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
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. Charlotte Brontë's first published...
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
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...
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Paper Book
"The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude!"--Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne takes readers back to the puritan days of the American colonies, into...
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...
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
Paper Book
Dickens' great coming-of-age novel, now in a beautiful new clothbound edition This is the novel Dickens regarded as his "favourite child" and is considered his most autobiographical. As David recounts his experiences from childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful...
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
Translated by Julie Rose Introduction by Adam Gopnik   In this major new rendition by the acclaimed translator Julie Rose, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables is revealed in its full, unabridged glory. A favorite of readers for nearly 150 years, this stirring tale of...
Candide
Voltaire
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,...
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
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 No one is better equipped in the struggle...
Silas Marner
George Eliot
Paper Book
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Henry Fielding
Ebook
The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas
Paper Book
Just arrived in Paris and looking for adventure, D'Artagnan finds more than he bargains for. Within hours he has offended three of the King's musketeers - and has to duel with all of them Within days he's in love...and embroiled with spies, politicians, English noblemen, and being seduced by the...
The Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper
Paper Book
The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the...
The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole
Audiobook
The Castle of Otranto is regarded as the first Gothic novel. The son of Manfred, Prince of Otranto, is mysteriously killed on his wedding day by a huge helmet. The event leads to a fast-paced story of jealous passion, intrigue, murder and supernatural phenomena unfolding in an atmosphere of...
Old Goriot
Honoré de Balzac
Ebook
The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Radcliffe
Ebook
Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev
Ebook
As Arkady Kirsanov returns home after graduation, his father waits patiently for him--excited to see his much-loved son once again. But in returning home to a world that has remained static, Arkady and his friend Bazarov, a self-defined nihilist, find themselves wholly changed, and must now...
Barchester Towers
Anthony Trollope
Audiobook
First, a warning: If you haven't read any Trollope, start with The Warden; it's the first in a series of which Barchester is second. Next, a rather shocking warning: Trollope may be as addictive as a soap opera. It has plenty of the right ingredients-archly drawn characters and plots that enmesh the...
The Vicar of Wakefield
Oliver Goldsmith
Audiobook
The story opens in the country parsonage of Dr. Primrose, a kindly man who has a good heart, a good family, and a good income. Suddenly, his idyllic life is cruelly devastated by a series of misfortunes, and he ends up in prison. Yet, despite all this calamity and injustice, the vicar never loses...
The Betrothed
Alessandro Manzoni
Ebook
Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World
Fanny 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...
The Master of Ballantrae
Robert Louis Stevenson
Audiobook
Ruth
Elizabeth Gaskell
Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh
Sheridan Le Fanu
Ebook
Silas Rutvyn is something of a riddle. To some, including his niece, he is something of a ghost. There are, however, no simple answers. As Le Fanu gradually unfolds the layers of this story, we are irresistibly drawn into his world. From the writer of such works as" Through a Glass Darkly, " and...
Salammbô
Gustave Flaubert
Ebook
Salem Chapel
Margaret Oliphant
Ebook
Excerpt: "Towards the west end of Grove Street, in Carlingford, on the shabby side of the street, stood a red brick building, presenting a pinched gable terminated by a curious little belfry, not intended for any bell, and looking not unlike a handle to lift up the edifice by to the public...
The Absentee
Maria Edgeworth
Ebook
Just before coming of age, Lord Colambre, the sensitive hero of the novel, finds that his mother Lady Clonbrony's attempts to buy her way into the high society of London are only ridiculed, while his father, Lord Clonbrony, is in serious debt as a result of his wife's lifestyle. Colambre falls in...
John Halifax, Gentleman
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
Ebook
A deluxe Harper Perennial Legacy Edition, with an introduction from Simon Van Booy, nationally best-selling author of Father's Day and The Illusion of Separateness A compelling historical novel of a young man's rise from poverty to wealth in a small provincial town during the Industrial...

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