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
Charlotte Brontë
Paper Book
With carefully adapted text, new illustrations, language practise activities and additional online resources, the Penguin Readers series introduces language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content. Titles include popular classics, exciting...
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...
Wuthering Heights (Norton Critical Editions)
Emily Brontë
Paper Book
The text used in this edition is a collation of both the 1847 and 1850 editions of the novel. This book also includes the 17 poems by Charlotte Bronte which Emily selected for the 1850 edition to introduce her sister to the public as a poet. Also included are selections from Emily's diary and some...
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Paper Book
The cornerstone of American literature and moral study. Set in a village in Puritan New England, Hester Prynne, a young woman who has borne an illegitimate child. Hester believes herself a widow, but her husband, returns to New England and conceals his identity and becomes obsessed with finding the...
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
Paper Book
The Woman in White is the first and greatest `Sensation Novel'. Walter Hartright's mysterious midnight encounter with the woman in white draws him into a vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, and international intrigue. This new critical edition is the first to use the manuscript of the novel. John...
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
Paper Book
Now a major film directed by Armando Iannucci, starring Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Peter Capaldi and Ben Whishaw Dickens's epic, exuberant novel is one of the greatest coming-of-age stories in literature. It chronicles David Copperfield's extraordinary journey through...
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...
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Paper Book
Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful and tactile cloth. This beautiful clothbound edition of Victor Hugo's tale of injustice,...
Candide
Voltaire
Paper Book
In this splendid new translation of Voltaire's satiric masterpiece, all the celebrated wit, irony, and trenchant social commentary of one of the great works of the Enlightenment is restored and refreshed. Voltaire may have cast a jaundiced eye on eighteenth-century Europe-a place that...
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
Gold! - his own gold - brought back to him as mysteriously as it had been taken away!Falsely accused of theft, Silas Marner is cut off from his community but finds refuge in the village of Raveloe, where he is eyed with distant suspicion. Like a spider from a fairy-tale, Silas fills fifteen...
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding
Paper Book
Fielding's comic masterpiece of 1749 was immediately attacked as `A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery'. Indeed, his populous novel overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes, hypocrites, scoundrels, virgins, and all too fallible...
The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas
Paper Book
A new and vibrant translation of Alexandre Dumas's renowned The Three Musketeers, following the adventures of the valiant d'Artagnan and his three loyal comrades. In March of 1844, the Parisian paper The Century began publishing installments of a new...
The Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper
Paper Book
The second of Cooper's five Leatherstocking Tales, this is the one which has consistently captured the imagination of generations since it was first published in 1826. It's success lies partly in the historical role Cooper gives to his Indian characters, against the grain of accumulated racial...
The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole
Paper Book
When Conrad, son of Prince Manfred of Otranto, is killed in mysterious circumstances on his wedding day, his father, fearing his line is at an end, declares that he will divorce his wife and marry his late son's intended bride. Soon, however, this planned union brings about a series of...
Old Goriot
Honoré de Balzac
Paper Book
Honoré de Balzac's great theme was money, and in his best-loved novel, Old Goriot, he explored its uses and abuses with the particularity of a poet. A shabby Parisian boarding house in 1819 is the setting where his colorful characters collide. These include an elderly retired merchant called...
Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev
CD
When Arkady Petrovich comes home from college, his father finds his eager, naïve son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend he has brought with him. A self-proclaimed nihilist, the ardent young Bazarov shocks Arkady...
Barchester Towers
Anthony Trollope
Paper Book
'Mr Slope flattered himself that he could out-manoeuvre the lady...he did not doubt of ultimate triumph.'Barchester Towers (1857) was the book that made Trollope's reputation and it remains his most popular and enjoyable novel. The arrival of a new bishop in Barchester, accompanied by his formidable...
Mr Midshipman Easy
Frederick Marryat
CD
At fourteen the unworldly, idealistic Jack Easy leaves the luxury of his father's estate in England and sails into a world of action and adventure aboard the sloop of war HMS Harpy. At first Jack finds it hard to stomach the discipline of naval life and, with his mischievous sense of humor, is...
Sybil, or The Two Nations
Benjamin Disraeli
Paper Book
Sybil, or The Two Nations is one of the finest novels to depict the social problems of class-ridden Victorian England. The book's publication in 1845 created a sensation, for its immediacy and readability brought the plight of the working classes sharply to the attention of the reading public. The...

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