Are these the 25 best British novels of all time?

Well, that's what the people say with the BBC, who posed this question to foreign critics (readers outside the UK), and with a supposedly objective look. The result was this selection of 25 titles considered as the best British novels ever. They are between them Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Heart of Darkness o 1984. And writers abound. Let's take a look. I agree on some of them and I'm sure many readers will too.

Female predominance

The fact of more presence of writers than writers because they sign almost half of the selected titles, 6 among the 10 most voted, and are placed in the Top 3. And they are names like those of George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen, for example, that they take three mentions. And surely the sisters bronte (how could it be otherwise with this trio), the winner of the Nobel Prize Doris lessing, and the most current Zadie Smith as a prominent name in the XNUMXst century.

XIXth Century

Is century that most predominates also in this selection of the BBC. Perhaps in that we resemble our great national classics of the time as Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Leopoldo Alas «Clarín», Larra or Blasco Ibáñez. And is that most of the great British novels were written during the Victorian age, also coinciding with the full establishment of the Industrial Revolution and the Great Exhibition of London. You just have to see surnames like Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy or Conrad, already bordering on the XX.

The best

The one the critics chose as the best british novel was Middlemarch, which for foreign readers or with other languages ​​is not, by far, the most popular. Signed it Mary anne evans, better known by her male pseudonym of George Eliot. It was his seventh novel and bears the subtitle "study of life in the provinces," which gives sufficient clues to guess the accurate portrait of British society from the second half of the XNUMXth century.

It takes place in the region of Midlands, in an imaginary city called Middlemarch. It was originally published in fascicles that ended up becoming 8 volumes. In them the writer combined realism and humor equal parts in that social fresco. A realism that was common theme in most of the prose literature of that century.

The 25 novels

1. Middlemarch (1874), by George Eliot.

2. To the lighthouse (1927), by Virginia Woolf.

3. Mrs. Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf.

4. Big hopes (1861), by Charles Dickens.

5. Jane Eyre (1847), by Charlotte Brontë.

6. Desolate house (1853), by Charles Dickens.

7. Wuthering Heights (1847), by Emily Brontë.

8. David Copperfield (1850), by Charles Dickens.

9. Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Shelley.

10. The vanity fair (1848), by William Makepeace Thackeray.

11. Pride and prejudice (1813), by Jane Austen.

12. 1984 (1949), by George Orwell.

13. The good soldier (1915), by Ford Madox Ford.

14. Clarissa (1748), by Samuel Richardson.

15. Atonement (2001), by Ian McEwan.

16. Waves (1931), by Virginia Woolf.

17. The Mansion (Howards End) (1910) by EM Forster.

18. What remains of the day (1989), by Kazuo Ishiguro.

19. Emma (1815), by Jane Austen.

20. Persuasiveness (1817), by Jane Austen.

21. Heart of Darkness (1899), by Joseph Conrad.

22. Tom Jones (1749), by Henry Fielding.

23. Jude the dark (1895), by Thomas Hardy.

24. The golden notebook (1962), by Doris Lessing.

25. White teeth (2000) by Zadie Smith.

I stay with ...

… Perhaps more with other novels by some of those authors. For example, from Dickens I would have chosen his Oliver Twist and even their Christmas tales. But of course, Mr. Scrooge is one of the great literary characters of my life and I cannot be objective. From Hardy I would stay with Far from the madding crowd. And of Orwell with Farm.

But with the rest coincided mostly. Titles like Wuthering Heights o Jane Eyre could be on any list of best novels of all time, as with the Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

And what do you think? Do you miss any? Would you change other titles? How many have you read and which one is your favorite?