Your favourite English-language novelists

The votes are counted - and quite a job it was too. There were 143 entries. A very few of you didn't use all of your 10 votes, but most people did; and a small number of votes were cast for novelists who write or wrote in languages other than English and are therefore not eligible for this poll. But, even with the subtractions, we're talking about 1400 plus votes. These were widely spread - across 416 writers. There were times during the count, indeed, when I began to wonder if I'm the only person in the world who isn't a novelist.

In any case, here are the results. I have grouped them into rough divisions, according to numbers of points scored. These writers are the top 40, though because of a tie at the bottom it comes out as a top 39. They all scored more than 10 points. The scoring system was explained in this post. I give the number of points obtained by each writer in brackets after her or his place number:

01 (151) - Jane Austen
02 (113) - Charles Dickens

03 (64) - Philip Roth
04 (61) - George Eliot
05 (54) - Evelyn Waugh
06 (48) - Ian McEwan

07 (38) - Graham Greene
08 (37) - P.G. Wodehouse
09 (35) - Vladimir Nabokov
10 (32) - Charlotte Bronte
11 (31) - Thomas Hardy
11 (31) - George Orwell

13 (26) - F. Scott Fitzgerald
13 (26) - Cormac McCarthy
15 (25) - J.R.R. Tolkien
16 (24) - Joseph Conrad
17 (23) - Martin Amis
17 (23) - J.M. Coetzee
19 (21) - William Faulkner
20 (20) - Mark Twain

21 (19) - Saul Bellow
22 (18) - Raymond Chandler
22 (18) - James Joyce
22 (18) - Virginia Woolf
25 (16) - Margaret Atwood
25 (16) - Ernest Hemingway
25 (16) - Iris Murdoch
25 (16) - John Steinbeck
29 (15) - Patrick O'Brian
29 (15) - Anthony Trollope
31 (14) - Anne Tyler
32 (13) - Kingsley Amis
32 (13) - Emily Bronte
32 (13) - Kazuo Ishiguro
32 (13) - Edith Wharton
36 (12) - Robertson Davies
36 (12) - Philip K. Dick
36 (12) - Anthony Powell
39 (11) - E.M. Forster
39 (11) - Henry James

Near misses (number of points in brackets):

Iain M. Banks (10); John Banville (9); Samuel Beckett (9); Anthony Burgess (10); Richard Ford (9); George MacDonald Fraser (9); Joseph Heller (9); John Irving (10); John Le Carré (10); Elmore Leonard (8); Doris Lessing (8); Herman Melville (10); Rohinton Mistry (9); Brian Moore (8); Philip Pullman (8); Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine (9); Mordecai Richler (8); Dorothy L. Sayers (10); Muriel Spark (9); Robert Louis Stevenson (10); Kurt Vonnegut (8).

To satisfy one normblog reader's curiosity: those writers scoring just one point numbered 205! They include Frank Herbert and Ford Madox Ford, Neville Shute, Jean Rhys and C.P. Snow.

Thanks again to everyone who sent in an entry.