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
'The masterwork of a great genius' William Makepeace Thackeray A novel of intense emotional power, heightened atmosphere and fierce intelligence, Jane Eyre dazzled and shocked readers with its passionate depiction of a woman's search for equality and freedom on her own...
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Paper Book
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' 'The best-loved book by our best-loved novelist' Independent With its 'light and bright and sparkling' dialogue, its romantic denouement and its lively heroine, Pride and Prejudice is Jane...
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
'The most popular novel of the nineteenth century, and still one of the best plots in English literature' Sarah Waters The original 'sensation novel', The Woman in White opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter with a strange, solitary woman on a moonlit London road....
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
Paper Book
"The most perfect of all the Dickens novels" --Virginia Woolf David Copperfield is the story of a young man's adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of...
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
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
Victor Hugo
Paper Book
Now a major musical film from Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper (The King's Speech), starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway, and also featuring Amanda Seyfreid, Helena Bonham-Carter and Sacha Baron-Cohen, Victor Hugo's Les Miserablesis one of the great works of western...
Candide
Voltaire
Paper Book
'The prince of philosophical novels' John Updike In Candide, Voltaire threw down an audacious challenge to the philosophical views of the Enlightenment to create one of the most glorious satires of the eighteenth century. His eponymous hero is an innocent young man whose tutor...
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Paper Book
William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair depicts the anarchic anti-heroine Beky Sharpe cutting a swathe through the eligible young men of Europe, set against a lucid backdrop of war and international chaos. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by John...
Silas Marner
George Eliot
Paper Book
When Silas Marner is wrongly accused of crime and expelled from his community, he vows to turn his back upon the world. He moves to the village of Raveloe, where he remains an outsider and an object of suspicion until an extraordinary sequence of events, including the theft of his gold and...
The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas
Paper Book
A major new translation of one of the most enduring works of literature, from the award- winning, bestselling co-translator of Anna Karenina-with a spectacular, specially illustrated cover The Three Musketeers is the most famous of Alexandre Dumas's historical...
The Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper
Paper Book
Cooper's most enduringly popular novel combines heroism and romance with powerful criticism of the destruction of nature and tradition. Set against the French and Indian siege of Fort William Henry in 1757,The Last of the Mohicansrecounts the story of two sisters, Cora and...
The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole
Paper Book
On the day of his wedding, Conrad, heir to the house of Otranto, is killed in mysterious circumstances. His calculating father Manfred fears that his dynasty will now come to an end and determines to marry his son's bride himself - despite the fact he is already married. But a series of terrifying...
Old Goriot
Honoré de Balzac
Ebook

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