British and Irish novelists before 1945

George Eliot

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Anne Evans (1819–1880), English Victorian novelist of Middlemarch, Adam Bede, and Daniel Deronda; also Westminster Review editor, translator of Strauss and Feuerbach, partner of George Henry Lewes.

George Gissing

George Gissing (1857–1903) was an English novelist who chronicled London poverty and the educated-but-poor lower middle class; his masterpiece is New Grub Street (1891), and he wrote 23 novels.

George Meredith

George Meredith (1828–1909) was a British novelist and poet whose psychologically dense fiction, including The Egoist and Diana of the Crossways, won him honors but few general readers.

George Moore (novelist)

George Moore, full name George Augustus Moore (1852–1933), was an Irish novelist who brought French naturalism into English and Irish fiction, best known for Esther Waters (1894).

George Orwell

George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950), English novelist, essayist, and critic; author of Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and a democratic socialist critic of totalitarianism.

Graham Greene

Graham Greene (Henry Graham Greene) was an English novelist, playwright, and screenwriter who combined Catholic themes with espionage, writing Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, and The Quiet American.

Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding (1707–1754), English novelist and magistrate, author of Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones (1749), and Amelia; pioneer of the modern comic novel and founder of the Bow Street Runners.

Hugh Walpole

Hugh Walpole (1884–1941) was a New Zealand-born English novelist who published a novel almost yearly for three decades and is best remembered for his Herries Chronicle.

Ian Maclaren

Ian Maclaren was the pen name of John Watson (1850–1907), a Scottish Free Church minister and novelist whose 1894 collection Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush sold over 750,000 copies.

Ignatius Sancho

Ignatius Sancho (c. 1729 – 1780) was a Black British writer, composer, and shopkeeper, the first known person of African descent to vote in a British parliamentary election.

Israel Zangwill

Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) was a British novelist, playwright, and advocate of Jewish causes who led British Zionism, then broke with it in 1905 to found the Jewish Territorialist Organization.

J. M. Barrie

J. M. Barrie (1860–1937), Scottish novelist and playwright, creator of Peter Pan; born in Kirriemuir, guardian of the Llewelyn Davies boys, gave the Peter Pan copyright to Great Ormond Street Hospital.

James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882-1941), Irish modernist novelist, short story writer, and poet; author of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939); lived in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris; Ulysses banned until the 1933 Woolsey decision.

Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775–1817), English novelist of gentry life, author of six novels published 1811–1818 including Pride and Prejudice and Emma; pioneer of free indirect discourse, first published anonymously as "by a Lady".

John Cowper Powys

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) was a British novelist and itinerant lecturer in America who wrote Wolf Solent and A Glastonbury Romance, and is ranked among the great 20th-century novelists.

John Galsworthy

John Galsworthy (1867-1933), English novelist and dramatist who first wrote as John Sinjohn; author of The Forsyte Saga (1906-1921) and the play Justice, winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Irish satirist and Church of Ireland clergyman, dean of St Patrick's, Dublin; author of Gulliver's Travels (1726), A Tale of a Tub (1704), and A Modest Proposal (1729).

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad (Józef Teodor Konrad Nałęcz Korzeniowski, 1857–1924), Polish-born British novelist and ex-merchant-marine captain who wrote in English, his third language; known for Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Marlow.

Joyce Cary

Joyce Cary (Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary, 1888–1957), Irish-born British novelist and former Nigerian colonial administrator, author of Mister Johnson, The Horse's Mouth, and two first-person trilogies on art and politics.

L. P. Hartley

L. P. Hartley, full name Leslie Poles Hartley (1895–1972), was an English novelist and short-story writer whose reputation rests chiefly on The Go-Between and the Eustace and Hilda trilogy.

Lady Caroline Lamb

Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828), English aristocrat and novelist, wife of future Prime Minister Lord Melbourne; famous for her 1812 affair with Byron and her scandalous 1816 roman a clef Glenarvon.

Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), Anglo-Irish clergyman and novelist, author of Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), famed for digressive, typographically experimental narrative and vast European influence.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, pen name of Scottish writer James Leslie Mitchell (1901–1935), author of A Scots Quair; Sunset Song (1932) blends Doric, Scots and English and was voted Scotland's best loved novel in 2016.

Liam O'Flaherty

Liam O'Flaherty (Liam Ó Flaithearta, 1896–1984) was an Irish novelist and short story writer from Inis Mór, Aran Islands, author of The Informer, Famine, and the Irish-language collection Dúil, and co-founder of the first Communist Party of Ireland.

Margaret Oliphant

Margaret Oliphant, known as Mrs. Oliphant, was a Scottish novelist, biographer, and historian (1828–1897) who published about 98 novels and wrote for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for nearly fifty years.

Maria Edgeworth

Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and children's writer whose Irish novels of 1800 to 1817, beginning with Castle Rackrent, pioneered the regional novel in English and influenced Walter Scott and Jane Austen.

Michael Sadleir

Michael Sadleir, born Michael Sadler, was an English novelist, publisher, and leading bibliographer of Victorian fiction; his novel Fanny by Gaslight (1940) was his most successful, and his collection went to UCLA.

Neil M. Gunn

Neil M. Gunn (1891-1973), born Dunbeath, Caithness, was a Scottish novelist of the interwar Scottish Literary Renaissance; a former Customs and Excise officer, his Highland River (1937) won the James Tait Black Prize and The Silver Darlings (1941) was a bestseller.

P. G. Wodehouse

P. G. Wodehouse, born Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, was an English comic novelist (1881–1975) who created Jeeves and Bertie Wooster and wrote more than seventy novels and hundreds of short stories.