Pride and Prejudice tops teachers' favourite 100 books

Pride and Prejudice was written 200 years ago, and
adapted numerous times for TV and film

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice has topped a list of teachers' favourite books, compiled by the Times Educational Supplement (TES).

An online survey asked 500 teachers to name their favourite titles.

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird was second and the Harry Potter series third - but the top 100 also includes picture books like The Gruffalo.

The list "is a masterpiece of erudition and entertainment", according to TES editor Gerard Kelly.

"It could be one of the few things that Michaels Gove and Rosen agree on", he writes in a leader column for the magazine, reflecting an ongoing disagreement between the secretary of state and the former children's laureate over the direction of English teaching in England's schools.

Mr Kelly points out that apart from a modern intrusion in the form of Harry Potter, the top 10 is dominated by the literary canon in the shape of the Brontes, Orwell and Tolkien.



TES Teachers' Top Reads


1. Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen
2. To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee
3. Harry Potter series: JK Rowling
4. Wuthering Heights: Emily Bronte
5. Jane Eyre: Charlotte Bronte
6. Nineteen Eighty-Four: George Orwell
7. The Lord of the Rings series: JRR Tolkien
8. The Book Thief: Markus Zusak
9. The Hobbit: JRR Tolkien
10. The Great Gatsby: F Scott Fitzgerald
11.. The Kite Runner: Khaled Hosseini
12. The Hunger Games series: Suzanne Collins
13. The Time Traveler's Wife: Audrey Niffenegger
14. The Chronicles of Narnia series CS Lewis
15. Of Mice and Men: John Steinbeck
16. Birdsong: Sebastian Faulks
17. His Dark Materials series: Philip Pullman
18. The Gruffalo: Julia Donaldson+ Axel Scheffler
19. The Catcher in the Rye: JD Salinger
20. Life of Pi: Yann Martel


- BBC.co.uk