Famous novelists in history

How these ten novelists were chosen

Each novelist here changed what a novel could do: tell a long story of inner life (Murasaki), make comedy out of money and marriage (Austen), invent science fiction (Shelley), reach a mass audience in monthly parts (Dickens), argue about God and freedom (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy), write in the voice of an ordinary boy (Twain), test art against morality (Wilde), bring politics into the family (Tagore), or follow thought as it flows (Woolf).

For each one: dates, the book to read first, and a detail most lists miss, with a source. Their letters and diaries survive, which lets you hear the writer as well as the characters. One caution: a character’s opinion is not the author’s, and several of these writers held views we now reject, which the entries mention.

Murasaki Shikibu (about 973 to 1014): The Tale of Genji

Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at the Heian court in Kyoto, wrote The Tale of Genji between about 1000 and 1012: 54 chapters following the life and loves of a prince and then his descendants. It is often called the world’s first novel. Her real name is not recorded; Murasaki Shikibu is a court nickname.

Most lists miss: her diary says she hid her learning. Women were not expected to read Chinese, so at court she pretended she could not even read the character for “one” on a screen, while secretly teaching Chinese poetry to the empress.

Jane Austen (1775 to 1817): Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen, a clergyman’s daughter from Hampshire, published four novels in her lifetime, starting with Sense and Sensibility (1811), and two more appeared after her death. Pride and Prejudice (1813) is the place to start. None carried her name: the first was signed “By a Lady”.

Most lists miss: she dedicated Emma (1815) to the Prince Regent, a man she disliked, because his librarian made clear the dedication was expected. See Jane Austen vs Charles Dickens.

Mary Shelley (1797 to 1851): Frankenstein

Mary Shelley, daughter of the writers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, began Frankenstein at eighteen, in June 1816, when Lord Byron challenged his guests at a villa by Lake Geneva to write ghost stories. It was published anonymously on 1 January 1818.

Most lists miss: the story of the waking dream that inspired it comes from her introduction to the revised edition of 1831, written fifteen years later. She also wrote The Last Man (1826), a novel about humanity wiped out by plague, which few lists mention.

Charles Dickens (1812 to 1870): A Christmas Carol and the serial novel

Charles Dickens worked in a blacking factory at twelve while his father was in a debtors’ prison, and turned that knowledge of poverty into Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Most of his novels came out first in monthly or weekly instalments, so readers followed them like a series.

Most lists miss: he published A Christmas Carol in December 1843 at his own risk, and the first printing of 6,000 copies sold out within days, though the expensive production earned him far less than he hoped. He campaigned against public executions in letters to The Times in 1849, yet in private letters wrote with fury about Indian rebels in 1857.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 to 1881): Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky was arrested in 1849 for belonging to a radical discussion circle, faced a mock execution by firing squad, and served four years in a Siberian prison camp. His novels, Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, argue about guilt, freedom and faith.

Most lists miss: in 1866, under a contract that would have handed his future rights to a publisher, he dictated the short novel The Gambler to a young stenographer, Anna Snitkina, in under a month. He made the deadline and married her the next year. His later journalism contains antisemitic passages that readers should not skip over.

Leo Tolstoy (1828 to 1910): War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy, a Russian count, wrote War and Peace (1865 to 1869), set during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and Anna Karenina (1875 to 1877). After a spiritual crisis described in A Confession he preached non-violence and simple living.

Most lists miss: in 1901 the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him for his writings against its doctrines, and he published a reply. In November 1910, aged 82, he left home secretly and died days later at the small railway station of Astapovo, with reporters camped outside.

Mark Twain (1835 to 1910): Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens, grew up on the Mississippi in Hannibal, Missouri, and piloted riverboats before becoming a writer. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884 in Britain, 1885 in the United States) is told in the voice of a boy helping an enslaved man, Jim, escape.

Most lists miss: his pen name is a riverboat call meaning two fathoms (about 3.7 metres) of water, safe depth for a steamboat. In 1885 he paid the Yale law school costs of a Black student, Warner McGuinn, writing that white Americans owed reparation to Black Americans. See questions to ask Mark Twain.

Oscar Wilde (1854 to 1900): The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde, Dublin-born wit and playwright, wrote only one novel. The Picture of Dorian Gray, about a young man whose portrait ages while he does not, first appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890 and was expanded as a book in 1891.

Most lists miss: he added that preface after critics attacked the magazine version as immoral. At his trials in 1895 the novel was quoted against him; he was imprisoned for two years for “gross indecency” with men.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 to 1941): The Home and the World

Rabindranath Tagore is known worldwide as a poet, but his Bengali novels are major works too: Gora (1910), about identity and religion, and Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, 1916), set during the Swadeshi movement against the 1905 partition of Bengal.

Most lists miss: The Home and the World puts a political argument inside a marriage. A wife is drawn between her calm husband and a fiery nationalist, and the novel questions movements that demand total loyalty. Satyajit Ray filmed it in 1984.

Virginia Woolf (1882 to 1941): Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway (1925), which follows one day in London in June 1923 through the thoughts of its characters, and To the Lighthouse (1927). Her essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) argues that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write fiction.

Most lists miss: she was also a publisher. In 1917 she and her husband Leonard bought a small hand press and started the Hogarth Press at home, setting type by hand; it went on to publish T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in Britain (1923) and the English translations of Freud.

Summary table: novelists and the book to read first

Project ideas using famous novelists

• Opening lines: copy the first paragraph of five of these novels and explain what each tells the reader in its first fifty words.
• Author versus character: pick a famous line from a novel and find whether the author said anything similar in a letter or diary. If not, say so in your essay.
• Book talk in character: give a two-minute talk as the novelist explaining why they wrote their first book. The first-person biography speech guide helps.
• Interview by voice: try your questions with Jane Austen or Charles Dickens on Yuga, which you can talk to by voice or text. These AI recreations draw on the writers’ letters and books but are not the real people and can be wrong, so cite the books and letters, not the app.

Poets next door: famous poets in history. Also see questions to ask Jane Austen and questions to ask Charles Dickens.