Editor’s note: British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) passed the pair recently82A survey of foreign critics selected the ten most enduring British novels. True classics are the eternal treasures of mankind and never fade with time.

Vanity Fair

1848

William Makepeace Thackeray

This novel features probably the greatest anti-heroine in English literature, Becky Sharp, and a plot that revolves around class, social climbing and a financial crisis that will seem eerily familiar to modern readers. Vanity Fair has it all. It both speaks of its time, and speaks of all times.

Frankenstein

1818

Mary Shelley

This pioneering work of science fiction and Gothic horror developed an indelible "monster" of a theme that has endured for centuries: of the scientist as a "modern Prometheus".

David Copperfield

1850

Charles Dickens

David Copperfield is populated by some of the most vivid characters ever created. They are as much a part of readers' world, and their way of thinking about the world, as people they have actually met.

Wuthering Heights

1847

Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights is "powered by more psychological energy than any book ever written". Readers admire Wuthering Heights because of "its layered narrative structure, because it is a work of incredible imagination, and because it is far more than a love story. The story shows "the eternal rocks beneath" our fleeting desires.

Bleak House

1853

Charles Dickens

Bleak House is among Dickens novels, uniquely original in its alternation of first-person past-tense chapters with a concurrent third-person account in present tense.

Jane Eyre

1847

Charlotte Brontë

Brontë's revolutionary 1847 Gothic romance about a young woman seeking a richer and more passionate life on her own still resonates with modern readers. Brontë's novel features the orphan Jane Eyre's search for an identity, her powerful attraction to her master, Mr Rochester, and an intimate description of her complex moral choices and sometimes raw emotional states.

Great Expectations

1861

Charles Dickens

Great Expectations might be the quintessential British novel. To re-read Dickens' classic as an adult is to discover its wit and brio, its influence, and its truth. It has all the elements of classic Dickens endearing, flawed characters; a plot that skewers the politics of the time; subplots that skewer morality and culture; a love story; and a wonderful storyline.

Mrs Dalloway

1925

Virginia Woolf

If the most precious gift of the novel as a medium is the power it has to break into the prison of human consciousness, to expose the gossamer weave of thought and feeling and memory that makes up our innermost lives, then Woolf's fourth novel stands alone at the pinnacle. Virginia Woolf made modernism live and breathe.

To the Lighthouse

1927

Virginia Woolf

Subtle, beautiful, staggeringly intelligent and flat-out original. A masterpiece of modernism, its stream-of-consciousness, richness of language and perceptions has continued to reveal itself.

Middlemarch

1874

George Eliot