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
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...
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
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift
Paper Book
Regarded as the preeminent prose satirist in the English language, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) intended this masterpiece, as he once wrote Alexander Pope, to "vex the world rather than divert it." Savagely ironic, it portrays man as foolish at best, and at worst, not much more than an...
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
Paper Book
The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice,...
Frankenstein (Norton Critical Editions)
Mary Shelley
Paper Book
Contemporary perspectives of the text are provided in two sections: Contexts helps place the novel in relation to the mind of its creator through writings by Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John William Polidori; Nineteenth-Century Responses collects six reactions to the book...
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
Paper Book
When David Copperfield escapes from the cruelty of his childhood home, he embarks on a journey to adulthood which will lead him through comedy and tragedy, love and heartbreak and friendship and betrayal. Over the course of his adventure, David meets an array of eccentric characters and learns...
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...
Candide
Voltaire
Paper Book
With its vibrant new translation, perceptive introduction, and witty packaging, this new edition of Voltaire's masterpiece belongs in the hands of every reader pondering our assumptions about human behavior and our place in the world. Candide tells of the hilarious adventures of the naive Candide,...
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Paper Book
Few novels ever swept across the world with such overpowering impact as Les Misérables. Within 24 hours, the first Paris edition was sold out. In other great cities of the world it was devoured with equal relish. Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and...
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
Paper Book
Since publication of the first edition, huge developments have taken place in sensory biology research and new insights have been provided in particular by molecular biology. These show the similarities in the molecular architecture and in the physiology of sensory cells across species and across...
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
"We read The Three Musketeers to experience a sense of romance and for the sheer excitement of the story," reflected Clifton Fadiman. "In these violent pages all is action, intrigue, suspense, surprise--an almost endless chain of duels, murders, love affairs, unmaskings, ambushes, hairbreadth...
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding
Paper Book
One of the first and most influential of English novels--originally published in 1749--is blessed with a lively and endearing hero at the center of one of the most ingeniously constructed comic plots in fiction. * Inspiration for the PBS MASTERPIECE series Tom Jones starring...
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
In a faraway medieval realm, Manfred, an arrogant and evil prince, rules with an iron fist. Banishing his wife to the castle dungeon, he confines -- and plans to wed -- the lovely Isabella, fiancée of his recently deceased son. The prince's plans are foiled, however, when a well-meaning...
The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Radcliffe
Paper Book
Trapped in a gloomy medieval fortress, an orphaned heroine battles the devious schemes of her guardians as well as her own pensive visions and melancholy fancies. Generations of readers have thrilled to this famous Gothic tale from 1794 and its hypnotic pre-Freudian exploration of the psyche.
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
Paper Book
Turgenev's masterpiece about the conflict between generations is as fresh, outspoken, and exciting today as it was in when it was first published in 1862. The controversial portrait of Bazarov, the energetic, cynical, and self-assured `nihilist' who repudiates the romanticism of his elders, shook...
The Vicar of Wakefield
Oliver Goldsmith
Paper Book
Rich with wisdom and gentle irony, Oliver Goldsmith's only novel is a charming comedy that tells of an unworldly and generous vicar who lives contentedly with his large family until disaster strikes. When his idyllic life is brutally interrupted by bankruptcy and his daughter's abduction, he lands...
Barchester Towers
Anthony Trollope
Paper Book
After the death of old Dr Grantly, a bitter struggle begins over who will succeed him as Bishop of Barchester. And when the decision is finally made to appoint the evangelical Dr Proudie, rather than the son of the old bishop, Archdeacon Grantly, resentment and suspicion threaten to cause deep...
The Betrothed
Alessandro Manzoni
Paper Book
Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, prevented from marrying by the petty tyrant Don Rodrigo, who desires Lucia for himself. Forced to flee, they are then cruelly separated, and must face many dangers...
Evelina
Frances Burney
Ebook
Good-looking, kind-hearted Evelina Anville has grown up in rural obscurity as the ward of a country parson. At the age of seventeen, she begins her progress from provincial life to fashionable London ― a transition that's complicated by vulgar relatives and her own naiveté. Evelina's shrewd...
Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady
Samuel Richardson
Paper Book
Pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests, the young Clarissa Harlowe is tricked into fleeing with the witty and debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague promises of...
Ruth
Elizabeth Gaskell
Ebook
A tragic affair blooms between a working-class orphan and a wealthy rake in this classic novel of Victorian England. Although Ruth Hilton is kind, life does not treat her kindly in return. An orphaned young seamstress, she works long hours at a sweatshop in a small English...
Tom Brown's School Days
Thomas Hughes
Ebook
The Master of Ballantrae
Robert Louis Stevenson
Paper Book
Westward Ho!
Charles Kingsley
Ebook
Enormously popular when published, Westward Ho! is the saga of Elizabethan sailors from the Devonshire coast who sail off into the unknown to found an empire for their queen. Moving at...
Kenilworth
Sir Walter Scott
Paper Book
In the court of Elizabeth I, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, is favoured above all the noblemen of England. It is rumoured that the Queen may chose him for her husband, but Leicester has secretly married the beautiful Amy Robsart. Fearing ruin if this were known, he keeps his lovely young wife a...
Vathek
William Beckford
Paper Book
A chilling addition to the Haunted Library of Horror Classics. When you have all you could ever want-power, wealth, influence, status-what's left to wish for? First published in 1786, William Beckford's classic tale combines the lush setting of The Arabian Nights with a...
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Ebook
Wilhelm goes through deep self-realisation and decides to escape his empty life of a bourgeois businessman. After a failed romance with the theatre, Wilhelm commits himself to the mysterious Tower Society. A coming-of-age tale, a story of education and disillusionment, a novel of ideas ranging...
Caleb Williams
William Godwin
Paper Book
Deals with the misdeeds of Tyrrel, a tyrannical country squire, who comes into conflict with Falkland, a neighbouring squire of a seemingly more benevolent disposition. When Tyrrel knocks Falkland down in public and Tyrrel is later found murdered, suspicion falls on Falkland.
News from Nowhere; or, An Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance
William Morris
Ebook
William Morris' classic novel News from Nowhere has been enjoyed by readers around the world for 120 years.A soft science-fiction, this is an exploration of socialist ideas, following the story of William Guest, a man who falls asleep after a Socialist League meeting to find himself waking up in a...
The holy war, made by Shaddai upon Diabolus, for the regaining of the metropolis of the world; or, The losing and taking again of the town of Mansoul
John Bunyan
Ebook
The Holy War Made by King Shaddai Upon Diabolus, to Regain the Metropolis of the World, Or, The Losing and Taking Again of the Town of Mansoul is a 1682 novel by John Bunyan. This novel, written in the form of an allegory, tells the story of the town "Mansoul" (Man's soul). Though this town is...
The Wild Irish Girl
Lady Morgan
Paper Book
`I long to study the purely national, natural character of an Irishwoman' When Horatio, the son of an English lord, is banished to his father's Irish estate as punishment for gambling debts and dissipated living, he adopts the persona of knight errant and goes off in search of adventure. On the wild...
The Scottish Chiefs
Jane Porter
Paper Book
For nearly a century, Scribner has exemplified the very best in publishing by pairing classic texts with the illustrative giants of the time, such as N. C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish. With the same commitment to the high standards established by the series' founders, Atheneum Books for Young Readers...
Mr Midshipman Easy
Frederick Marryat
Paper Book
A timelesss tale of a midshipman's rise in Nelson's navy. Widely regarded as Marryat's best work,Mr. Midshipman Easy is based on the author's adventures sailing with Lord Thomas Cochrane. This classic seafaring tale is a fascinating account of naval life and warfare,...

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