Best British Literature Books

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen and their relationships with Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich — Lawrence's most sustained philosophical novel, a diagnosis of modern civilisation's death wish conducted through the most intense pair of love relationships in English fiction.

The long letter Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading Gaol, where he was imprisoned for homosexuality, is simultaneously a self-examination, an accusation, a meditation on suffering, and a statement of aesthetic faith. It is among the most extraordinary prose documents of the nineteenth century: the most brilliant wit of the age writing in extremis, finding in Christ the artist who suffered for beauty, rethinking everything he had written in the light of what had been done to him.

Paul Pennyfeather is expelled from Oxford for indecent behaviour not his own, becomes a schoolmaster at a chaotic Welsh school, enters the English aristocracy through an engagement, and is imprisoned for white slavery not his own — Waugh's first novel and the funniest debut in the English language.

A country nature columnist is accidentally sent to cover a war in the fictional African nation of Ishmaelia by a press baron who wanted a different journalist — Waugh's satire of foreign correspondents, Fleet Street, and the construction of news.

Paul Morel grows up in a Nottinghamshire mining village, caught between his possessive mother's ambitions for him and his own desires — for art, for independence, for women who are not his mother. The first great working-class bildungsroman in English.

Sir Robert Chiltern, an upright politician, is being blackmailed by Mrs Cheveley over an early indiscretion that made his fortune and his career. Wilde's second great society comedy is his most politically serious — an examination of the gap between public virtue and private corruption, and of what an 'ideal husband' actually is when the idealism is tested.

Sasha Jensen, an aging Englishwoman alone in Paris on borrowed money, drinks and remembers and encounters a young man who may be a gigolo. Rhys's fourth novel is the most formally accomplished of her pre-Wide Sargasso Sea work — the stream-of-consciousness narration spirals inward toward a final scene that is simultaneously sexual, violent, and ambiguous. The title is from Emily Dickinson.

Jim, a first mate on a passenger ship, abandons eight hundred Muslim pilgrims during an apparent emergency — and must spend the rest of his life with the knowledge of what he did. Conrad's novel of cowardice, guilt, and the impossibility of redemption is narrated by Marlow, who reconstructs Jim's story from fragments.

A British poet working in Hollywood attends a funeral at the Forest Lawn-inspired Whispering Glades and falls in love with the cosmetician for the corpses. Waugh's novella about the American funeral industry and Hollywood expatriate culture.

Three generations of the Brangwen family in the English Midlands — from the 1840s to the early twentieth century — each straining toward something beyond the agricultural life that made them. Seized and destroyed by police on publication for its frank treatment of sexuality.

The Bright Young Things of 1920s London party relentlessly while Adam Fenwick-Symes tries and fails to marry Nina. Waugh's second novel captures the feverish emptiness of the interwar generation with satirical accuracy that becomes, by the end, something closer to despair.

Written after his release from prison and published under a pseudonym, Wilde's poem about the execution of a fellow prisoner — 'he did not wear his scarlet coat, for blood and wine are red' — is his most politically direct work. The poem indicts the prison system, capital punishment, and Victorian society's treatment of those it destroys, written in ballad form that gives the critique populist reach.

A double agent for the Russian embassy in London is ordered to commit a terrorist act that can be blamed on anarchists. Conrad's London novel — simultaneously thriller, black comedy, and study of how political violence is always manipulated by those who profit from its effects.

Anna Morgan, a young West Indian chorus girl in England, is kept by an older man and then abandoned, and drifts into a series of diminishments. Rhys's most autobiographical novel — the closest to her own experience of arriving in England from Dominica — is also her most economical: the prose is stripped to the bone, and the cold English world that Anna cannot navigate is rendered entirely through what it refuses to give her.

Constance Chatterley, married to a paralysed, emotionally remote aristocrat, begins an affair with Mellors, the estate's gamekeeper. Lawrence's most notorious novel was banned for obscenity in Britain until 1960, but beneath the explicit content is a serious argument about industrialism, class, and the body's need for genuine tenderness.

In the fictional South American republic of Costaguana, revolution tears the country apart while the silver mine that funds both sides becomes the novel's true subject — the material interest that corrupts every idealism. Conrad's most ambitious novel is the first great political novel of the twentieth century.

Julia Martin, who has been receiving a small weekly allowance from a former lover, confronts him when it stops, returns to London to see her dying mother, and drifts. Rhys's second novel is the most Chekhovian of her work — nothing is resolved, nothing is dramatized, and the sense of life passing without the protagonist being able to grasp it is achieved entirely through prose of minimal, devastating precision.

Razumov, a Russian student in St Petersburg, witnesses a fellow student's assassination of a government minister — and is forced to choose between betraying his colleague to the police or destroying his own future. Conrad's most explicitly political novel is a study of betrayal, guilt, and the way political ideology consumes individual moral life.

An Irish woman in Mexico encounters a political and religious movement attempting to revive the ancient Aztec religion and displace Christianity — Lawrence's most politically troubling and visually extraordinary novel.