Robert McCrum / All Time Top 10

 

Joseph Conrad

All Time Top 10

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

The 100 best novels / An introduction by Robert McCrum

Book Review

Robert McCrum
Sunday 16 August 2015 09.00 BST

Finally, we are left with the classics, often by dead white males, those books to which English language readers worldwide return again and again. Say what you like about my list (and thousands have merrily done so these past two years), the Anglo-American literary tradition, a source of some sublime and imperishable masterpieces, deserves to be celebrated for some astonishing achievements. Here, to provoke Observer readers just one last time, is my All Time Top 10 (chosen from this series, in chronological order):

007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

Jane Austen’s Emma is her masterpiece, mixing the sparkle of her early books with a deep sensibility.

013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) 

Emily Brontë’s windswept masterpiece is notable not just for its wild beauty but for its daring reinvention of the novel form itself.

017  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) 

Wise, funny and gripping, Melville’s epic work continues to cast a long shadow over American literature.

021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

This cathedral of words stands today as perhaps the greatest of the great Victorian fictions.

023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

Mark Twain’s tale of a rebel boy and a runaway slave seeking liberation upon the waters of the Mississippi remains a defining classic of American literature.

032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece about a life-changing journey in search of Mr Kurtz has the simplicity of great myth.

043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)

The Rainbow is perhaps DH Lawrence’s finest work, showing him for the radical, protean, thoroughly modern writer he was.

046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

This portrait of a day in the lives of three Dubliners remains a towering work, in its word play surpassing even Shakespeare.

050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Woolf’s great novel makes a day of party preparations the canvas for themes of lost love, life choices and mental illness.

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Fitzgerald’s jazz age masterpiece has become a tantalising metaphor for the eternal mystery of art.

You pays yer money, and you takes yer choice.

THE GUARDIAN

Book Review 021 / Middlemarch by George Eliot / A Review

 

Middlemarch 

by George Eliot

1871-2 

[A Review]

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 21 / Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

Dorothea, admiring this ambition, hopes that in marriage she will be a true partner to Casaubon, helping to complete his life’s work.

Those who have great thoughts get too much worn in working them out. I used to feel about that, even when I was a little girl; and it always seemed to me that the use I should like to make of my life would be to help some one who did great works, so that his burthen might be lighter.

But Casaubon, who has probably never before desired a wife, is reluctant to share the world of his work with anyone.

Top 10 most dislikable characters in fiction

Top 10 most dislikable characters in fiction

From Tom Wolfe’s ‘master of the universe’ to George Eliot’s vengeful pedant, these are some of the hardest characters in literature to love

Louise Candlish

Wed 30 December 2020

 

A

t reader events to promote my novels, I find that one question crops up more often than any other: ‘Why do you write such dislikable characters?’ Well, I usually reply, swallowing my defensiveness, don’t all novelists write characters who are dislikable to someone, given that likability is entirely subjective? If niceness is a spectrum, then we’re all on it, for better or worse.

James Joyce

The 10 best… closing lines of books

The most memorable literary payoffs, from the chilling to the poetic

Robert McCrum
Sunday 29 July 2012

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Fitzgerald hypnotises successive generations of readers with this tale. Nick Carraway's signing off after the death of Gatsby is my favourite last line in the Anglo-American tradition – resonant, memorable and profound. It hovers between poetry and the vernacular and is the magnificent chord, in a minor key, which brings this 20th-century masterpiece to a close. Somehow, it sums up the novel completely, in tone as much as meaning, while giving the reader a way out into the drabber, duller world of everyday reality.

Ulysses by James Joyce

BIOGRAPHY

"I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another… then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Joyce is the master of the closing line and this is his most famous and most suggestive. Compare it with the end of The Dead, his short story that concludes Dubliners: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Middlemarch by George Eliot

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Middlemarch is many readers' favourite Eliot novel, with so many quotable passages. This passage is almost a credo – a lovely, valedictory celebration of Dorothea's quiet life, after she has renounced Casaubon's fortune and confessed her love for Ladislaw.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

"The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness."

Conrad's merciless short novel (fewer than 40,000 words) opens on the Thames and ends there, too. The last line of Marlowe's astounding confession is an admission of his complicity in the terrible events he has just described as a reluctant witness. It also executes a highly effective narrative diminuendo in an extraordinary fictional nightmare. Compare George Orwell's chilling return to the status quo in another nightmare, Nineteen Eighty Four: "He loved Big Brother."

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

"But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before." 

This is a heartbreaker. Twain rounds off his masterpiece by saying that Huck Finn is fated, like all Americans, to an incessant quest for the challenge of the frontier. For sheer teenage disaffection, it's matched by the last line ofCatcher in the Rye: "Don't tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody." And also from the US, let's not forget Margaret Mitchell's ending to Gone With the Wind: "After all, tomorrow is another day." Pure hokum, like the novel.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

"Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision." 

And she has. Lily's closing words complete the circle of consciousness.Virginia Woolf was good at last lines and was always a decisive closer. Mrs Dalloway, whose first line famously has Woolf's protagonist buying the flowers herself, ends with: "It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was." That's the perfect conclusion, to a nervy climax, nailed in nine words.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

"The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off." 

The spirit of Bugs Bunny inspires the finale of Yossarian's adventures with 256th Squadron. It's the moment in which Yossarian, who has been in thrall to Catch-22 throughout, finally breaks away. Yossarian has come to realise that Catch-22 does not actually exist, but because the powers that be claim it does, and the world believes it does, it nevertheless has potent effects. Indeed, because it does not exist, there is no way it can be repealed, undone, overthrown, or denounced. But here, finally, he can become free.

Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

"There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbour, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline, or a lady's bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship's funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture – Find What the Sailor Has

A brilliant, and moving, mixture of perception and reality. Contrast the incoherent end of William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, "No got … C'lom Fliday."

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

Brontë's masterpiece is often cited for its gothic morbidity and intoxicating romantic darkness, but here – stepping back from the tragedy of Heathcliff and Catherine – the novel displays an acute evocation of Yorkshire combined with memorable poetic grandeur. This note of redemption promises a better future in the union of Cathy and Hareton.

The Tale of Samuel Whiskers by Beatrix Potter

"But Tom Kitten has always been afraid of a rat; he never durst face anything bigger than – A Mouse."

Children's books should not be overlooked. Potter earns her slot with this chilling, but playful, ending to a spine-tingler by a writer who loved to explore the world of juvenile suspense. Perhaps in honour of the late Maurice Sendak we should also mention "And it was still warm", the payoff to Where the Wild Things Are. And JK Rowling has a well-earned closer toHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: "The scar had not pained Harry for 19 years. All was well."

THE GUARDIAN

Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt's Top Ten List

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Reader Bio

Siri Hustvedt (born 1955) is an American novelist and essayist of Norwegian descent whose wide-ranging writings explore various themes including the world of art, the intersection of the humanities and science, the nature of identity, selfhood and perception. She has published six novels: The Blindfold(1992), The Enchantment of Lily Dahl(1996), What I Loved (2003), The Sorrows of an American (2008), The Summer Without Men (2011) and The Blazing World, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Her five works of nonfiction include the essay collections Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (2005) and Living, Thinking, Looking (2012) and the neurological memoir The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2009). She is an internationally acclaimed lecturer whose honors include the Gabarron International Award for Thought and Humanities and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Oslo. In 2015 she was appointed lecturer in psychiatry at the Weill Medical School of Cornell University. She married the writer Paul Auster on Bloom’s Day in 1982. For more information, visit her official website.

If one takes a lesson from the various literary frauds that have been perpetrated over the last couple of centuries—the “masterpieces” that have been typed up word-for-word and sent to publishers under other names and been rejected or the novels published under pseudonyms by celebrated authors that have been ignored—then one must approach all lists of greatness with skepticism. If one further believes, as I do, that every book is animated by its reader, that reading is a collaboration between reader and text, then that same skepticism increases rather than decreases. Moreover, if one knows that the very idea of greatness creates an implicit bias in the reader, which enhances the physiological experience of said great work and activates reward systems in the brain that are not activated without that contextual bias, then caution is in order. And, finally, if all literary works are held in sway to the beliefs of a particular culture (its prejudices about masculinity and femininity, for example) and to the changing whims of time, then one may be left scratching one’s head about what it all means.

Americans in particular are keen on competition, on the dogged reinvigoration of a mythical biggest and best, whether their object is a hotdog or a work of art. That said there seem to be books in a given culture at a given time that many writers share as beloved works. And there are not ten, of course. There are hundreds. In my list, I detect an obvious bias for nineteenth century books written in English. There is nothing rigid about either my order or my choices. Tomorrow they might be different.

1. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847). First published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell in 1847, the novel both shocked and confused its reviewers, many of whom regarded its author as a rough, unrefined man of brutal character. Slowly, the book grew in stature among scholars, but its subtle structure and diffuse, complex meanings are still fought over. For me, it remains a book of almost incomprehensible power, both in thought and in feeling.

2. Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667) There would be noWuthering Heights without Milton. That is certain. I remain in awe of the poet’s dense, rich meanings and his music. The two are inseparable.

3. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871–72). Like a number of books on this list, I have read it four times, and with each reading, it generates new thoughts and emotions in me, a tribute to both its intellectual rigor and immense sympathy for human weakness.

4. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life by Søren Kierkegaard (1843). This is either the novel as philosophy or philosophy as the novel by the master of irony himself. It is, in all events, a long work of prose fiction, written under a pseudonym with a fictional editor’s introduction. Diabolical in its wit, passionate, and sly, it is a book at once immensely difficult and deeply pleasurable to read.

5. Persuasion by Jane Austen (1817). As I get older, this is the book of Austen’s I return to, not because it is her most perfect book, but because the psychological acumen of its narrative continues to haunt me.

6. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (1864–65). The author’s last finished book is for me his best, a book that explores the fragmented nature of human identity in his inimitable prose.

7. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927). I loved this book when I was nineteen, but I had to grow up and read it again to understand its profundity.

8. Stories of Franz Kafka (1883–1924)—because Kafka’s work is irreducible.

9. The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904). Nobody dissects the muddle of human feeling and desire with greater subtlety than James.

10. Sorry, but I resist. This one could be Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, O’Connor, Proust, Tolstoy, Wharton, Dante, Bachman, or an eccentric choice, chosen because it is a book so spectacularly ignored, that brilliant small novel by Djuna Barnes, Nightwood. 

THE TOP TEN

The 100 best novels / No 21 / Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

The 100 best novels

No 21 

Middlemarch by George Eliot 

(1871-2)

This cathedral of words stands today as perhaps the greatest of the great Victorian fictions 

Robert McCrum
Monday 10 February 2014

Middlemarch is one of those books that can exert an almost hypnotic power over its readers. Few other titles in this series will inspire quite the same intensity of response. When, for instance, in 1873, the poet Emily Dickinson referred to the novel, she wrote in a letter: "What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory – except that in a few instances 'this mortal [George Eliot] has already put on immortality'."

As well as moving its admirers to rhapsody, Middlemarch is also supremely a work of serious literature. According to Virginia Woolf, it is "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people". Later in the 20th century the influential critic FR Leavis made Middlemarch a central element of his "Great Tradition". Today it stands as perhaps the greatest of many great Victorian novels.

George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch, appeared after the deaths of Thackeray (1863) and Dickens (1870). This is hardly an accident. Subtitled "a study of provincial life", the novel has a didactic realism that's a world away from Vanity Fair or Great Expectations. Indeed, Middlemarch looms above the mid-Victorian literary landscape like a cathedral of words in whose shadowy vastness its readers can find every kind of addictive discomfort, a sequence of raw truths: the loneliness of the disappointed failure, Dr Lydgate; the frustrations of his discontented wife; the humiliation of a good woman, Dorothea; the corrosive bitterness of Casaubon, and so on.

Few of Eliot's characters achieve what they really want, and all have to learn to compromise. Some learn the lessons and achieve a temporary happiness. Others refuse or are incapable of learning, and spend their lives resenting their situation, and blaming others. And others still realise their mistakes but are trapped by a wrong decision and never escape. Dr Lydgate is especially emblematic of Middlemarch: dying young, a bitter and disappointed man who knew he had married the wrong woman and could do nothing about it.

The action takes place some 40 years before the moment of composition. As well as making allusions to the death of George IV, outbreaks of cholera and the passing of the Great Reform Bill of 1832, its characters discuss the coming of the railway and the impact of industrialisation on a settled Midland English world. Here, the organising metaphor of Middlemarch becomes "the web", Eliot's representation of English society in all its airy complexity and resilience.

In the middle of this web we find the character whom all readers of Middlemarchwill argue about and identify with, the fascinating figure of Dorothea, wife of the cold-hearted monster Rev Edward Casaubon. Dorothea becomes a true heroine because – despite all she suffers, her humiliations and heartache – she still tries to be a good person, and to do the right thing. Lydgate, in particular, sees this and understands to his great sorrow what sort of woman he should have married and how different his life could have been. In a larger sense, Dorothea's fate (and also the torments self-inflicted by Rosamond Vincy) dramatise another of the novel's major themes, the place of women in a changing but still patriarchal society.

There are no easy resolutions in a great novel. Some readers will be dismayed to find, in the final chapters, Dorothea discovering fulfilment in her work for Will Ladislaw as he becomes a reforming MP. But Eliot has the last word, a famous and deeply moving valedictory page celebrating Dorothea's "finely-touched spirit". Here, Eliot concludes that "the effect of [Dorothea's] being" was "incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs".

A note on the text

At the beginning of 1869, George Eliot listed her tasks for the coming year in her journal, including "A Novel called Middlemarch". However, progress was slow, interrupted by the fatal illness of Thornie Lewes, the second son of her partner George Henry Lewes. By September, only three chapters of the story had bee completed, and by the time Thornie finally died in November 1869, Eliot had stopped work on a novel that was at this stage just a study of Middlemarch society, with Lydgate, the doctor, and his ill-matched wife Rosamond Vincy, as the main characters.

However, more than a year later, in November 1870, she began work on a new story entitled "Miss Brooke", which introduced Dorothea. Eventually Eliot combined Dorothea's story with the Lydgate-Vincy narrative, and began to unfold the full majesty of the Middlemarch we have today.

As it took wing the work became so unlike the traditional Victorian "three-decker" novel that Lewes, acting as his partner's agent, requested John Blackwood, the publisher, to launch the novel in eight parts, at two-monthly intervals from December 1871. Once Blackwood had agreed, the eight books appeared throughout 1872, culminating in the closing chapters of November and December 1872, although the title page of the first edition bears the date 1871. Middlemarchwas immediately recognised as a work of genius, and secured Eliot's place high in the pantheon of English fiction. The first one-volume edition was published in 1874, and sold well to an enthusiastic reading public. In 2003 the novel was chosen as no 27 in the BBC survey "the Big Read".

Some other George Eliot titles

The Mill on the Floss (1860); Silas Marner (1861); Daniel Deronda (1874-6)

THE GUARDIAN

THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH

000 The 100 best novels: an introduction by Robert McCrum

001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)

002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)

003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson  (1748)

005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding  (1749)

006 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)

007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)

010 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1833)

011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli  (1845)

012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) 

014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  

015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

017  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) 

018 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)

019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)

020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)

021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

022 The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)

023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome  (1889)

026  The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)

027  The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

028  New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)

029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)

031 Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)

032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)

034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)

035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)

037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)

038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908) 

039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

055 As I Lay Dying  by William Faulkner  (1930)

070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell  (1949)

071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene  (1951) 

072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)

073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)

074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)

075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)

078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

079 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1960)

080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962) 

082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964) 

084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966) 

086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)

087 Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971)

088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)

089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979) 

091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)