To everyone who thinks Joyce was Irish. Yes, obviously. But he wrote Ulysses while Ireland was united with Britain and he kept his British passport until his death in 1941.
Still disagree with Joyce being co-opted as British so he really should not be on this list , I think British critics wish he was British because he was such a great and important writer so everyone wants to claim him as he’s too crucial to leave out so hey just say he’s British and that solves it . Ireland became independent in 1922 the year Ulysses was published yes yes I know it took years to write before that . He had an ambiguous relationship with Ireland and was not a republican or anything like that. He only ever wrote about Dublin , the city of his birth which he had a love hate relationship with for sure
The fact is that he was a British citizen, with voting rights in the British parliament, when he wrote all but FW. And he chose to keep the passport. Under what definition of British are we operating if we do not include citizens? Before 1922 he was as British as anyone else in the British Isles. He was also Irish, and that might be far more important to his identity (though it was complicated). But British citizens are British. To think anything else gets you into all sorts of complicated ideas about "who is really British"....
Well, that was agony, having to chose between Austen and Tolkien. Yes, very different writers, but I'm an eclectic reader.
FWIW in the end I chose Austen because she wrote six great novels and Tolkien only wrote one (or three if you regard LOTR as a trilogy (it was originally published in three stages)).
I know I’ll need some sort of force shield when people read this but … I really detest Dickens.
I’m prepared to accept that this is a minority view (maybe even a singular one) and I’m willing to accept that many people whose views I respect (including Henry Oliver) regard him as a great writer. So the error is probably mine. His writing may have all sorts of greatness that I’m just not seeing because I simply can’t get past all the muck and misery; I get enough of that at home. (Or so I once jokingly told my reading group. They seemed equally shocked by both confessions and I never felt able to go back. I hope I don’t get similarly frozen out here.)
I know great literature needn’t be all sweetness and light, and I’m aware that life in Victorian London contained little of either, but I simply can’t get past the way Dickens seems to delight in his characters’ misery and revel in all sorts of physical unpleasantness. It’s one thing to get your character up a tree and then throw rocks at him, as the well-known advice suggests; it’s quite another to gloat in covering the tree in slimy mud, so to speak, and then increase the emotional pain by getting his own mother to be the one throwing the rocks. Dickens seems to me to delight in cruelly cranking up his characters’ misery while pushing his readers’ credulity to its very limits. Great conflict it may be but not so great to read about. Or not to my taste, anyway.
And then there are all those weird names and highly-exaggerated caricatures. His fully-rounded main characters may have substance, a degree of warmth and attractiveness even, and they and their interactions may indeed reflect some wise comment by Dickens about the the human condition. But they exist in a world otherwise entirely populated by grotesques, like a nightmare of being trapped a fairground hall of distorting mirrors. That’s not a word I want to spend any time in, no matter how technically good the writing is.
Okay, shoot me now. I can take it. (And while l’m here, I may as well get it all on record at once and admit I can’t stand Charlie Chaplin, either, and for similar reasons.)
All v interesting comments , I didn’t vote because I have read many of the authors but In some cases not enough of certain authors to make a judgment and I’ve read no Powell at all. I’ve already made my views known on joyce inclusion so I’ll park that , Conrad an interesting one too given that he was Polish Ukrainian then naturalised British. Lord Jim blew me away when I read it at 14 , I found all his other works v heavy going , it also feels problematic reading a book with the N word in the title in 2024, so I think he has fallen out of favour for that and as an Irish person his views on colonialism can be dubious and hard to pin down , it’s problematic , you don’t know where he stands sometimes. But Lord Jim is a staggering work it’s so underrated and nobody seems to read it anymore
Group 4 was brutal. I'm a huge Powell fan, and have a decent collection of the English first editions of 'Dance', plus first editions hardcovers of the omnibus volumes, and a set of the omnibus paper backs (my reading editions). But for moral and psychological subtlety I had to go with James. His last three novels are without equal.
Hardy's absence is interesting, and I think this competition is the poorer for it! Maybe voters would have felt differently if choosing the GOAT English novelist. Hard to escape the association of Englishness to landscape ("close your eyes and think of..."), rather than any particular value or ideology shared (and more constitutionally enshrined) by almost every other Western nation. And to me, Hardy is unbeatable when writing on this subject. His treatment of Egdon Heath in Return of the Native felt far more sympathetic and sensitive than anything Dickens produced on London.
💯 when I read hardy and dickens on alternate nights (yes perhaps I am strange) and when I close my eyes my dreams of Englishness are always deeper after Hardy
I can only conclude from Group 2 that people don't read Conrad any more. He is absolutely profound, and world-embracing. Yes, Woolf recast the metaphysics of writing as capturing how it feels to be a particular someon at a particular moment, but she didn't write anything as profound about the world as Nostromo. I suppose you could say that she writes about one aspect of modernity and Conrad about another, but he encompasses the whole of it - and is a moralist to boot. Conrad just is great. He should be in there as one of the Big Four with GE, CD, and JA.
And Group 4 has got my goat (sorry). For me, James is one of the top five English novelists. His skill, his subtlety, his profound sense of ethics and right and wrong, the beauty of his writing, the complex slow burn of what he writes - the stature. Compared to Ishiguro? Sorry, really.
To everyone who thinks Joyce was Irish. Yes, obviously. But he wrote Ulysses while Ireland was united with Britain and he kept his British passport until his death in 1941.
Still disagree with Joyce being co-opted as British so he really should not be on this list , I think British critics wish he was British because he was such a great and important writer so everyone wants to claim him as he’s too crucial to leave out so hey just say he’s British and that solves it . Ireland became independent in 1922 the year Ulysses was published yes yes I know it took years to write before that . He had an ambiguous relationship with Ireland and was not a republican or anything like that. He only ever wrote about Dublin , the city of his birth which he had a love hate relationship with for sure
The fact is that he was a British citizen, with voting rights in the British parliament, when he wrote all but FW. And he chose to keep the passport. Under what definition of British are we operating if we do not include citizens? Before 1922 he was as British as anyone else in the British Isles. He was also Irish, and that might be far more important to his identity (though it was complicated). But British citizens are British. To think anything else gets you into all sorts of complicated ideas about "who is really British"....
Well, that was agony, having to chose between Austen and Tolkien. Yes, very different writers, but I'm an eclectic reader.
FWIW in the end I chose Austen because she wrote six great novels and Tolkien only wrote one (or three if you regard LOTR as a trilogy (it was originally published in three stages)).
yeah the randomiser made some fun tough choices!
Woolf vs Mantel is quite an impossible choice for me. BTW, would you say the language of Tolkien is just as much Celtic as Saxon?
Yes good point. Agee many hard choices here
Book quality matters!
Dickens
I know I’ll need some sort of force shield when people read this but … I really detest Dickens.
I’m prepared to accept that this is a minority view (maybe even a singular one) and I’m willing to accept that many people whose views I respect (including Henry Oliver) regard him as a great writer. So the error is probably mine. His writing may have all sorts of greatness that I’m just not seeing because I simply can’t get past all the muck and misery; I get enough of that at home. (Or so I once jokingly told my reading group. They seemed equally shocked by both confessions and I never felt able to go back. I hope I don’t get similarly frozen out here.)
I know great literature needn’t be all sweetness and light, and I’m aware that life in Victorian London contained little of either, but I simply can’t get past the way Dickens seems to delight in his characters’ misery and revel in all sorts of physical unpleasantness. It’s one thing to get your character up a tree and then throw rocks at him, as the well-known advice suggests; it’s quite another to gloat in covering the tree in slimy mud, so to speak, and then increase the emotional pain by getting his own mother to be the one throwing the rocks. Dickens seems to me to delight in cruelly cranking up his characters’ misery while pushing his readers’ credulity to its very limits. Great conflict it may be but not so great to read about. Or not to my taste, anyway.
And then there are all those weird names and highly-exaggerated caricatures. His fully-rounded main characters may have substance, a degree of warmth and attractiveness even, and they and their interactions may indeed reflect some wise comment by Dickens about the the human condition. But they exist in a world otherwise entirely populated by grotesques, like a nightmare of being trapped a fairground hall of distorting mirrors. That’s not a word I want to spend any time in, no matter how technically good the writing is.
Okay, shoot me now. I can take it. (And while l’m here, I may as well get it all on record at once and admit I can’t stand Charlie Chaplin, either, and for similar reasons.)
Perfectly reasonable perspective! Many others have felt similar!
Whew! Does that mean I can stay, then?
I don't throw people out :)
(well obviously I might, but not for having literary opinions...!)
All v interesting comments , I didn’t vote because I have read many of the authors but In some cases not enough of certain authors to make a judgment and I’ve read no Powell at all. I’ve already made my views known on joyce inclusion so I’ll park that , Conrad an interesting one too given that he was Polish Ukrainian then naturalised British. Lord Jim blew me away when I read it at 14 , I found all his other works v heavy going , it also feels problematic reading a book with the N word in the title in 2024, so I think he has fallen out of favour for that and as an Irish person his views on colonialism can be dubious and hard to pin down , it’s problematic , you don’t know where he stands sometimes. But Lord Jim is a staggering work it’s so underrated and nobody seems to read it anymore
isn;t it interesting that no-one objects to Conrad’s inclusion!
I’m enjoying this series of posts and appreciate that you have set yourself a hard task, but not including Somerset Maugham
I think Maugham is great and recommend him to people but I don’t see him competing against some of these names
Ooh, those groupings tested me. I still think I voted by way of personal fave instead go greatest, but hey, it's fun isn't it? And no fighting.
Yes all just fun and an encouragement to read :) the randomiser made the choices tricky!!
Group 4 was brutal. I'm a huge Powell fan, and have a decent collection of the English first editions of 'Dance', plus first editions hardcovers of the omnibus volumes, and a set of the omnibus paper backs (my reading editions). But for moral and psychological subtlety I had to go with James. His last three novels are without equal.
What makes it a hard choice is that they are quite comparable in many ways and it’s a question of aesthetic differences—I’m stuck on it.
Hardy's absence is interesting, and I think this competition is the poorer for it! Maybe voters would have felt differently if choosing the GOAT English novelist. Hard to escape the association of Englishness to landscape ("close your eyes and think of..."), rather than any particular value or ideology shared (and more constitutionally enshrined) by almost every other Western nation. And to me, Hardy is unbeatable when writing on this subject. His treatment of Egdon Heath in Return of the Native felt far more sympathetic and sensitive than anything Dickens produced on London.
💯 when I read hardy and dickens on alternate nights (yes perhaps I am strange) and when I close my eyes my dreams of Englishness are always deeper after Hardy
I agree :/
I can only conclude from Group 2 that people don't read Conrad any more. He is absolutely profound, and world-embracing. Yes, Woolf recast the metaphysics of writing as capturing how it feels to be a particular someon at a particular moment, but she didn't write anything as profound about the world as Nostromo. I suppose you could say that she writes about one aspect of modernity and Conrad about another, but he encompasses the whole of it - and is a moralist to boot. Conrad just is great. He should be in there as one of the Big Four with GE, CD, and JA.
Big Give for me: GE, CD, JA, Conrad, & James.
Oops. Big Five.
Why did Waugh get two slots?
Sorry four votes got removed when I updated it...
damn, sorry will fix
And Group 4 has got my goat (sorry). For me, James is one of the top five English novelists. His skill, his subtlety, his profound sense of ethics and right and wrong, the beauty of his writing, the complex slow burn of what he writes - the stature. Compared to Ishiguro? Sorry, really.
You should write something making the case for James—encourage people to read him!