A major new global poll of leading authors and critics has named the greatest novel of all time, and the top spot does not belong to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or Leo Tolstoy. Instead, George Eliot's sprawling Victorian masterpiece Middlemarch has been crowned the single greatest novel ever written.
The Poll and Its Participants
The ambitious project, unveiled in the Guardian's Saturday Magazine, was compiled by polling more than 170 of the world's leading authors, critics, and academics. High-profile writers from vastly different genres—including master of horror Stephen King, crime kingpin Ian Rankin, Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo, and cozy-mystery sensation Richard Osman—were all asked to rank their top ten choices, creating a definitive countdown of the one hundred best novels.
Top Ten Results
While legendary romances like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre safely made the cut, they were pushed much further down the top ten than many traditionalists might expect, placing at ninth and eighth respectively. Instead, the coveted number-one spot went to George Eliot's Middlemarch, closely followed by Toni Morrison's powerful, haunting Beloved in second place.
The rest of the upper echelons feature a fascinating mix of complex modernist triumphs and sweeping historical epics. James Joyce's notoriously challenging Ulysses secured third place, followed by Virginia Woolf's introspective To the Lighthouse in fourth and Marcel Proust's monumental In Search of Lost Time in fifth.
Remarkably, Russian giant Leo Tolstoy achieved the rare feat of dominating the middle of the chart, with Anna Karenina and War and Peace taking the sixth and seventh spots. Gustave Flaubert's tragic Madame Bovary rounded out the prestigious top ten.
Interactive Feature and Live Event
For readers curious to see how their own personal bookshelves stack up against the collective wisdom of the world's finest literary minds, an interactive version of the full list is now live online. The digital feature allows users to track how many of the top one hundred books they have actually managed to read, share their scores with friends, and look behind the curtain to see exactly which titles their favourite authors championed.
The conversation around these definitive, and perhaps controversial, results is set to continue live at Conway Hall on Tuesday, 19 May. The Guardian's Joint Heads of Books, Charlotte Northedge and Liese Spencer, will host a special live book club event. They will be joined on stage by a panel of acclaimed authors, including Elif Shafak, Guy Gunaratne, Kate Mosse, and Blake Morrison, to dissect the poll and debate what truly makes a novel the greatest of all time.
