novels by Virginia Woolf, who ties with Charles Dickens in having the most entries among the top 100 British novels as seen by the rest of the world.

The list was put together for BBC Culture by Jane Ciabattari, who polled 81 book critics from all around the world, excluding the UK. Each was asked to come up with a list of 10 British novels, naming one as the greatest. The result is a top five in which George Eliot’s masterpiece is followed by Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway, with Dickens’s Great Expectations and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre completing the line-up. Two more Dickens titles feature in the top 10: Bleak House (sixth), and David Copperfield (eighth). Woolf’s The Waves takes 16th place, and Orlando 65th.

Eclectic and intriguing, the list ranges from the modern (Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, and Ali Smith’s There but for the) to the Nobel prize-winning (William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas), from the comic brilliance of PG Wodehouse (The Code of the Woosters, in 100th place) to children’s classics such as The Chronicles of Narnia and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Zadie Smith is there, twice; so are Jeanette Winterson and Alan Hollinghurst.

It also, as the BBC points out, features a strong showing from female authors. Unlike other recent lists, including the Observer’s, women writers dominate the top 10, and books by women make up nearly 40% of the total 100 novels on the list. Speculating as to why this might be, Hephzibah Anderson writes for the BBC that “Britain’s literary landscape appears to be a good deal more female to outsiders than we ourselves appreciate”, and suggests that “so many generations of women writers have found themselves to be doubly outsiders – by virtue of both gender and creative calling – that their observations appeal to other outsiders”.



Why, then, Middlemarch? Eliot’s novel won “by a landslide”, reveals BBC Culture, included by 42% of the international critics in their list. The Australian’s Geordie Williamson said that to read it is “to encounter an intelligence wholly sympathetic towards, and wholly unsurprised by, human foibles and frailties”. The Wall Street Journal’s Sam Sacks said it was “the greatest social and psychological novel ever written in English”, the writer George Scialabba said its “last sentence is perhaps the most moving in British fiction”.

I love the fact that Nineteen Eighty-Four sits next to Pride and Prejudice on this list; that it ranges from The Lord of the Rings to Moll Flanders and Clarissa and The Wind in the Willows. Many of these books form my own literary backbone, as it were (Orwell, Forster, Lawrence, the Brontës, Spark). Many I have yet to read (shame on me – I disliked Tess of the d’Urbervilles so much I never ventured further into Hardy).

Most of all, though, I love the fact that we are endlessly happy to make, and to pick apart, lists like this, as if, eventually, we will arrive on a definitive lineup – the greatest 100 novels, the top 10, the best novel of all time.

Are we now closer? Is it Middlemarch? You tell me.

The top 50 books from BBC Culture’s top 100 countdown

50. A Passage to India (EM Forster, 1924)

49. Possession (AS Byatt, 1990)

48. Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis, 1954)

47. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Laurence Sterne, 1759)

46. Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie, 1981)

45. The Little Stranger (Sarah Waters, 2009)

44. Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel, 2009)

43. The Swimming Pool Library (Alan Hollinghurst, 1988)

42. Brighton Rock (Graham Greene, 1938)

41. Dombey and Son (Charles Dickens, 1848)

40. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll, 1865)

39. The Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes, 2011)

38. The Passion (Jeanette Winterson, 1987)

37. Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh, 1928)

36. A Dance to the Music of Time (Anthony Powell, 1951-1975)

35. Remainder (Tom McCarthy, 2005)

34. Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005)

33. The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame, 1908)

32. A Room with a View (EM Forster, 1908)

31. The End of the Affair (Graham Greene, 1951)

30. Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe, 1722)

29. Brick Lane (Monica Ali, 2003)

28. Villette (Charlotte Brontë, 1853)

27. Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, 1719)

26. The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien, 1954)

25. White Teeth (Zadie Smith, 2000)

24. The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing, 1962)

23. Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy, 1895)

22. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (Henry Fielding, 1749)

21. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad, 1899)

20. Persuasion (Jane Austen, 1817)

19. Emma (Jane Austen, 1815)

18. Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989)

17. Howards End (EM Forster, 1910)

16. The Waves (Virginia Woolf, 1931)

15. Atonement (Ian McEwan, 2001)

14. Clarissa (Samuel Richardson,1748)

13. The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford, 1915)

12. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949)

11. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, 1813)

10. Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848)

9. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)

8. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens, 1850)

7. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)

6. Bleak House (Charles Dickens, 1853)

5. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)

4. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens, 1861)

3. Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925)

2. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf, 1927)

1. Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1874)