Book lists, despite what younger readers born into Buzzfeed’s ruthless listsicle monopoly may think, have always been popular. Some, like David Bowie’s Top 100 Books, give us a sense of the artist’s development. Others, like Joseph Brodsky’s List of 84 Books for Basic Conversation, provide a Nobel prize-winning benchmark for knowledge. Even though the books are within the reach of most readers, systematically digesting such lists often tries one’s patience. Despite the lack of will or interest in working through someone else’s literary education, however, glancing through such personal anthologies provides us with a glimpse into the maker’s life—be it their private tastes, or their social mores.
In late October, The Times Literary Supplement’s Michael Caines unearthed another Top 100 list; this one, however, has the distinction of hailing from 1898. At the turn of the 20th century, a journalist and author of numerous books on the Brontë sisters named Clement K. Shorter tried his hand at compiling the 100 Best Novels for a journal called The Bookman. The ground rules were simple: the list could feature only one novel per novelist, and living authors were excluded. Today, Shorter’s compendium looks somewhat hit-or-miss. There are some indisputable classics (many of which can be found in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections) and some other texts that have faded into oblivion. Still—one can’t help but experience a certain historical frisson at a 19th century listsicle. Here it goes:
1. Don Quixote — 1604 — Miguel de Cervantes
2. The Holy War — 1682 — John Bunyan
3. Gil Blas — 1715 — Alain René le Sage
4. Robinson Crusoe — 1719 — Daniel Defoe
5. Gulliver’s Travels — 1726 — Jonathan Swift
6. Roderick Random — 1748 — Tobias Smollett
7. Clarissa — 1749 — Samuel Richardson
8. Tom Jones — 1749 — Henry Fielding
9. Candide — 1756 — Françoise de Voltaire
10. Rasselas — 1759 — Samuel Johnson
11. The Castle of Otranto — 1764 — Horace Walpole
12. The Vicar of Wakefield — 1766 — Oliver Goldsmith
13. The Old English Baron — 1777 — Clara Reeve
14. Evelina — 1778 — Fanny Burney
15. Vathek — 1787 — William Beckford
16. The Mysteries of Udolpho — 1794 — Ann Radcliffe
17. Caleb Williams — 1794 — William Godwin
18. The Wild Irish Girl — 1806 — Lady Morgan
19. Corinne — 1810 — Madame de Stael
20. The Scottish Chiefs — 1810 — Jane Porter
21. The Absentee — 1812 — Maria Edgeworth
22. Pride and Prejudice — 1813 — Jane Austen
23. Headlong Hall — 1816 — Thomas Love Peacock
24. Frankenstein — 1818 — Mary Shelley
25. Marriage — 1818 — Susan Ferrier
26. The Ayrshire Legatees — 1820 — John Galt
27. Valerius — 1821 — John Gibson Lockhart
28. Wilhelm Meister — 1821 — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
29. Kenilworth — 1821 — Sir Walter Scott
30. Bracebridge Hall — 1822 — Washington Irving
31. The Epicurean — 1822 — Thomas Moore
32. The Adventures of Hajji Baba — 1824 — James Morier (“usually reckoned his best”)
33. The Betrothed — 1825 — Alessandro Manzoni
34. Lichtenstein — 1826 — Wilhelm Hauff
35. The Last of the Mohicans — 1826 — Fenimore Cooper
36. The Collegians — 1828 — Gerald Griffin
37. The Autobiography of Mansie Wauch — 1828 — David M. Moir
38. Richelieu — 1829 — G. P. R. James (the “first and best” novel by the “doyen of historical novelists”)
39. Tom Cringle’s Log — 1833 — Michael Scott
40. Mr. Midshipman Easy — 1834 — Frederick Marryat
41. Le Père Goriot — 1835 — Honoré de Balzac
42. Rory O’More — 1836 — Samuel Lover (another first novel, inspired by one of the author’s own ballads)
43. Jack Brag — 1837 — Theodore Hook
44. Fardorougha the Miser — 1839 — William Carleton (“a grim study of avarice and Catholic family life. Critics consider it the author’s finest achievement”)
45. Valentine Vox — 1840 — Henry Cockton (yet another first novel)
46. Old St. Paul’s — 1841 — Harrison Ainsworth
47. Ten Thousand a Year — 1841 — Samuel Warren (“immensely successful”)
48. Susan Hopley — 1841 — Catherine Crowe (“the story of a resourceful servant who solves a mysterious crime”)
49. Charles O’Malley — 1841 — Charles Lever
50. The Last of the Barons — 1843 — Bulwer Lytton
51. Consuelo — 1844 — George Sand
52. Amy Herbert — 1844 — Elizabeth Sewell
53. Adventures of Mr. Ledbury — 1844 — Elizabeth Sewell
54. Sybil — 1845 — Lord Beaconsfield (a. k. a. Benjamin Disraeli)
55. The Three Musketeers — 1845 — Alexandre Dumas
56. The Wandering Jew — 1845 — Eugène Sue
57. Emilia Wyndham — 1846 — Anne Marsh
58. The Romance of War — 1846 — James Grant (“the narrative of the 92nd Highlanders’ contribution from the Peninsular campaign to Waterloo”)
59. Vanity Fair — 1847 — W. M. Thackeray
60. Jane Eyre — 1847 — Charlotte Brontë
61. Wuthering Heights — 1847 — Emily Brontë
62. The Vale of Cedars — 1848 — Grace Aguilar
63. David Copperfield — 1849 — Charles Dickens
64. The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell — 1850 — Anne Manning (“written in a pastiche seventeenth-century style and printed with the old-fashioned typography and page layout for which there was a vogue at the period …”)
65. The Scarlet Letter — 1850 — Nathaniel Hawthorne
66. Frank Fairleigh — 1850 — Francis Smedley (“Smedley specialised in fiction that is hearty and active, with a strong line in boisterous college escapades and adventurous esquestrian exploits”)
67. Uncle Tom’s Cabin — 1851 — H. B. Stowe
68. The Wide Wide World — 1851 — Susan Warner (Elizabeth Wetherell)
69. Nathalie — 1851 — Julia Kavanagh
70. Ruth — 1853 — Elizabeth Gaskell
71. The Lamplighter — 1854 — Maria Susanna Cummins
72. Dr. Antonio — 1855 — Giovanni Ruffini
73. Westward Ho! — 1855 — Charles Kingsley
74. Debit and Credit (Soll und Haben) — 1855 — Gustav Freytag
75. Tom Brown’s School-Days — 1856 — Thomas Hughes
76. Barchester Towers — 1857 — Anthony Trollope
77. John Halifax, Gentleman — 1857 — Dinah Mulock (a. k. a. Dinah Craik; “the best-known Victorian fable of Smilesian self-improvement”)
78. Ekkehard — 1857 — Viktor von Scheffel
79. Elsie Venner — 1859 — O. W. Holmes
80. The Woman in White — 1860 — Wilkie Collins
81. The Cloister and the Hearth — 1861 — Charles Reade
82. Ravenshoe — 1861 — Henry Kingsley (“There is much confusion in the plot to do with changelings and frustrated inheritance” in this successful novel by Charles Kingsley’s younger brother, the “black sheep” of a “highly respectable” family)
83. Fathers and Sons — 1861 — Ivan Turgenieff
84. Silas Marner — 1861 — George Eliot
85. Les Misérables — 1862 — Victor Hugo
86. Salammbô — 1862 — Gustave Flaubert
87. Salem Chapel — 1862 — Margaret Oliphant
88. The Channings — 1862 — Ellen Wood (a. k. a. Mrs Henry Wood)
89. Lost and Saved — 1863 — The Hon. Mrs. Norton
90. The Schönberg-Cotta Family — 1863 — Elizabeth Charles
91. Uncle Silas — 1864 — Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
92. Barbara’s History — 1864 — Amelia B. Edwards (“Confusingly for bibliographers, she was related to Matilda Betham-Edwards and possibly to Annie Edward(e)s …”)
93. Sweet Anne Page — 1868 — Mortimer Collins
94. Crime and Punishment — 1868 — Feodor Dostoieffsky
95. Fromont Junior — 1874 — Alphonse Daudet
96. Marmorne — 1877 — P. G. Hamerton (“written under the pseudonym Adolphus Segrave”)
97. Black but Comely — 1879 — G. J. Whyte-Melville
98. The Master of Ballantrae — 1889 — R. L. Stevenson
99. Reuben Sachs — 1889 — Amy Levy
100. News from Nowhere — 1891 — William Morris
In addition to the canon, Shorter—unable to heed his own cautious counsel and throwing the door open to the winds of literary passion—included 8 books by living novelists whom he called “writers whose reputations are too well established for their juniors to feel towards them any sentiments other than those of reverence and regard:”
An Egyptian Princess — 1864 — Georg Ebers
Rhoda Fleming — 1865 — George Meredith
Lorna Doone — 1869 — R. D. Blackmore
Anna Karenina — 1875 — Count Leo Tolstoi
The Return of the Native — 1878 — Thomas Hardy
Daisy Miller — 1878 — Henry James
Mark Rutherford — 1881 — W. Hale White
Le Rêve — 1889 — Emile Zola
via The Times Literary Supplement
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See Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky’s Reading List For Having an Intelligent Conversation
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman
I’ve read perhaps 25 of these, and heard of maybe 20 more…Notice there is only one Dickens, one George Eliot.
I’ve read perhaps 25 of these, and heard of maybe 20 more…Notice there is only one Dickens, one George Eliot.
84 — Silas Mariner.nnAnd note: there are no living authors included in the main list and only one novel per novelist.
I’m a bozo..I missed the one novel per novelist part, but I realize that, yeah if it’s from 1898, the author is probably dead…
Living at the time of compiling the list.
Hey, I love these book lists you guys post, so I’d thought I’d recommend another knowledgeable source. In the sixties Kenneth Rexroth wrote an extremely fun and lively column for the Saturday Review where he reviewed some of the great classics of world literature. These reviews were eventually gathered together and published in two books, Classics Revisited and its sequel More Classics Revisited. Both books are goldmines. I’ve been poring over each of them for about twenty years now, and I’ve come to regard Rexroth as a trusted and good natured friend who I never got the chance to meet in person. I’m quite sure he would resonate strongly with anyone who digs Open Cultureu2026. And by the way, thanks for this site! I use this as my startup page; always a fun way to start the day.
Hey, I love these book lists you guys post, so I’d thought I’d recommend another knowledgeable source. In the sixties Kenneth Rexroth wrote an extremely fun and lively column for the Saturday Review where he reviewed some of the great classics of world literature. These reviews were eventually gathered together and published in two books, Classics Revisited and its sequel More Classics Revisited. Both books are goldmines. I’ve been poring over each of them for about twenty years now, and I’ve come to regard Rexroth as a trusted and good natured friend who I never got the chance to meet in person. I’m quite sure he would resonate strongly with anyone who digs Open Cultureu2026. And by the way, thanks for this site! I use this as my startup page; always a fun way to start the day.
The historical Mary Powell (#64) was married to John Milton, so I imagine that’s a historical novel about her experience.
I’m pleased and surprised to see so many women authors included, both the well- and lesser known.
#53 is actually by Albert Richard Smith.
Also, you should make it clearer (perhaps by using an unordered list) that this list is in chronological order, and not ranked 1–100.
Don Quixote,by Miguel de Cervantes, is undoubtly a classic novel…and really well placed on the book list.
Fiodor Dostoyevsky** it is, please..