A survey of the most important British novelists of the past 250 years, for students of British fiction.

Introduction Adrian Poole; 1. Daniel Defoe Tom Keymer; 2. Samuel Richardson Peter Sabor; 3. Henry Fielding Jane Spencer; 4. Laurence Sterne Melvyn New; 5. Frances Burney Vivien Jones; 6. Jane Austen Jocelyn Harris; 7. Walter Scott Alison Lumsden; 8. Charles Dickens Robert Douglas-Fairhurst; 9. William Makepeace Thackeray Nicholas Dames; 10. Charlotte Brontë Patsy Stoneman; 11. Emily Brontë Heather Glen; 12. Elizabeth Gaskell Brigid Lowe; 13. Anthony Trollope David Skilton; 14. George Eliot Jill L. Matus; 15. Thomas Hardy Penny Boumelha; 16. Robert Louis Stevenson Adrian Poole; 17. Henry James Michiel Heyns; 18. Joseph Conrad Robert Hampson; 19. D. H. Lawrence Michael Bell; 20. James Joyce Maud Ellmann; 21. E. M. Forster Santanu Das; 22. Virginia Woolf Maria DiBattista; 23. Elizabeth Bowen Victoria Coulson; 24. Henry Green Bharat Tandon; 25. Evelyn Waugh Anthony Lane; 26. Graham Greene Dorothea Barrett; 27. William Golding Robert Macfarlane; Further reading; Index.