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
Jane Austen's timeless masterpiece, now in a beautiful new hardcover edition 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...
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Paper Book
Penguin Readers is an ELT graded reader series for learners of English as a foreign language. With carefully adapted text, new illustrations and language learning exercises, the print edition also includes instructions to access supporting material online. Titles...
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Paper Book
In seventeenth-century Boston, Hester Prynne shoulders the scorn of her fellow Puritan townsfolk for bearing a child out of wedlock. For her refusal to name the father of her daughter Pearl, Hester is made to wear a scarlet "A" stitched conspicuously upon her dress. But though she bears the stigma...
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
Paper Book
'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop .. There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth .. stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white' The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie...
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
Audiobook
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Ebook
Selling more than 300,000 copies the first year it was published, Stowe's powerful abolitionist novel fueled the fire of the human rights debate in 1852. Denouncing the institution of slavery in dramatic terms, the incendiary novel quickly draws the reader into the world of slaves and their...
Candide
Voltaire
Paper Book
Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man, whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own way in the world. And so...
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Paper Book
Les Mis#65533;rables is a French historical novel by Victor Hugo.
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Paper Book
The classic novel of 'villainy, crime, merriment, lovemaking, jilting, laughing, cheating, fighting and dancing', soon to be a major new ITV series from the producers of Poldark, Victoria and And Then There Were None. William Makepeace Thackeray's witty...
The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas
Paper Book
"All for one, one for all!"--Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers The Three Musketeers, by French writer Alexandre Dumas, was first released in serial form in 1844, a year before Dumas' publication of The Count of Monte Cristo. The story was an instant...
Old Goriot
Honoré de Balzac
Paper Book
This fine example of the French realist novel contrasts the social progress of an impoverished but ambitious aristocrat with the tale of a father, whose obsessive love for his daughters leads to his personal and financial ruin. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's...
Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev
Paper Book
Turgenev's timeless tale of generational collision, in a sparkling new translation When Arkady Petrovich returns home from college, his father finds his eager, na ve son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend...
The Betrothed
Alessandro Manzoni
Ebook
Marriage
Susan Ferrier
Paper Book
Susan Ferrier sold more copies of her novels than her contemporary, Jane Austen. Sir Walter Scott declared her his equal. Why, then has she been lost to history? On the 200th anniversary of this sharply observed, comic novel, it is time to rediscover her brilliance. 'Edinburgh 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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