The Guardian has finally concluded its list of 100 Best Novels Written in English, a survey which took two years to complete.
Robert McCrum, who oversaw the project, writes a long article in today’s edition of The Observer, reviewing choices and omissions. He also picks his all-time Top Ten, which comprises one book by an Irish author, James Joyce's Ulysses, although the Brontës were of Irish stock. Their father Patrick Brunty - his original surname - was the first of ten children born to farm labourer Hugh Brunty and Alice McClory, in Drumballyroney, County Down. Emily Brontë, his daughter, wrote Wuthering Heights.
McCrum's Top Ten, chosen from the 100 Best series, runs as follows, in chronological order:
Emma (Jane Austen);
Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë) ;
Moby-Dick (Herman Melville);
Middlemarch (George Eliot);
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain);
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad);
The Rainbow (DH Lawrence);
Ulysses (James Joyce);
Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf);
The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald.)
