Veritable volumes
10 books that really did shape our world (and didn’t make the cut…)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
This muchloved story of the “poor, obscure, plain and little” governess is not simply an incredible page-turner, it was also one of the first novels to promote the idea of the individual – a staple of modern literature.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Rev Charles Dodgson’s weird and wonderful story about a little girl’s journey down a rabbit hole is a dazzling display of parody, wordplay and riddles. Never has nonsense been so fiendishly clever.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
This novel by the Queen of Crime (the third to feature Hercule Poirot) is a triumph of technical plotting. The rules of the whodunnit had barely been established when Christie showed how they could be bent and teased.
Ulysses by James Joyce
The most prominent work of modernist literature, Joyce’s stream of consciousness novel – set over one day in Dublin – redefined the possibility of what a novel can be.
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
The Nobel Prize winner’s greatest novel was described by Margaret Drabble as “inner-space fiction”. Widely accepted as a feminist bible, it also offers a sharp analysis of war and communism.
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
This bleakly brilliant novel – Hardy’s last – set a social agenda that even the great reformer Dickens had shied away from. Class, education and feminism are tackled head on – to often devastating effect.
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
What may seem like a soupy piece of Victoriana set the template for the most successful literary genre of all – the modern detective novel. Enter Sergeant Cuff, a sharpminded sleuth with a passion for roses.
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
“It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery.” So said John Gay, thus revealing exactly why Swift’s work (an early example of satire in novel form), was so influential. Its layers of meaning can be deciphered and enjoyed by readers of all ages.
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
This sprawling novel, set around the Napoleonic Wars, is one of the most perfect satires of society, and in antiheroine Becky Sharp gives us a brilliantly realised character who, although venal and self-serving, you ultimately root for.
Our Nig by Harriet E Wilson
Still largely unknown, this was the first novel by an Africanamerican woman to be published in North America and caused a furore among white antiabolitionists who were angered by Wilson’s cleareyed assessment of the “shadow of slavery” which existed in their territory.