Spectator competition winners: Charles Dickens pours scorn on Pride & Prejudice

In Competition No. 3323 you were invited to submit an extract from a book review written by a well-known author which trashes a work by another well-known author that is generally deemed to be a classic.

Virginia Woolf took a dim view of Ulysses. In a 1922 diary entry, she wrote: ‘I finished Ulysses and think it a misfire… The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious.’ Graham Greene was no fan either, judging it to be ‘a big bore… really one of the most overrated classics’. Then there is H.L. Mencken’s characteristically pithy verdict on The Great Gatsby: ‘A glorified anecdote.’ And, more recently, Geoff Dyer’s withering dismissal of Julian Barnes’s Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending: ‘It isn’t terrible, it is just so… average…’

In a smallish entry, an honourable mention goes to David Shields’s Wodehouse skewering Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘Now had he said “Great Aunt is watching you”, it would have been quite another matter.’