The Modern Library's 1998 list of the best novels has 9 by women. The Guardian's 2026 list has 37.
Each new critics' list of the greatest novels tends to have more women on it than the one before. The Guardian's list from 2026 has four times as many as the Modern Library's, and it still has about two men for every woman.
Readers' polls got there sooner. In 2003, 34 of the novels on the Big Read were by women, against 16 on the Observer's critics' list from the same year. Since then the critics have overtaken them: the Guardian's 2026 readers' poll has 25 novels by women, against 37 on its critics' list.
Source: The Novel Index, from 15 all-time lists: Guardian 2026, Guardian (McCrum) 2015, Observer 2003, BBC Culture 2015, BBC Arts 2019, Telegraph 2009, Time 2005, Modern Library 1998, Bokklubben World Library 2002, Le Monde 1999, Big Read 2003, Guardian readers 2026, Big Jubilee Read 2022, Great American Read 2018, Amazon UK 2014.Download image (PNG)The numbers behind the chart
We counted the novels on each of the 15 lists of the best novels ever written that The Novel Index uses, by the author's gender as recorded on Wikidata. A book by two or more authors counts as a woman's or a man's only when they all are; mixed books and the few whose author's gender we don't know are drawn as outlines and left out of the percentages.
Some lists have fewer than 100 squares (Le Monde, the Bokklubben World Library, the Observer, the Telegraph, Amazon UK, the Big Jubilee Read) because we only count novels, so stories, poems, plays and non-fiction on the original lists are left out. Two lists limit who can be on them: BBC Culture 2015 (British authors only) and the Big Jubilee Read 2022 (Commonwealth authors only). The two lists of 21st-century books (the Guardian and the New York Times) are left out because they only cover recent years; together they are 52% women.
