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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Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Paper Book
Introduction by Anna Quindlen * Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." So begins Pride and...
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Paper Book
Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates .Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS'sThe Great American Read Initially published under the pseudonym Currer Bell in 1847, Charlotte Bronte'sJane Eyreerupted onto the English literary scene, immediately winning...
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Paper Book
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
Audiobook
Wilkie Collins is a master of suspense, but his transfer to audiobook requires a cast of readers to faithfully reflect the eleven different characters who tell the story. Walter Hartright, a drawing teacher to two sisters, wants to marry Laura, though she is betrothed to another. But who is the...
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
Paper Book
When David Copperfield escapes from the cruelty of his childhood home, he embarks on a journey to adulthood which will lead him through comedy and tragedy, love and heartbreak and friendship and betrayal. Over the course of his adventure, David meets an array of eccentric characters and learns...
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Paper Book
  Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and...
Candide
Voltaire
Paper Book
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Paper Book
It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers is Les Misérables (1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a...
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Paper Book
A panoramic satire of English society during the Napoleonic Wars, Vanity Fair is William Makepeace Thackeray's masterpiece. At its center is one of the most unforgettable characters in nineteenth-century literature: the enthralling Becky Sharp, a charmingly ruthless social climber who is...
Silas Marner
George Eliot
Paper Book
"There's nothing kills a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself..."George Eliot's Silas Marner is a 19th-century tale of injustice, betrayal, love and faith. It tells the story of a simple and hard-working weaver who is falsely accused of theft, stigmatized by the local...
The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas
Paper Book
Alexandre Dumas's most famous tale-- and possibly the most famous historical novel of all time-- in a handsome hardcover volume. This swashbuckling epic of chivalry, honor, and derring-do, set in France during the 1620s, is richly populated with romantic heroes, unattainable heroines,...
The Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper
Audiobook
The Last of the Mohicans is a classic portrait of a man of moral courage who severs all connections with a society whose values he can no longer accept. Despite his chosen exile, the frontier scout Natty Bumppo, known as "Hawkeye," risks his life to escort two sisters through hostile Indian country....
The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole
Ebook
The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear. The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity;...
The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Radcliffe
Ebook
Barchester Towers
Anthony Trollope
Paper Book
Barchester Towers, Trollope's most popular novel, is the second of the six Chronicles of Barsetshire. The Chronicles follow the intrigues of ambition and love in the cathedral town of Barchester. In this novel Trollope continues the story, begun in The Warden, of Mr. Harding and his daughter Eleanor...
The Betrothed
Alessandro Manzoni
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
Frances Burney
Ebook
Ruth
Elizabeth Gaskell
Ebook
Tom Brown's School Days
Thomas Hughes
DVD
Stephen Fry, Jemma Redgrave, Joseph Beattie, and Alex Pettyfer star in director Dave Moore's adaptation of Thomas Hughes' timeless coming of age tale. The time is the mid-1800s, and Tom Brown is a timid student at Rugby Public School. Confronted with relentless bullying, the homesick schoolboy makes...
Westward Ho!
Charles Kingsley
Audiobook
From the coral reefs of the Barbados to the jungles and fabled cities of the Orinoco and on to the great sea battle with the Spanish Armada, this vibrant novel captures the daring spirit of the Elizabethan adventurers who sailed with Sir Francis Drake. Full of the drama of that age of exploration,...
Salammbô
Gustave Flaubert
Ebook
With his masterwork Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert blazed new trails in literary realism with a gripping tale of a disenchanted wife entangled in an extramarital affair. After that, Flaubert took a completely different tack and dove into the extensive historical research that would form the basis...
Headlong Hall
Thomas Love Peacock
Ebook
Mr Midshipman Easy
Frederick Marryat
Ebook

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