Some of the English authors I have read and enjoyed. Many are in the public domain, so they’re free – the best things in life, and so forth. It’s not ‘literature’, mostly ‘popular’ fiction, but: rasavant (with ‘rasa’), so it’s time well spent.
P G Wodehouse (the greatest)
Charles Dickens
Thomas Hardy
Fanny Burney (Evelina is her best novel)
Rafael Sabatini
Stanley J Weyman (a lot like Raphael Sabatini –historical adventure page turners with the archetypical male hero)
P C Wren
J Meade Falkner (Moonfleet)
Erskine Childers
John Buchan
Frederick Marryat
A E W Mason (The Four Feathers, The Broken Road, Clementina and the Inspector Hanaud books)
Terry Pratchett
Jerome K Jerome
Stephen Leacock
G K Chesterton
Saki (H H Munro)
Rudyard Kipling
The Bronte sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne)
R L Stevenson
Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gentley)
Daphne Du Maurier (especially Rebecca and The Scapegoat)
C S Forester (Hornblower series)
Patrick O’Brian (Aubrey-Maturin series)
Bernard Cornwell (Sharpe series)
H R F Keating (Inspector Ghote)
Jane Austen
Lewis Carroll
James Herriott
Bill Bryson
Joseph Conrad
Daniel Defoe
Johann David Wyss (Swiss Family Robinson)
Conan Doyle
Henry Fielding
E Nesbit
Enid Blyton (even if you’re a senior citizen; maybe especially then)
Nevil Shute
Walter Scott
R K Narayan
Emile Zola
Jules Verne
O Henry
Victor Hugo
Graham Greene
Neil Gaiman (maybe)
Susanna Clarke
John Galsworthy
Anthony Trollope
William Faulkner
Louis L’amour
J T Edson
Max Brand
Oliver Strange and Frederick H Christian (The Sudden series – known as Picadilly westerns, which were Wild West books written by English authors, the print equivalent of Spaghetti westerns)
Sheridan Le Fanu
Wilkie Collins
Edgar Allan Poe
Oscar Wilde
Agatha Christie
Willa Cather (My Antonia, in particular)
C S Lewis
Georgette Heyer
Charles Reade
Somerset Maugham
J G Farrell (The Siege Of Krishnapur)
J G Ballard
Jonathan Swift (A Modest Proposal, Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of A Tub)
Roald Dahl
Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden)
Stephen Fry (the Hippopotamus, The Ode Less Travelled (non-fiction, a beautiful introduction and workbook to prosody), The Liar)
Tom Sharpe (Porterhouse Blues, The Throwback, Wilt series etc.)
Tom Holt (Doughnut, Snow White and the Seven Samurai etc.)
A A Gill (Sap Rising)
John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden)
Tom Wolfe (Bonfire of The Vanities)
Margaret Mitchell (Gone With The Wind)
John Irving (The World According to Garp, The Ciderhouse Rules)