Women and non-Caucasian authors write incredible books, too. [Photo: Rex]
From Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the English language has produced thousands of literary works of genius – making it incredibly hard to narrow down.
But that’s exactly what The Guardian writer Robert McCrum has done. Sifting through all of the greatest stories written in English, he’s spent two years selecting the novels that he considers to be the 100 greatest.
And while there are indeed many ‘greats’ on the list, one thing is very clear – it’s a compilation that’s largely dominated by male white Caucasian writers.
Out of the 100 authors included, only 21 of them are female and just a handful are of an ethnic background that isn’t white – but why is that?
It’s not like women and people of different ethnicities don’t write wonderful and groundbreaking books – just look at the likes of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah and Khaled Hosseini, who penned the 2003 hit The Kite Runner.
The God of Small Things by Indian novelist Arundhati Roy is another award-winning read while African-American author Maya Angelou’s 1969 autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is still widely discussed today.
And how could we fail to mention Monica Ali’s Brick Lane? The list could go on and on.
With so many brilliant novels written by both female and non-Caucasian writers, you do have to wonder how McCrum put together his round-up – and why he failed to include a diverse range of English-writing authors.
McCrum’s Top 100 List Of Books Written In English
1. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
2. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)
3. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
4. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
5. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
6. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)
7. Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
8. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
9. Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (1818)
10. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838)
11. Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
12. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
13. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
14. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
15. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
16. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
17. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
18. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
19. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
20. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
21. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
22. The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)
23. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
24. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
25. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
26. The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
27. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
28. New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
29. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
30. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)
31. Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
32. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
33. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
34. Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
35. The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
36. The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
37. Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)
38. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
39. The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
40. Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1911)
41. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
42. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
43. The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
44. Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham (1915)
45. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
46. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
47. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
48. A Passage to India by EM Forster (1924)
49. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925)
50. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
51. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
52. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
53. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
54. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
55. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
56. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
57. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)
58. Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (1932)
59. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)
60. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
61. Murphy by Samuel Beckett (1938)
62. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
63. Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
64. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien (1939)
65. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
66. Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
67. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
68. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
69. The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)
70. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
71. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
72. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
73. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
74. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
75. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
76. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
77. Voss by Patrick White (1957)
78. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
79. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1960)
80. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
81. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
82. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
83. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
84. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
85. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
86. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
87. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971)
88. Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
89. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
90. A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
91. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
92. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1981)
93. Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis (1984)
94. An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986)
95. The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
96. Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1988)
97. Amongst Women by John McGahern (1990)
98. Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)
99. Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1999)
100. True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2000)
Which is your all-time favourite novel? Tweet us at @YahooStyleUK.
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