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
Discover Jane Austen's most beloved classic. When Elizabeth Bennet meets Mr Darcy, she is repelled by his overbearing pride and prejudice towards her family. But the Bennet girls are in need of financial security in the shape of husbands, so when Darcy's...
Jane Eyre
Brontë, Charlotte
Paper Book
Following the death of her uncle, the orphan Jane Eyre is sent to the Lowood School, where she grows into a confident and well-educated young woman. When Jane leaves Lowood to become a governess at Thornfield Hall, she falls in love with Mr. Rochester, her pupil's guardian. But a series of eerie...
The scarlet letter
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Paper Book
A classic tale of revenge and redemption, in a beautiful pocket hardback edition.The Scarlet Letter is the story of three New England settlers at odds with the Puritan society in which they live. Roger Chillingworth, an ageing scholar, arrives in New England after two years' separation from...
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
Dickens, Charles
Paper Book
Dickens's tale of David Copperfield follows him from birth through to his successful career as a novelistIn one of his most energetic and enjoyable novels, Dickens tells the life story of David Copperfield, from his birth in Suffolk, through the various struggles of his childhood, to his successful...
Uncle Tom's cabin
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Paper Book
Harriet Beecher Stowe's seminal anti-slavery novel with an afterword by Pat Righelato.When a Kentucky farmer falls on hard times he is forced to sell his slaves, and among them is Uncle Tom, who's bought by a brutal plantation owner. The novel describes the horror of plantation labour and Tom...
Candide
Voltaire
Paper Book
A flamboyant and controversial personality of enormous wit and intelligence, Voltaire remains one of the most influential figures of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.Candide,his masterpiece, is a brilliant satire of the theory that our world is “the best of all possible worlds.” The...
Les Miserables
Hugo, Victor
Digital file
Jean Valjean is one of society's victims. A poor but honest peasant, he is caught stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving family and is sent to prison. By the time of his eventual release, he has become a hardened criminal, but his friendship with the saintly Monseigneur Bienvenu...
Vanity Fair : a novel without a hero
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Paper Book
No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their...
Silas Marner : the weaver of Raveloe
Eliot, George
Paper Book
The perfect companion to The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, both published in Alma Classics' Evergreens series, Silas Marner portrays a changing society with realism. Having been accused of theft and hounded out of a religious community many years...
The three musketeers
Dumas, Alexandre.
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 History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Fielding, Henry
Digital file
The 'Voice of the Year' competition introduced and sponsored by Naxos AudioBooks and The Times books pages, edited by Erica Wagner, took place in Spring 2004. Readers without any formal drama training or professional acting experience were invited to send in recordings of a short extract of either...
The last of the Mohicans : a narrative of 1757
Cooper, James Fenimore
Paper Book
Introduction and Notes by David Blair. University of Kent at Canterbury. It is 1757. Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. Their conflict, however, overlays older struggles between nations of native Americans for...
The Castle of Otranto
Walpole, Horace
Digital file
Old Goriot
Honoré de Balzac
Paper Book
Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev
CD
One of the most controversial Russian novels ever written, Fathers and Sons dramatizes the volcanic social conflicts that divided Russia just before the revolution, pitting peasants against masters, traditionalists against intellectuals, and fathers against sons. It is also a timeless...
Barchester towers
Trollope, Anthony
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...
The betrothed : a seventeenth-century Milanese story discovered and rewritten
Manzoni, Alessandro
Paper Book
"Thefirst English translation in more than fifty years of Alessandro Manzoni's masterpiece,a work of foundational Italian literature on par with the Divine Comedy and the Decameron."-The Wall Street Journal "An exemplary historical novel" (The New Yorker) from...
Tom Brown's Schooldays
Hughes, Thomas
Digital file
The Master of Ballantrae : a winter's tale
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Digital file
News from nowhere, or, An epoch of rest : being some chapters from a utopian romance
Morris, William
Paper Book
'The only English utopia since More's that deserves to be remembered as literature.'News from Nowhere (1890) is the best-known prose work of William Morris. The novel describes the encounter between a visitor from the nineteenth century, William Guest, and a decentralized and humane socialist future...

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