• 100 best novels: from Bunyan’s pilgrim to Carey’s Ned Kelly – Robert McCrum reflects on his choices
• Series: The 100 best novels written in English
“Best of” lists are strange and silly things, particularly in the realm of books: as prize shortlists prove time and time again, fiction is a most subjective art. But still, what fun they can be, and how unwittingly revealing. Of Robert McCrum’s 100 Greatest Novels, just 21 are by women. Even allowing for the fact that his list takes in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, when women writers were relatively rare, this seems extraordinary to me. Sixty-seven of his titles belong to the 20th century – his final book is Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, which was published in 2000 – and yet, only 15 of these are by women. How can this be? The last century offers up an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the female imagination. Is it that Robert thinks men write better, more important novels than women? Or is it simply that he is less familiar with the female canon? I’m not sure. Either way, here I am, eager to help. Let the reprogramming begin.
To take it from the top, I can’t disagree: Jane Austen’s Emma and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are masterpieces; so is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Wuthering Heights by her sister, Emily, and Middlemarch by George Eliot. But to this quintet I might add Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), whose cast of working-class characters was then such an innovation (Dickens was an admirer). Robert has included Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s a wonderful book, but his neighbour Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) perhaps deserves to join it. A faulty novel, with a preposterous end, its anti-slavery message nevertheless stirred up great public feeling; its power should not be discounted.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment