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The
Best of the British Novelists, Novels
by
Richard H. Cracroft
Here it is,
for your home library: Cracroft's Only True-and-Living List
of the Forty All-Time-Best-British-Novelists. I have it on
the Best Authority that, unless you have read all of them, can recite
their names and titles from memory, and can give a rough summary
of the plot, your chances are slim for being admitted to the Terrestrial
Kingdom. But think of this: if you own and read
them all, you will rise in the Resurrection with your own built-in,
portable library-and a perfect recollection of every page! What
a Sweet Eternity it will be!
This list is
my own(I've been shaping it for forty years), but I have consulted
others' lists, such as "Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan,"
W. Somerset Maugham's "Ten Greatest Novels," "Modern Library's 100
English-Language Novels of the 20th Century,"and other
lists in Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan's A Passion for Books
(Random House, 1999); "The Heath Top 100," "Fiction Books Cited
as Significant" by English Teachers, and the BYU English Department's
no-longer-used "Minimum Reading List for English Majors."
Yes, I've omitted
many novels-where does one stop listing works by Charles Dickens,
or Sir Walter Scott, for example? and I've omitted some personal
favorites (like Bram Stoker's Dracula, Wilkie Collins's
The Moonstone, any novel by Iris Murdoch, or the mysteries
of Agatha Christie or Anne Perry-maybe one of these months we'll
have to list the all-time best Whodunits). Yes, I think that all
of the novels listed seem to me to be of cultural significance and
literary merit.
Next month I'll
stick my neck out again by venturing a list of the All-Time-Best-American-Novels.
Meanwhile, send me your picks for the best American novel-and any
you feel I've egregiously overlooked in the British novel.
The Forty
All-Time-Best British Novelists
Being Cracroft's
Only True-and-Living List of the Forty All-Time-Best-British-Novelists
Austen, Jane,
Emma; Pride and Prejudice
Brontë,
Charlotte, Jane Eyre.
Brontë,
Emily, Wuthering Heights
Bulwer-Lytton,
Edward, The Last Days of Pompeii
Bunyan, John,
Pilgrim's Progress
Butler, Samuel,
The Way of All Flesh
Carroll, Lewis,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Conrad, Joseph,
Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim
DeFoe, Daniel,
Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles,
David Copperfield; Great Expectations; The Pickwick
Papers
Doyle, Arthur
Conan, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Durrell, Lawrence,
The Alexandria Quartet
DuMaurier, Daphne,
Rebecca
Eliot, George,
Adam Bede, Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss
Fielding, Henry,
Tom Jones
Forster, E.M.,
A Passage to India; Howard's End; A Room with
a View
Galsworthy,
John, The Forsyte Saga
Golding, William,
Lord of the Flies
Graves, Robert,
I, Claudius
Greene, Graham,
The Power and the Glory
Hardy, Thomas,
The Return of the Native; Tess of the D'Urbervilles;
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Huxley, Aldous,
Brave New World
Joyce, James,
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Kipling, Rudyard,
Captains Couragous, Kim
Lawrence, D.H.
Sons and Lovers
Lewis, C.S.,
The Chronicles of Narnia
Maugham, W.
Somerset, Of Human Bondage
Orwell, George,
1984; Animal Farm
Scott, Sir Walter,
Ivanhoe
Shelley, Mary,
Frankenstein
Smollett, Tobias,
Humphrey Clinker
Sterne, Laurence,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent.
Stevenson, Robert
Louis, Treasure Island
Swift, Jonathan,
Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William
Makepeace, Vanity Fair
Tolkien, J.R.R.,
The Lord of the Rings
Trollope, Anthony,
Barcester Towers
Waugh, Evelyn,
Brideshead Revisited
Wilde, Oscar,
The Picture of Dorian Grey
Wolfe, Virginia,
To the Lighthouse; Mrs. Dalloway
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