The Best British Authors to Read

Jane Austen

1775–1817 · Steventon, Hampshire

Six completed novels, every one published anonymously — Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811 credited only to “A Lady”. Her subject is not romance but the economics underneath it: what a woman without money could and could not do in Regency England, and how much of courtship was a negotiation conducted in code.

She is funnier than her reputation suggests. The famous first line of Pride and Prejudice is a joke at the expense of everyone who repeats it as if it were sincere.

Start with Pride and Prejudice (1813). Then Persuasion (1817), published after her death and the most adult thing she wrote.

Mary Shelley

1797–1851 · London

She began Frankenstein at eighteen, after a ghost-story competition on Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, and published it anonymously in 1818 when she was twenty. It is usually filed as horror; it is closer to an argument about responsibility, in which the monster is articulate, reasonable, and abandoned.

Start with Frankenstein (1818) — and if you can, the 1818 text rather than the tidied-up 1831 revision.

Charles Dickens

1812–1870 · Portsmouth

Fifteen novels, almost all serialised in weekly or monthly parts, which is why they are long, why they end chapters on cliffhangers, and why the casts are enormous. He wrote about debt, workhouses, courts and child labour for an audience that included the people running them.

He was twelve when his father was imprisoned for debt and he was sent to work in a blacking factory. Nearly every novel he wrote returns to a child left to fend for itself.

Start with Great Expectations (1861), the shortest way in. Then Bleak House (1853), his best and his hardest.

Emily Brontë

1818–1848 · Thornton, Yorkshire

One novel, and she died at thirty, the year after it appeared. Wuthering Heights came out in 1847 under the name Ellis Bell, and early reviewers, assuming a male author, found it brutal; when it became known that a clergyman's daughter had written it, they found it worse.

It is not a love story, whatever the covers suggest. It is a study of obsession that ruins two generations, narrated at two removes by people who do not entirely understand what they are describing.

Start with Wuthering Heights (1847). There is nothing else.

Oscar Wilde

1854–1900 · Dublin

Irish, born in Dublin, and on this page the way he was in London: an outsider who mastered the form and then turned it on its audience. One novel, four society comedies, and, from prison, the long letter published as De Profundis.

Start with The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) for the novel, or The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) for the play. Both are short.

Virginia Woolf

1882–1941 · London

She moved the novel inside the head. Instead of narrating what people do, she narrates what it is like to be them for a day — memory, half-thought, the sentence that never gets said aloud. She also ran the Hogarth Press with her husband Leonard, which is how she got to publish exactly what she wanted.

A Room of One's Own (1929) grew out of two lectures given to women's colleges at Cambridge, and its argument — that a woman needs money and a door that shuts in order to write — is still the most-quoted thing she said.

Start with Mrs Dalloway (1925) for the fiction, A Room of One's Own (1929) for the essay.

Agatha Christie

1890–1976 · Torquay, Devon

The best-selling novelist of all time — roughly a billion copies in English and another billion in translation — and UNESCO's Index Translationum makes her the most translated individual author on record, with 7,236 translations catalogued. She wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections. The Mousetrap opened in the West End in October 1952 and has never closed.

She is here for craft, not sales. Nobody has built a fair puzzle better, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd broke a rule of the genre so thoroughly that people argued for years about whether it was allowed.

Start with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) or And Then There Were None (1939).

George Orwell

1903–1950 · Motihari, British India

Born Eric Arthur Blair in colonial India, he served in the Burmese police, was shot through the throat fighting in Spain, and died of tuberculosis at forty-six, a year after Nineteen Eighty-Four. The politics in his work are not theoretical; he had been in the buildings.

His real subject is language: what happens to a society when the words for things are quietly replaced, so that certain thoughts become harder to hold. That is the argument of the essay Politics and the English Language as much as of the novels.

Start with Animal Farm (1945), which takes an evening. Then Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), or Homage to Catalonia (1938) if you want the reporting.

Iris Murdoch

1919–1999 · Dublin, raised in London

Twenty-six novels in forty-one years, alongside six works of moral philosophy, and she taught at Oxford before the fiction took over. Seven of her novels were nominated for the Booker Prize; The Sea, The Sea won it in 1978.

She wrote the same question twenty-six times: whether anyone is capable of seeing another person clearly, or whether the ego always gets in the way. Her characters are articulate, well-read, and consistently wrong about their own motives.

Start with Under the Net (1954) for the comic debut, or The Sea, The Sea (1978) for the Booker winner.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Born 1954 · Nagasaki, Japan

Born in Nagasaki, moved to Surrey aged five. He won the Booker Prize in 1989 for The Remains of the Day and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.

Almost every book he writes is narrated by someone quietly editing their own past. The reader works out what actually happened several pages before the narrator admits it, and that gap is the whole effect.

Start with The Remains of the Day (1989). Then Never Let Me Go (2005).