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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 20^th 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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