1898 C.K. Shorter List of Best 100 Novels

In 1898, an editor named Clement K. Shorter made a list of the 100 best novels (with a limit of one book per author).
Updated September 19, 2022
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Jane Eyre
Brontë, Charlotte
Paper Book
Jane Eyre, a penniless orphan, is engaged as governess at Thornfield Hall by the mysterious Mr Rochester. Her integrity and independence are tested to the limit as their love for each other grows, and the secrets of Mr Rochester's past are revealed. Charlotte Brontë's novel about the...
Pride and prejudice
Austen, Jane
Paper Book
A beautiful, display-worthy collector's hardcover of one of the most beloved novels ever written, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. No novel in English has given more pleasure than Pride and Prejudice. Because it is one of the great works in our literature, critics...
The scarlet letter : a romance
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Paper Book
Set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1642 to 1649, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter with a man to whom she is not married and then struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. As punishment, she must wear a scarlet letter 'A'...
The woman in white
Collins, Wilkie
Paper Book
'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop .. There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth .. stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white' The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie...
David Copperfield
Dickens, Charles
Paper Book
In this novel, Dickens describes one boy growing up in a world which is by turns magical, fearful and grimly realistic. In a book which is part autobiographical, the novelist transmutes his life-experience into a series of comic and sentimental adventures.
Uncle Tom's cabin : or, Life among the lowly
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Paper Book
The novel that changed the course of American history Published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel was a powerful indictment of slavery in America. Describing the many trials and eventual escape to freedom of the long-suffering, good-hearted slave Uncle Tom, it aimed to show...
Les misérables
Hugo, Victor
Paper Book
NOW A SIX-PART MINISERIES ON MASTERPIECE ON PBS The only completely unabridged paperback edition of Victor Hugo's masterpiece--a sweeping tale of love, loss, valor, and passion. Introducing one of the most famous characters in literature, Jean Valjean--the noble...
Candide
Voltaire
Ebook
Caustic and hilarious, Candide has ranked as one of the world's great satires since its first publication in 1759. It concerns the adventures of the youthful Candide, disciple of Dr. Pangloss.In the course of his travels in Europe and South America, Candide sees and suffers such misfortune that it...
Vanity fair : a novel without a hero
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Paper Book
No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their...
Silas Marner : the weaver of Raveloe
Eliot, George
Paper Book
When the weaver Silas Marner is wrongly accused of crime and expelled from his community, he becomes a miser and vows to turn his back on the world. But an etraordinary sequence of events, including the appearance of a tiny child in his cottage, melts Silas's heart and transforms his life. George...
The history of Tom Jones, a foundling
Fielding, Henry
Paper Book
A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighbouring squire - though he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. But when his amorous...
The three musketeers
Dumas, Alexandre
Paper Book
First published in 1844, Alexandre Dumas' adventure The Three Musketeers is one of the most popular novels ever written. Now this rollicking and witty story is available in a new translation by Richard Pevear, award-winning translator of Anna Karenina.
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS
Cooper, James Fenimore
Paper Book
The castle of Otranto
Walpole, Horace
Paper Book
Purporting to be based on a (fictitious) sixteenth-century manuscript containing a mediaeval story about spooky goings - on in an Italian castle, this story opens with the death of the heir of the castle of Otrantro, on both his wedding-day and his birthday, crushed by an immense helmet.
Old Goriot
Balzac, Honoré de
Paper Book
Eugene wants to get on in the world. So he has come to Paris, where the streets teem with chancers, criminals and social climbers - and everyone is out for what they can get. When he finds a place to stay at a shabby boarding house, he sees a potential plan to make a fortune- the two beautiful,...
Fathers and sons
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich
Paper Book
Turgenev's timeless tale of generational collision, in a sparkling new translation When Arkady Petrovich returns home from college, his father finds his eager, na ve son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend...
Barchester Towers
Trollope, Anthony
Paper Book
Anthony Trollope was well aware that the seemingly parochial power struggles that determine the action of Barchester Towers - struggles whose comic possibilities he exploits to hilarious effect - actually went to the heart of mid-Victorian English society, and had, in other times and other...
The vicar of Wakefield
Goldsmith, Oliver
Paper Book
'He loved all mankind; for fortune prevented him from knowing there were rascals.'Oliver Goldsmith's hugely successful novel of 1766 remained for generations one of the most highly regarded and beloved works of eighteenth-century fiction. It depicts the fall and rise of the Primrose family, presided...
The betrothed : a seventeenth-century Milanese story discovered and rewritten
Manzoni, Alessandro
Paper Book
"The first English translation in more than fifty years of Alessandro Manzoni's masterpiece, a work of foundational Italian literature on par with the Divine Comedy and the Decameron."--The Wall Street Journal "An exemplary historical novel" (The New Yorker) from...
Evelina ; or, The history of a young lady's entrance into the world
Burney, Fanny
Digital file
TOM BROWN'S SCHOOLDAYS
Hughes, Thomas.
Paper Book
Ruth
Gaskell, Elizabeth
Paper Book
Ruth Hilton is an orphaned young seamstress who catches the eye of a gentleman, Henry Bellingham, who is captivated by her simplicity and beauty. When she loses her job and home, he offers her comfort and shelter, only to cruelly desert her soon after. Nearly dead with grief and shame, Ruth is...
Uncle Silas : a tale of Bartram-Haugh
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan
Paper Book
One of the most significant and intriguing Gothic novels of the Victorian period and is enjoyed today as a modern psychological thriller. In UNCLE SILAS (1864) Le Fanu brought up to date Mrs Radcliffe's earlier tales of virtue imprisoned and menacedby unscrupulous schemers. The narrator, Maud Ruthyn...
Salammbô
Flaubert, Gustave
Paper Book
Vathek, or, The history of Caliph Vathek
Beckford, William
Ebook
Vathek was written during a time when part of European culture was influenced by Orientalism. It is an Arabian tale because of the oriental setting and characters and the depiction of oriental cultures, societies, and myth. Vathek is also a Gothic novel with its emphasis on the supernatural, ghosts,...
Wilhelm Meister's apprenticeship
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Paper Book
An authoritative English translation of one of the most important works in the history of the novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-1796), Goethe's second novel, is a foundational work in the history of the genre--perhaps the first Bildungsroman, a coming...
News from nowhere; or, An epoch of rest: being some chapters from a utopian romance
Morris, William
Paper Book
The holy war
Bunyan, John
Paper Book
  A Masterful Spiritual Classic   Once upon a time, the residents of the town of Mansoul were tricked into defying their ruler, Shaddai. Their new ruler, Diabolus, brought them great harm. When Shaddai sends Prince Emmanuel, his son, to rescue them, a...
The wild Irish girl
Morgan, Lady
Paper Book

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