No love for Jane Austen? Some of her works are all time classic. They could probably compete with top 10 literature work of 17th-18th century.
Another author that’s under appreciated would be Gertrude Stein.
Yeah, Jane Austen’s easily one of the top 20 English novelists of all time, and one of my personal favorites. She gets kind of a mixed appreciation these days bc the movies made from her novels usually focus on the romance (often in a way that would have scandalized her) and skimp on her commentary about human nature and society’s pressures. And plus her prose is just gorgeous and that is difficult to adapt to film. Probably the best adaptation is the BBC 1980 Pride and Prejudice miniseries ( wikipedia , tubi ) which was adapted by Fay Weldon, who was a novelist in her own right. That miniseries turns a lot of Austen’s prose into dialogue, which is beautiful to hear in that context, though as a consequence the series is a little slow for a wide modern audience. Really you have to read the books themselves.
She’s also incredibly funny (and sometimes savage) which also gets lost in many adaptations, since it’s in her commentary and not necessarily in the dialog.
She was not a woman of many words; for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas.
Agree with all of the above, would add T. Kingfisher for fantasy, Iris Murdoch for heady philosophical fiction, Agatha Christie for murder mystery, Clarissa Pinkola Estés for empowering fables and explorations of feminine archetypes, Mary Oliver for poetry, and Lady Margaret Cavendish for a great sci-fi novel from 1666.
Agatha Christie is definitely one. Agree with Mary Shelley Robin Hobb
Surprised I had to scroll this much to see her being mentioned.
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Ursula LeGuin
Margaret Atwood
Diana Wynne Jones
and for personal preference, Robin McKinley
Mary Shelley has to be up there for inventing Sci-Fi.
Some would say that was Margaret Cavendish, 150 years earlier. Mary Shelly’s novels are and have been more popular though.
Fiction
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Ursula K. LeGuin
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Octavia Butler
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Margaret Atwood
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Tui T. Sutherland (J Fic)
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Suzanne Collins (YA)
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Lois Lowry (YA)
Non-Fiction
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Naomi Klein
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Margaret Atwood (Massey Lecture)
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Angela Y. Davis
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Tanya Talaga
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bell hooks
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Robin Wall Kimmerer
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Ursula K LeGuin?
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Henriette Walter. Her works on French linguistics are both fascinating and informative.
Iris Murdoch. I’ve only read The Sea, The Sea, but it’s one of the books that got me into literature when I was a teenager. I really need to get around to exploring more of her work.
A lot of folk are giving great answers here.
I just want to add Andre Norton to the list. She was a pioneer in Sci-Fi and her fantasy work was great too.
Mary Ann Evans, who wrote as George Eliot. Middlemarch is imho one of the best novels ever written in the English language.
Le Guin
Toni Morrison
Angela Carter
Virginia Wolfe
Shirley Jackson
Octavia Butler
I don’t know about “of all time” but “The Coming Plague” by Laurie Garrett should be required reading.
Incorrect answer but I’m very excited every time she has a book, Mary Roach.
