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 1775-1817
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, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. When Elizabeth Bennet first meets...
Jane Eyre
Brontë, Charlotte 1816-1855
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...
The scarlet letter
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1804-1864
Paper Book
The woman in white
Collins, Wilkie 1824-1889
CD
Frankenstein : the 1818 text, contexts, nineteenth-century responses, modern criticism
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft 1797-1851
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
Dickens, Charles 1812-1870
Paper Book
This is the novel Dickens regarded as his 'favourite child' and is considered his most autobiographical. As David recounts his experience from childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist, Dickens draws openly and revealingly on his own life. Among the gloriously vivid cast of...
Uncle Tom's cabin
Stowe, Harriet Beecher 1811-1896
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 for its...
Candide, or, Optimism
Voltaire 1694-1778
Paper Book
"All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds"   It was the indifferent shrug and callous inertia that this "optimism" concealed which so angered Voltaire, who found the "all for the best" approach a patently inadequate response to suffering, to natural disasters,...
Les misérables
Hugo, Victor 1802-1885
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,...
Vanity fair
Thackeray, William Makepeace 1811-1863
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
Eliot, George 1819-1880
Paper Book
In this heartwarming classic, a gentle linen weaver named Silas Marner is wrongly accused of theft actually committed by his best friend. Silas exiles himself to a rustic village, where he finds spiritual rebirth through his unselfish love of an abandoned child. Includes a new Afterword. Revised...
The three musketeers
Dumas, Alexandre 1802-1870
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...
The last of the Mohicans : a narrative of 1757
Cooper, James Fenimore 1789-1851
Paper Book
The wild rush of action in this classic frontier adventure story has made The Last of the Mohicans the most popular of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. Deep in the forests of upper New York State, the brave woodsman Hawkeye (Natty Bumppo) and his loyal Mohican friends Chingachgook and...
The master of Ballantrae : a winter's tale
Stevenson, Robert Louis 1850-1894
Paper Book

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