100 Fun Facts About Classic Literature

Which Jane Austen novel features Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy?

Pride and Prejudice earned Jane Austen just £110: she sold the copyright outright to the publisher Thomas Egerton, so the profits of its success went to him.

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, which character is Polonius's daughter and loves the prince?

Ophelia goes mad after Hamlet kills her father, Polonius; the queen reports that a willow branch broke under her and her soaked clothes dragged her down to drown.

Which 1932 dystopian novel imagines citizens bred in hatcheries and conditioned into fixed social castes?

Brave New World takes its title from The Tempest, where the sheltered Miranda cries 'O brave new world' at her first sight of strangers; Huxley's outsider John echoes the line on his way to London.

Who wrote 'The Aeneid,' the epic of Aeneas's journey after the fall of Troy?

Virgil died in 19 BC with the Aeneid still unrevised and is said to have asked for it to be burned; Emperor Augustus ordered it published instead.

Which Russian author wrote 'Crime and Punishment', about Rodion Raskolnikov?

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment deep in debt, having taken on his dead brother's creditors and family, and had to beg an editor for an advance on the story.

In Melville's Moby-Dick, who is the monomaniacal captain of the Pequod?

Captain Ahab commands the Pequod, obsessed with the white whale that bit off his leg on a previous voyage; Starbuck is his first mate.

In Cervantes's novel of 1605, which earthy farm labourer is recruited as Don Quixote's squire?

Sancho Panza signs on for the promise of an island to govern; when a duke and duchess hand him a sham one as a joke, he judges cases so shrewdly that his subjects call him another Solomon.

Charlotte Brontë first published Jane Eyre in October 1847 under what pen name?

Currer Bell kept Charlotte's initials, as Ellis and Acton did for Emily and Anne; she later explained that they hid their sex because 'authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice'.

Which English author wrote the 1818 Gothic novel subtitled The Modern Prometheus?

Mary Shelley began Frankenstein at eighteen, after Lord Byron proposed that he and his guests at a Swiss villa each write a ghost story during the wet summer of 1816.

In which cathedral city stood the shrine of Thomas Becket that Chaucer's pilgrims ride toward?

Canterbury was the goal of a storytelling contest Chaucer never finished: each pilgrim was pledged to tell tales on the road, yet only 24 exist, some of them broken off.

Which orphan narrates Charles Dickens's Great Expectations?

Pip narrates Great Expectations; the story opens in a graveyard, where the escaped convict Abel Magwitch seizes him.

In Great Expectations, which jilted recluse still wears her wedding dress in Satis House?

Miss Havisham, jilted on her wedding morning, stopped every clock in Satis House and raises her adopted daughter Estella to break men's hearts.

In A Tale of Two Cities, who swaps places with Charles Darnay and goes to the guillotine for him?

Sydney Carton, a barrister who happens to look like Darnay, slips into his cell, drugs him and takes his place; the novel ends with his 'far, far better thing'.

In Wuthering Heights, which tenant of Thrushcross Grange hears Nelly Dean's story?

Mr Lockwood, snowed in at Wuthering Heights, dreams that Catherine's ghost grips his hand through the window and begs to be let in; back at the Grange, he asks Nelly Dean for the story.

What was the real name of George Eliot, author of Middlemarch?

Mary Ann Evans took 'George' from her partner, George Henry Lewes, and said she added Eliot because it was 'a good, mouth-filling, easily pronounced word'.

Bram Stoker's Dracula opens with which English solicitor travelling to a castle in Transylvania?

Jonathan Harker arrives to settle the Count's purchase of a London estate, then finds every door locked and writes in his journal: 'The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner!'

Thomas Hardy set Tess of the d'Urbervilles and most of his novels in which fictional English region?

Hardy's Wessex, named for the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom, is a fictionalised south-west England; Tess and Angel Clare stumble upon Stonehenge near the novel's end.

In Gulliver's Travels, which land is inhabited by tiny people caught up in petty political disputes?

Lilliput's six-inch inhabitants feud over which end of an egg to break; Swift said he wrote the 1726 satire 'to vex the world rather than divert it'.

In Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, what name does Crusoe give the man he rescues from cannibals?

Friday is named for the day Crusoe saved his life, after more than twenty years alone; the tale is often traced to Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor marooned for four years.

In what poetic form is John Milton's Paradise Lost written?

Paradise Lost is in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter; Milton, blind since 1652, dictated it and defended the lack of rhyme in a prefatory note.

In Beowulf, what is the name of the Danish mead hall terrorised by the monster Grendel?

Heorot is King Hrothgar's hall, which Grendel raids for twelve years before Beowulf arrives; the poem itself survives in a single manuscript, scorched in an eighteenth-century fire.

Which scheming heroine drives Thackeray's Vanity Fair, subtitled A Novel without a Hero?

Becky Sharp announces herself in the first chapter by flinging her school's parting gift, a copy of Johnson's Dictionary, out of the carriage window as she drives away.

Lewis Carroll's Wonderland heroine shares her name with a real girl from which family he knew in Oxford?

The Liddells' daughter Alice heard the tale on a river trip in July 1862 and Carroll undertook to write it out for her; her father was dean of his Oxford college, Christ Church.

Who narrates The Great Gatsby?

Nick Carraway rents the bungalow beside Gatsby's mansion, and Gatsby soon asks him to invite Daisy, Nick's cousin, to tea so that he can come over and meet her again.

Along which river do Huck and Jim travel by raft in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

Huck and Jim raft down the Mississippi aiming for Cairo, where the Ohio joins it in the free state of Illinois, but drift past it in fog.

Which Puritan heroine is punished in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter?

Hester Prynne must wear a scarlet A for adultery; she refuses to name the father of her child, the minister Arthur Dimmesdale.

Tolstoy's War and Peace is set during which conflict?

The Napoleonic Wars reach Moscow in the novel's 1812 chapters; Tolstoy drew its battle scenes on his own service as an artillery officer at the siege of Sevastopol in the Crimean War.

What recurring setting frames the major plot turns of Anna Karenina, including its ending?

Railway trains and stations frame the novel: Anna meets her future lover at a Moscow station where a guard is crushed, and at the end she throws herself under a train.

Who is the ex-convict at the heart of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables?

Jean Valjean was sentenced to five years for stealing a loaf for his sister's seven children; escape attempts stretched it to nineteen, and Inspector Javert hunts him long after his release.

Gustave Flaubert was put on trial in 1857 over which debut novel, on the grounds that it was obscene?

Madame Bovary ran as a magazine serial before prosecutors charged Flaubert and his publisher with immorality; both were acquitted, and the notorious novel was a success when it came out as a book.

In Dante's Divine Comedy, which woman guides the pilgrim through Paradise?

Beatrice is traditionally identified with Beatrice Portinari, a Florentine whom Dante says he first saw when he was nine and loved from a distance until her early death in 1290.

In Homer's Odyssey, what is the name of Odysseus's faithful wife, besieged by suitors?

Penelope holds off the suitors by weaving and unravelling a shroud; Odysseus's journey home from Troy takes ten years and every one of his crew dies along the way.

Homer's Iliad traces the wrath of which Greek warrior?

The Iliad opens by invoking the wrath of Achilles; despite popular belief, the poem never depicts the Trojan Horse or the fall of Troy.

Who painted the portrait in Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray?

Basil Hallward pays for his masterpiece: years later Dorian shows him the corrupted portrait, then stabs him to death in the locked room where it is hidden.

In Treasure Island, which one-legged ship's cook turns out to be the ringleader of the mutiny?

Long John Silver charms the squire into hiring him as cook, then helps pick the crew, quietly filling the Hispaniola with Captain Flint's old pirates.

Jane Austen's Emma is set in which fictional Surrey village?

Emma Woodhouse lives at Hartfield in the village of Highbury; Austen predicted she would create 'a heroine whom no one but myself will much like'.

Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811 with what in place of the author's name on the title page?

'By A Lady' was the only credit on the title page; all Austen's novels appeared anonymously, and readers learned her name from her brother Henry's notice in the two published after her death.

James Joyce's Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom through which city on a single day, 16 June 1904?

Dublin fills every page, yet Joyce wrote the novel in exile and signed its last page 'Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921'; fans mark 16 June each year as Bloomsday.

In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Marlow travels upriver in search of which ivory trader?

Kurtz, the Inner Station's ivory agent, has set himself up as a god among the locals; the novella inspired Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis opens with salesman Gregor Samsa transformed into what?

A monstrous insect is one English rendering of Kafka's 'ungeheueres Ungeziefer', closer to 'monstrous vermin'; Gregor's first worry is his job and the train he has missed.

Which tutor in Voltaire's Candide insists that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds?

Dr Pangloss parrots Leibnizian optimism through every disaster in Candide; Voltaire's reply, in the last line, is that 'we must cultivate our garden'.

What is the surname of the four sisters in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women?

March is a thin disguise for Alcott: the four sisters are drawn on her own, and she wrote the book reluctantly, noting that she 'never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters'.

In Uncle Tom's Cabin, which brutal Louisiana planter buys Tom after St. Clare's death?

Simon Legree turns on Tom when Tom refuses an order to whip a fellow slave, and finally has him beaten to death for keeping silent about two women's escape.

In which island prison is Edmond Dantès held in The Count of Monte Cristo?

Dantès spends fourteen years in the Château d'If, an island fortress off Marseille, where fellow prisoner Abbé Faria reveals the location of the Monte Cristo treasure.

In Dumas's The Three Musketeers, which young Gascon befriends Athos, Porthos and Aramis?

D'Artagnan manages to owe all three a duel in a single morning; when the Cardinal's guards interrupt the first, he fights beside the musketeers and the four become friends.

Which is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy, first performed around 1606?

Macbeth, about half the length of Hamlet, is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy; actors' superstition renamed it 'the Scottish play'.

Which ensign manipulates Othello into suspecting his wife Desdemona of infidelity?

Iago opens the play furious that Othello has made Cassio his lieutenant instead of him, and warns the audience early: 'I am not what I am.'

Which daughter does King Lear disown for saying she loves him only according to her duty?

Cordelia's honesty costs her everything: Goneril and Regan's flattering speeches win them her share of the kingdom.

Who leads the gang of juvenile pickpockets that Oliver Twist falls in with in London?

Fagin trains the Artful Dodger and the other boys to pick pockets; Dickens borrowed the name from Bob Fagin, a boy who worked beside him in a blacking warehouse.

What object do the stranded boys use to call meetings in William Golding's Lord of the Flies?

Ralph blows the conch shell to summon assemblies and it becomes the symbol of order; Golding wrote the 1954 novel as a grim reply to R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island.

In George Orwell's 1984, what has Great Britain been renamed?

Airstrip One is merely the third most populous province of Oceania; London survives as its chief city, with Big Brother's statue on top of the column in what is now Victory Square.

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's final novel, revolves around what crime?

Patricide drives the plot: old Fyodor Karamazov is murdered and his son Dmitri is tried for it, though the killer is the servant Smerdyakov, rumoured to be Fyodor's own illegitimate son.

In Scott's Ivanhoe, which king fights disguised as the Black Knight?

Richard the Lionheart comes home from crusade and captivity to find his brother John plotting for the crown; Scott also wrote Robin Hood into the story as the outlaw Locksley.

Under what title was Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises published in Britain?

Fiesta was the British title; Hemingway built the novel on a real trip to Pamplona's San Fermín festival, and friends such as Harold Loeb found themselves turned into its characters.

What is the name of the endless Chancery lawsuit at the centre of Dickens's Bleak House?

Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds on for generations over conflicting wills and stops only when the lawyers' costs have swallowed the whole estate, leaving the heirs nothing.

In Dante's Inferno, which traitor is chewed in Satan's central mouth?

Judas Iscariot suffers most of the three, thrust in head first with only his legs outside; Caesar's assassins Brutus and Cassius hang from the side mouths as fellow traitors to their lords.

Which Jane Austen heroine, aged 27, gets a second chance with Captain Frederick Wentworth?

Anne Elliot, persuaded eight years earlier to break the engagement, reunites with Wentworth; Persuasion appeared in December 1817, five months after Austen's death, alongside Northanger Abbey.

Which George Eliot novel follows a weaver who adopts a little girl?

Silas Marner, The Weaver of Raveloe, loses his hoard to a thief; when a golden-haired toddler wanders in from the snow, he takes her curls for his coins come back.

Which Gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe is the one most often referenced in Austen's Northanger Abbey?

Catherine Morland devours The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and imagines Northanger Abbey as a Radcliffe castle; Austen sold the manuscript in 1803 but it appeared only after her death, in December 1817.

Gogol burned the manuscript of the second part of which 1842 novel shortly before his death?

Dead Souls carries the word 'Poem' on its title page; Gogol burned Part Two in a single night, for reasons on which accounts differ, and only fragments of it were saved.

Which narrator introduces himself in the three-word first sentence of Melville's Moby-Dick?

Ishmael signs on to the Pequod at Nantucket and is the only survivor left to tell the tale, kept afloat by Queequeg's coffin.

In A Christmas Carol, what is the name of Scrooge's dead business partner?

Jacob Marley has been dead seven years when the story opens; his ghost drags chains and cash boxes forged by a lifetime of greed.

Anna Karenina's scandalous affair is with which cavalry officer?

Count Alexei Vronsky, a dashing cavalry officer, becomes Anna's lover; they flee to Italy to escape Petersburg society, but after returning to Russia their lives steadily unravel.

What is the name of Phileas Fogg's French valet in Around the World in Eighty Days?

Jean Passepartout is hired on 2 October 1872 after Fogg sacks his previous valet for bringing shaving water two degrees too cold.

To Kill a Mockingbird is set in which fictional Alabama town?

Maycomb is a loose portrait of Harper Lee's hometown, Monroeville; even Scout's summer friend Dill is drawn from the boy who visited next door, the future writer Truman Capote.

In Animal Farm, which cart-horse is sold to the knacker after collapsing at the windmill?

Boxer, the loyal cart-horse, is driven off in a knacker's van; Squealer announces a hero's death, but Napoleon has pocketed the money and bought whisky for the pigs.

What is the name of the O'Hara family's Georgia plantation in Gone with the Wind?

Tara came to Gerald O'Hara at the card table: the Irish immigrant's knack for poker and a steady head for whisky won him the plantation in an all-night game.

Which hot-tempered cousin of Juliet does Romeo kill, earning his exile from Verona?

Tybalt has just stabbed Mercutio under Romeo's arm; Prince Escalus banishes Romeo rather than executing him.

In Goethe's Faust, which devil wagers with God that he can corrupt the scholar Faust?

Mephistopheles first slips into Faust's study as a black poodle, then steps out as a travelling scholar and answers the demand for his name with a riddle.

What was Lewis Carroll's real name?

Charles Dodgson built the pen name from his own: Lewis is Lutwidge by way of the Latin Ludovicus, and Carroll is Charles by way of Carolus, with the order swapped.

Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle sleeps for how many years in the Catskills?

Rip sleeps 20 years, dozing off under King George and waking after the American Revolution; he is nearly mobbed as a spy when he declares himself a loyal subject of the king.

Victor Frankenstein builds his creature while studying at which university?

Victor leaves Geneva for the University of Ingolstadt, in Bavaria, after his mother dies of scarlet fever; the creature later learns his origins from Victor's journal, taken from the laboratory.

Under what working title was Pride and Prejudice drafted in 1796–97?

Austen drafted it as First Impressions; her father offered the manuscript to the London bookseller Thomas Cadell in November 1797 and was turned down by return of post.

What weapon does Raskolnikov use to murder the pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment?

Raskolnikov kills the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna with an axe, then also kills her half-sister Lizaveta, who stumbles in on the scene, a second death his theory never allowed for.

Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond stood near which Massachusetts town?

Concord was near enough that Thoreau, for all his solitude, 'strolled to the village' every day or two 'to hear some of the gossip'; he lived at the pond for two years and two months.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson first appeared in which 1887 story?

A Study in Scarlet ran in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887 after several rejections; Conan Doyle was paid £25 for the copyright.

What name does Odysseus give the Cyclops Polyphemus before blinding him?

When the blinded giant cries that Nobody is hurting him, the other Cyclopes assume the gods are to blame and leave him be.

In Sophocles' tragedy, Oedipus unwittingly becomes king of which city?

Oedipus won the throne of Thebes by solving the riddle of the Sphinx, then married the widowed queen Jocasta, his own mother.

In Proust's In Search of Lost Time, which small cake dipped in tea unlocks the narrator's childhood memories?

A madeleine soaked in tea tastes like the crumbs his aunt Léonie gave him on Sunday mornings in Combray, and the whole seven-volume novel unfolds from that one mouthful.

Camus's The Stranger sees Meursault kill an unnamed man on a beach in which country?

Camus was himself born in French Algeria; at trial Meursault is condemned less for the killing than for failing to weep at his mother's funeral.

Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca is haunted by which West Country estate?

'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again' opens the novel; the unnamed narrator is tormented by the housekeeper Mrs Danvers's devotion to the first Mrs de Winter.

In the Iliad, Hector kills which beloved companion of the Greeks' greatest warrior?

Patroclus had gone out in his friend's borrowed armour to drive the Trojans from the ships; Hector strips it from his body, and grief sends that friend back into battle to kill Hector in turn.

In Gulliver's Travels, the rational Houyhnhnms are what kind of creature?

The Houyhnhnms are rational horses who share their land with the Yahoos, savage human-like brutes; Gulliver comes home preferring the company of his stable to his family.

The ending of Moby-Dick was based on the 1820 sinking of which real whaleship?

The Essex of Nantucket was rammed and sunk by a sperm whale; Melville read first mate Owen Chase's account of the wreck and cites it in the novel as proof that a whale can sink a ship.

Which lawyer investigates the link between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Stevenson's novella?

Gabriel John Utterson's weekly walk with his kinsman Enfield opens the story; Enfield's tale of a man trampling a girl in the street sets the investigation going.

In Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester's first wife Bertha Mason comes from which island?

Rochester married Bertha in Spanish Town, Jamaica; Jean Rhys's 1966 prequel Wide Sargasso Sea retells her Caribbean girlhood under the name Antoinette.

In Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke marries which elderly clergyman and scholar?

Edward Casaubon, a dry clergyman-scholar, is her first husband; on their Roman honeymoon she discovers the sterility of his never-finished Key to All Mythologies and befriends his young cousin Will Ladislaw.

Which 1895 novel was the last Thomas Hardy wrote before giving up fiction for poetry?

Jude the Obscure was attacked by some scandalised reviewers; after it Hardy issued one reworked old serial and then turned to poetry.

In The War of the Worlds, the first Martian cylinder lands near which Surrey town?

The cylinder lands on Horsell Common near Woking, where Wells was living; he recalled cycling the district 'marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians'.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Jack was found as a baby in a handbag at which station?

Jack was found in a handbag in the cloakroom at Victoria station, 'the Brighton line'; Miss Prism had put her manuscript in the pram and the baby in the handbag.

Which novel made Edith Wharton the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?

The Age of Innocence won in 1921 after the jury had initially recommended Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, which the board overruled.

Which was Anton Chekhov's last play, first staged by Stanislavski in January 1904?

The Cherry Orchard opened at the Moscow Art Theatre on 17 January 1904, six months before Chekhov's death; he called it a comedy with touches of farce, while Stanislavski staged it as tragedy.

In The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, what kind of animal is Esmeralda's pet Djali?

Djali performs tricks for coins, telling the time and spelling out Phoebus's name, and the poet Gringoire ends up fonder of the goat than of Esmeralda.

Which 18th-century novel includes a page printed entirely in black to mourn a character?

Tristram Shandy's black page mourns the parson Yorick; Sterne also left a page blank so that readers could draw their own portrait of the Widow Wadman, 'as like your mistress as you can'.

Dickens's father was jailed in which debtors' prison, later the setting for Little Dorrit?

John Dickens was sent to the Marshalsea in February 1824, and the 12-year-old Charles had to leave school; Amy Dorrit is born inside its walls.

In Milton's Paradise Lost, what is the capital that the fallen angels build in Hell called?

Pandemonium is 'the high capital of Satan and his peers'; the fallen angels raise it in Hell and hold the council there at which Satan volunteers to corrupt the newly made Earth.

Which poet was prosecuted in 1857 over Les Fleurs du mal and had six of its poems banned?

Charles Baudelaire, his publisher and his printer were all convicted of offending public morals; he later issued the six banned poems in Brussels under the title Les Épaves.

Chaucer's pilgrims gather at which Southwark inn before setting out on their journey?

The Tabard's landlord, Harry Bailly, proposes the storytelling contest himself and promises the winner a supper back at his inn, paid for by all the others.

In Poe's The Raven, the bird perches on a bust of which classical figure?

Pallas is Athena, goddess of wisdom; Poe wrote that he chose her bust to suit his scholarly narrator, to set marble against the bird's plumage, and for the sound of the word itself.

Which 14th-century book has young Florentines tell 100 tales while sheltering from the plague?

The Decameron's seven women and three men take turns as king or queen for a day, and on most days the ruler sets a theme for the stories.