Follow Business Insider: You've seen Google's annual lists of trendy search terms, featuring things like  robin williams, world cup, and ebola , but those show only the most unusually popular terms, not the most popular terms overall.
Murasaki Shikibu is the best known writer to emerge from Japan's glorious Heian period. Her novel, The Tale of Genji (Genji-monogatari) is considered to be one of the world's finest and earliest novels. Some argue that Murasaki is the world's first modern novelist.
Jane Austen. Context. In 1811, Sense and Sensibility became the first published novel of the English author Jane Austen (1775-1817). The first version of the novel was probably written in 1795 as an epistolary novel (novel in letters) entitled Elinor and Marianne..