I’ve just received an e-mail question, which I had fun in answering and thought I’d share with visitors to the Ink Desk. Here’s the text of the e-mail:

Who do you think is the third greatest British ( English? which is the right word?) writer? Remember Eliot is really American. I am talking of fiction…. novelist, playwright, poet …. in the nonfiction category I think I might say Chesterton or Newman. Churchill would rank high I think …. and I say that as one who has mixed opinions about Churchill. (It just hit me…. is either Dickens/Tolkien or Tolkien/Dickens. No drama about number 1.)

My response:

The correct word is English unless we want to include the Scots, Welsh or Irish. Shakespeare is obviously number one. No drama about that, as you say! Eliot is indeed American, though Eliot might not have liked to hear you say it! The great Thomist, Jacques Maritain, said that the reason that Eliot never became a Catholic was because he exhausted all his powers of conversion when he became an Englishman!

You might also be interested to learn that Belloc in his irritable old age dismissed Churchill “as a yank”! I think, however, that this is going a little too far!

But back to your question …

The greatest English writers of fiction and/or poetry, me judice, are Chaucer, Austen, Dickens, Hopkins, and Tolkien. I’m not comfortable about placing them in any particular order but, in the spirit of the game, I’ll list the top five English poets and novelists as follows:

1. Shakespeare

2. Tolkien

3. Dickens

4. Austen

5. Chaucer

6. Hopkins

 

As for non-fiction writers:

1. Churchill (half-American)

2. Newman

3. Lingard

4. Chesterton

5. Belloc (half-French)

6. Bede