‘Readers and critics don’t always think alike, as The Guardian discovered when it asked the two groups to name their favourite novels
’It is a truth universally acknowledged that critics and readers do not think alike. Those first five words are borrowed from the most famous opening line in the English novel — Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” The line came to mind because Pride and Prejudice appears on both the critics’ and the readers’ lists of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by The Guardian.
The British newspaper polled a distinguished panel of journalists, academics and writers — among them Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, Mark Haddon, Richard Osman, Amit Chaudhuri, Ian McEwan, William Boyd, Colm Tóibín, David Nicholls, Michael Chabon, Anne Enright, Ian Rankin and Maggie O’Farrell — to produce its critics’ list. It then asked its readers to submit their own favourites, and published the results as a separate list. Together, the two make an interesting study.
A literary cornucopia
Between them, the two lists encompass an extraordinary range of fiction: romantic comedies (Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion), Gothic romances (Wuthering Heights, Rebecca), horror (Frankenstein, Dracula), stream-of-consciousness novels (Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway), magical realism (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, Midnight’s Children), satire (Vanity Fair, Catch-22), dystopian fiction (1984, Never Let Me Go), historical fiction (War and Peace, Wolf Hall), coming-of-age novels (David Copperfield, Great Expectations), and tragedies (Anna Karenina, The Great Gatsby, The Remains of the Day).
Where the lists agree — and diverge
There are instructive similarities and differences between the two. Middlemarch tops the critics’ list and sits third on the readers’. Pride and Prejudice, placed ninth by the critics, rises to second among readers. But the readers’ top-ranked novel — J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings — does not appear anywhere in the critics’ hundred.
Why the critics overlooked it, I cannot say with authority, not having read the book myself. The panel’s composition offers a clue, though: writers, academics and journalists are trained to value nuance, formal innovation and literary tradition. This is not to suggest that ordinary readers cannot appreciate demanding books. James Joyce’s Ulysses — a bold, experimental novel that runs for pages without punctuation — ranks third on the critics’ list and tenth on the readers’. But the gap between the two widens with a writer like Henry James. The American master, whose later novels unfold in long, winding sentences and whose subject was the collision of New World money with Old World culture, is represented on the critics’ list by The Turn of the Screw and The Golden Bowl. Readers have no place for him at all.
Tradition and the individual talent
A closer look at the critics’ list suggests that it gives considerable weight to the canon — naturally enough, since writers are conscious of their predecessors in a way that general readers need not be. The novelists most widely regarded as the masters of English and American fiction — Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene and V.S. Naipaul — are all represented on the critics’ list. Sadly, Naipaul and Greene are absent from the readers’ favourites.
Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas is the epic story of a poor Trinidadian of Indian descent and his desperate, lifelong quest to own a house of his own — a quest for independence as much as property. Greene’s The End of the Affair is something rarer still: a love story with a theological intensity, in which a married woman breaks off her affair because she made a secret vow to God — that if He spared her lover from a German bombing raid in wartime London, she would leave him. The man survives; she keeps her promise. He never forgives her for it.
The readers’ list, by contrast, includes Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and a number of other novels by writers absent from the critics’ hundred. On the whole, readers gravitate towards more recent fiction than the critics do.
Writers both lists honour
The most revealing comparison lies in the writers whom both lists celebrate. Jane Austen (1775–1817) has four novels on the critics’ list: Pride and Prejudice, Emma (13th), Persuasion (18th) and Mansfield Park (56th). Readers embrace all four bar Mansfield Park.
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) also places four novels on the critics’ list: Bleak House (12th), David Copperfield (33rd), Great Expectations (35th) and Our Mutual Friend (73rd). Readers endorse all four and add a fifth — A Tale of Two Cities — making Dickens the most broadly popular novelist across both lists.
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) achieves a remarkable five entries on the critics’ list: To the Lighthouse (fourth), Mrs Dalloway (14th), Orlando (54th), The Waves (55th) and Jacob’s Room (92nd). Readers, though they admire her, stop at two: To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway. Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness method, though more accessible than Joyce’s, still asks more of a reader than most are willing to give.
What popular taste reveals
What does all this tell us about what readers want? The enduring popularity of 19th-century novelists suggests a love of stories with plenty of incident and a crowded canvas. Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Anthony Trollope were remarkable for their teeming casts of characters and their vivid, wide-ranging portraits of Victorian society — its politics, its hypocrisies, its injustices.
George Eliot did the same in Middlemarch, the novel the critics placed first above all others. Set in a fictional English Midlands town, it weaves together politics, religion and the condition of women through the lives of Dorothea Brooke — an idealistic, wealthy young woman who makes the disastrous mistake of marrying the elderly clergyman and scholar Casaubon — and a surrounding web of characters: Casaubon’s younger cousin Will Ladislaw, the ambitious doctor Lydgate, his vain wife Rosamond, her brother Fred Vincy, and the steady, clear-eyed Mary Garth who loves him. The novel is as crowded with characters and incidents as it is long.
Austen worked on a smaller scale but with no less precision. Writing in the Regency era, before Queen Victoria’s reign, she confined herself to a narrower social world and a more intimate cast. Her novels are love stories — what we would now call romantic comedies — but written with a sharp, unsentimental eye for class, economic pressure and the compromises that genteel poverty forces upon women. In Pride and Prejudice, the heroine Elizabeth Bennet’s friend Charlotte marries the clergyman Mr Collins not out of affection but necessity. She needs a home, and she takes the means available to her.
The novel as a form
The novel is a relatively young literary form. Poetry and drama trace their origins to ancient Greece; prose fiction, as we know it, flowered in England only in the 18th century. Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders), Samuel Richardson (Clarissa), Henry Fielding (Tom Jones) and Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy) were among its earliest practitioners. Sterne’s experimental masterpiece ranks 19th on the critics’ list — one place above Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s wildly popular Gothic romance, at 20th.
Novels became the dominant literary form in the 19th century, displacing even poetry — despite the fame of Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson and Browning — for several reasons. Readers had always loved stories, and the serial format gave them a new kind of suspense. Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope and Hardy all published their major novels in monthly or weekly instalments. “Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait”, Dickens reportedly said — and readers waited, eagerly, for the next instalment.
The circulating library played an equally important role. Books were expensive; libraries purchased them in bulk and lent them out for a modest subscription fee, bringing fiction within reach of a rapidly growing middle class.
In America, books were cheaper for a different reason. As John Sutherland notes in Bestsellers, his history of popular publishing, American publishers routinely pirated the works of British and European writers, paying nothing in royalties. They were under no legal obligation to do otherwise: the United States did not extend copyright protection to foreign authors until the Chace Act of 1891, a quarter-century after Britain had begun doing so.
The language of the 19th century
Reading Austen, Dickens and Eliot today, one is struck by how little their prose has dated. Books written 200 years ago might be expected to feel archaic — and Shakespeare, only two centuries earlier, requires annotated editions to be fully understood. But the great 19th-century novelists write in a language that remains essentially our own. They address the reader directly on occasion, in the discursive manner of the age, but for the most part allow their narratives to unfold like drama, revealing character through action, dialogue and the quiet exposure of motive. The technique has never gone out of fashion, because it works.
The European tradition
Novels were flourishing on the Continent at the same time as in Britain, and the European masters have had a lasting influence on the English-speaking literary world. The Guardian’s lists include Tolstoy (War and Peace, Anna Karenina), Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov), Proust (In Search of Lost Time), Flaubert (Madame Bovary) and García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera).
It is also worth noting that five writers of Indian origin appear on the two lists for novels written in English: V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children), Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance), Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) and Vikram Seth (A Suitable Boy). The great English novel has never been the exclusive property of native English speakers: Conrad was Polish, Nabokov was Russian. Nor should too much be made of the shared ethnicity of these five writers. Naipaul was Trinidadian by birth. Rushdie and Seth completed their schooling in England; Rushdie read history at Cambridge, Seth studied at Oxford and later took a doctoral degree at Stanford. Mistry emigrated to Canada and graduated from the University of Toronto. Only Arundhati Roy received her entire education in India — but English was, effectively, her first language, insisted upon at home and at the elite schools she attended.
What makes a great novel?
Do the finest novels share any common qualities? They make a lasting impression, certainly — and one reason they do is that we recognize ourselves in their characters. But that recognition cannot be reduced to a formula. We are moved by the suffering of others: Thomas Hardy’s tragedies — Jude the Obscure (70th on the critics’ list), The Return of the Native (97th) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (on the readers’ list) — have become enduring classics. Yet critics and readers alike also cherish Austen’s comedies, which end in happiness. The great novel can take any shape; what it cannot do is leave us indifferent.
Reading The Guardian’s lists, I would say the finest novels transport us to worlds that feel entirely real, populated by people we cannot forget. That is why some argue that novel-reading cultivates empathy — the capacity to inhabit another life. I have never forgotten Dickens’s David Copperfield: orphaned in childhood, tormented by his stepfather, rescued by his eccentric but fierce great-aunt Betsy Trotwood, and pulled between his gentle first wife Dora and Agnes, who has loved him faithfully all along.
Nor have I forgotten Lata, the heroine of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, who charmed me in much the same way as Elizabeth Bennet — with her intelligence and her reluctance to be managed. While her widowed mother, Rupa Mehra, searches for a suitable husband, Lata is courted by three very different men: a Muslim fellow student, a Bengali poet who writes in English, and an executive at a shoe company newly returned from England. The bare plot summary makes it sound like a romantic comedy, and in some ways it is. But A Suitable Boy is also a sprawling epic — one of the longest novels in the English language — whose panoramic sweep takes in all of post-Independence India: the Hindu-Muslim tensions, the land reform debates, the Anglophile “brown sahibs”, the squabbling politicians, the extended families. There is no better novel about India in the 1950s. And it ends happily, which I confess is a quality I value.
I will admit it: I like happy endings. Hardy’s tragic vision is impossible to deny, but I find myself returning more readily to his Far from the Madding Crowd, which does not end in catastrophe.
That said, tragedy can be cathartic. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day made a deep impression on me. Understated, restrained, wistful, it recalls a vanished England. Ishiguro’s narrator Stevens is an ageing butler who, looking back on a life of impeccable professional service to an English aristocrat who privately hosted Nazi sympathizers before the Second World War, slowly understands what he sacrificed in the name of dignity and duty. He became so formal in his manners that he never allowed intimacy to develop between himself and Miss Kenton, the housekeeper who might have loved him. When he encounters her years later — she is now married, living in Cornwall — she tells him gently that she sometimes thinks about the life they might have shared.
The revelation touches Stevens to the core: “My heart was breaking”, he writes in his travel journal — and continues, outwardly composed, on his way. They will not meet again.
Equally poignant is A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s novel of love and war. The American lieutenant Frederic Henry, serving with the Italian ambulance corps in the First World War, falls in love with the English nurse Catherine Barkley. Their affair deepens into something that sustains them both through the carnage of the Italian retreat. Then Catherine dies in a Swiss hospital after delivering a stillborn child. Henry remains by her bedside until the nurses ask him to leave. When he finally walks out into the rain, Hemingway gives him almost nothing to say. The silence, as much as the words, carries the weight of the loss — that economy, language stripped to what it can bear, is what makes the ending so indelible.
The novel under threat
“Reading superior novels”, writes the American critic Joseph Epstein in The Novel: Who Needs It?, “arouses the mind in a way that nothing else quite does.” He is surely right. And yet, as The Guardian itself has noted, reading for pleasure is in decline. People are overwhelmed by information — scrolling through their phones, tethered to social media, pulled in a dozen directions at once.
“As screens command more of our attention, less remains for everything else”, Nicholas Carr observed in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. There is less time for quieter, more solitary pursuits, such as reading.
Memes and influencers are, in one sense, the successors to novels and novelists: they command attention, provoke feeling, spread rapidly through a culture. They can make us laugh and cry, which is precisely what Dickens demanded of his serialized chapters. But they do not stay. They cannot take up residence in the mind the way David Copperfield has, or Elizabeth Bennet, or Lata Mehra, or Stevens the butler, walking back to his car on a seafront in Cornwall with a broken heart and a perfectly composed expression.
Those who have no time for novels are not merely missing a pastime. They are cutting themselves off from an experience no other medium quite replicates — that of living, however briefly, inside another person’s life, sharing their joys and griefs as if they were our own. Memes are fleeting. David Copperfield, Elizabeth Bennet, Lata Mehra, Stevens the butler — they stay.