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
Austen, Jane
Paper Book
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS'sThe 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 beginsPride and Prejudice,Jane Austen's witty comedy of manners...
Jane Eyre
Bronte, Charlotte
Paper Book
The scarlet letter : a romance
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Paper Book
Hester Prynne is a beautiful young woman. She is also an outcast. In the eyes of her neighbours she has committed an unforgivable sin. Everyone knows that her little daughter Pearl is the product of an illicit affair but no one knows the identity of Pearl's father. Hester's refusal to name him...
The woman in white
Collins, Wilkie
Paper Book
Wordsworth Classics covers a huge list of beloved works of literature in English and translations. This growing series is rigorously updated, with scholarly introductions and notes added to new titles.
David Copperfield
Dickens, Charles
CD
This much loved novel was Dicken's own favourite. It is easy to see why. Music: various.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
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 for its...
Les misérables
Hugo, Victor
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...
Silas Marner
Eliot, George
Paper Book
Embittered by a false accusation, disappointed in friendship and love, the weaver Silas Marner retreats into a long twilight life alone with his loom. . . and his gold. Silas hoards a treasure that kills his spirit until fate steals it from him and replaces it with a golden-haired founding child....
The three musketeers
Dumas, Alexandre
Paper Book
Perhaps the greatest “cloak and sword” story ever written, The Three Musketeers, first published ion 1844, is a tale for all time. Pitting the heroic young d’Artagnan and his noble compatriots, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis against the master of intrigue, Cardinal Richelieu,...
The last of the Mohicans
Mann, Michael
DVD
Barchester Towers
Trollope, Anthony
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...
Evelina, or, A young lady's entrance into the world : in a series of letters
Burney, Fanny
Paper Book
The reputation of Frances Burney (1752-1840) was largely established with her first novel, Evelina. Published anonymously in 1778, it is an epistolary account of a sheltered young woman's entrance into society and her experience of family. Its comedy ranges from the violent practical joking...
The master of Ballantrae a winter's tale
Stevenson, Robert Louis
CD
Stevenson's tragic masterpiece unfolds against a hauntingly beautiful Scottish landscape, where the 1745 Jacobite rising is dividing the country against itself. Amidst this outer conflict, one family finds itself devastatingly divided from within, as two brothers discover their opposing loyalties...

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