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
Drag items up and down to your preferred order then select the "Save Order" button.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Paper Book
When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister...
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Paper Book
Orphaned Jane Eyre grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, where she endures loneliness and cruelty, and at a charity school with a harsh regime. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane's natural independence and spirit - which prove necessary when she finds a position as governess at...
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Paper Book
The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta At once retrospective and radically new, The Scarlet Letter portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time period...
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
Paper Book
"There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road-there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven-stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments." Thus young Walter Hartright first meets the mysterious woman in...
Frankenstein (Norton Critical Editions)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Paper Book
Almost two centuries after its publication, Frankenstein remains an indisputably classic text and Mary Shelley's finest work. This extensively revised Norton Critical Edition includes new texts and illustrative materials that convey the enduring global conversation about...
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
Paper Book
This is the novel Dickens regarded as his 'favourite child' and is considered his most autobiographical. As David recounts his experience from childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist, Dickens draws openly and revealingly on his own life. Among the gloriously vivid cast of...
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Paper Book
Candide
Voltaire
Paper Book
"All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds"   It was the indifferent shrug and callous inertia that this "optimism" concealed which so angered Voltaire, who found the "all for the best" approach a patently inadequate response to suffering, to natural disasters,...
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
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...
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...
Don Quixote: Abridged Edition
Miguel de Cervantes
Audiobook
Este texto, cima de la literatura en lengua castellana, se divide en dos partes que relatan las aventuras de un loco - cuerdo que trata de hacer revivir las mágicas historias de los libros de caballerías. En la primera parte don Alonso Quijano es un humilde hacendado que invierte todo su capital en...
Silas Marner
George Eliot
Paper Book
In this heartwarming classic, a gentle linen weaver named Silas Marner is wrongly accused of theft actually committed by his best friend. Silas exiles himself to a rustic village, where he finds spiritual rebirth through his unselfish love of an abandoned child. Includes a new Afterword. Revised...
The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas
Paper Book
&&LDIV&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LI&&RThe Three Musketeers&&L/I&&R, by &&LB&&RAlexandre Dumas&&L/B&&R, is part of the &&LI&&R&&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics&&L/I&&R &&L/I&&Rseries, which offers quality editions...
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding
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 Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper
Paper Book
Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev
Paper Book
With an introduction by Rosamund Bartlett and an afterword by Tatiana Tolstaya Turgenev's depiction of the conflict between generations and their ideals stunned readers when Fathers and Sons was first published in 1862. But many could also sympathize with Arkady...
Barchester Towers
Anthony Trollope
Paper Book
Barchester Towers (1857) by Anthony Trollope is one of the charming series of loosely connected novels set in Barsetshire. This is the second book to appear in the series, but may be read as a standalone work, and enjoyed on its own merits. The residents and clergy of Barchester are faced with...
Caleb Williams
William Godwin
Paper Book
In William Godwin's dark psychological novel of paranoia and persecution, the eponymous hero is a guileless young servant who enters the employment of Ferdinando Falkland, a cosmopolitan and benevolent country gentleman. Falkland is subject to fits of unexplained melancholy, and Caleb becomes...
The Absentee
Maria Edgeworth
Paper Book
Lord and Lady Clonbrony are more concerned with fashionable London society than with their responsibilities to those who live and work on their Irish estates. Concerned by this negligence, their son Lord Colambre goes incognito to Ireland to observe the situation and to discover the truth about the...

Library staff! You can create and contribute to lists. Contact your catalog administrator or log in here.