The 10 Best British Novels (According to the Rest of the World)

Often you need a little distance to objectively judge something. So to pick the best British books of all time, BBC culture surveyed 82 book critics from outside of the UK. Each critic was asked to pick the 10 best British novels from any time period. The top 10 most voted books include three novels by Charles Dickens and two novels by Virginia Woolf, among classics by the Brontës, Mary Shelley, and George Eliot. Here is the top 10:

1. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1874)

2. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)

3. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

4. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861)

5. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

6. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853)

7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

8. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

9. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

10. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)

Middlemarch apparently won “by a landslide” and the top 10 features a majority of women writers. You can check out the entire top 100 here. Anything you think the critics missed?