50 Fun Facts About Famous First Lines of Books

Which Jane Austen novel opens by calling it 'a truth universally acknowledged' that a rich single man needs a wife?

Pride and Prejudice starts with a joke: in Austen's society it was really the unmarried daughters without fortunes who needed a wealthy husband.

Which seafaring novel opens with its narrator's three-word request, 'Call me Ishmael'?

Moby-Dick was a commercial failure and out of print when Herman Melville died in 1891, yet its opening sentence is now among the most famous ever written.

Which Charles Dickens novel opens with the words 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'?

A Tale of Two Cities keeps that sentence going for well over a hundred words of paired opposites, from wisdom and foolishness to hope and despair.

Which fantasy novel's first line was scribbled by an Oxford professor on a blank exam paper?

The Hobbit began as one sentence about a creature living in a hole, jotted by J. R. R. Tolkien when he found an empty page among the School Certificate papers he was marking.

Which children's novel, adapted from a 1904 stage play, opens with the line 'All children, except one, grow up'?

Peter Pan's famous opener was written for the 1911 novel, seven years after the boy who would not grow up first appeared on the London stage.

Which dystopian novel opens on a cold, bright spring day with the clocks striking an impossible thirteen?

Nineteen Eighty-Four nearly had another name: George Orwell wavered between that title and The Last Man in Europe until shortly before he finished the second draft.

Which Victorian ghost story opens with the blunt announcement 'Marley was dead: to begin with'?

A Christmas Carol's narrator then stops to wonder why a door-nail, rather than a coffin-nail, counts as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.

Which Leo Tolstoy novel opens by claiming that happy families are all alike but each unhappy family is different?

Anna Karenina lent its first sentence to the Anna Karenina principle, which Jared Diamond used to explain why so few animal species were ever domesticated.

Which American children's novel opens with a farm girl named Fern asking where her father is going with an ax?

Charlotte's Web first opened in the barn with Wilbur; E. B. White moved that scene to chapter three so the story starts with Fern saving the runt.

Which Newbery Medal-winning novel opens with the much-mocked line 'It was a dark and stormy night'?

A Wrinkle in Time borrows its opener from an 1830 novel, a sentence so often parodied that it became the textbook example of purple prose.

Which Jazz Age novel opens with its narrator recalling his father's advice from his 'younger and more vulnerable years'?

The Great Gatsby begins with Nick Carraway's father telling him to remember, before criticising anyone, that not everybody has had his advantages.

Which Mark Twain novel opens with its narrator mentioning 'a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'?

Huckleberry Finn adds that the earlier book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, who 'told the truth, mainly', so the author gets teased by his own character.

Which Charles Dickens title character begins his story wondering whether he will be 'the hero of my own life'?

David Copperfield tells his story in the novel Dickens called his favourite child, and its first chapter is plainly titled 'I Am Born'.

In Great Expectations, the narrator's infant tongue shortens Philip Pirrip to which nickname in the first line?

Pip gives his name in the opening chapter, set in a marsh churchyard where the escaped convict Abel Magwitch seizes him.

Which Brontë novel opens with the line 'There was no possibility of taking a walk that day'?

Jane Eyre spends that wet afternoon hidden behind a red curtain with Bewick's History of British Birds, until her bullying cousin John Reed comes looking for her.

Which Jane Austen heroine is described in a famous first line as 'handsome, clever, and rich'?

Emma Woodhouse was built to be hard to love: before starting the novel, Austen said she was taking a heroine whom no one but herself would much like.

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland opens with Alice bored by her sister's book, which lacks pictures and what else?

Conversations arrive within moments: a White Rabbit runs past fretting that it will be late, then pulls a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket.

Which Louisa May Alcott novel opens with Jo grumbling that the holiday won't be the same without any presents?

Little Women opens on the March sisters facing a lean winter at home while their father is far away, where the fighting of the Civil War is.

Which H. G. Wells novel opens with Earth being watched by 'intelligences greater than man's'?

The War of the Worlds says the watchers studied humans the way a man with a microscope studies the tiny creatures that swarm in a drop of water.

Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows opens with which animal hard at work spring-cleaning his little home?

Mole soon flings down his brush, says 'Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolts out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.

Which Frances Hodgson Burnett novel calls its heroine 'the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen' in its first line?

The Secret Garden introduces Mary Lennox as a thin, sour-faced girl born in India and sent to her uncle's house, Misselthwaite Manor, on the Yorkshire moors.

Which Jack London novel opens by noting that its hero, Buck, 'did not read the newspapers'?

The Call of the Wild explains the trouble at once: men had found gold in the Arctic and wanted heavy, strong-muscled dogs like Buck to toil for them.

Which 1922 modernist novel opens with 'Stately, plump Buck Mulligan' carrying a bowl of shaving lather?

Ulysses follows three Dubliners through a single day, 16 June 1904, which fans now celebrate every year as Bloomsday.

Which Irish novelist opened his debut novel like a nursery tale, with a 'moocow coming down along the road'?

James Joyce begins A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a story told by a father to his infant son, Stephen Dedalus, the 'baby tuckoo' of the tale.

Which castaway novel opens with its narrator stating 'I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York'?

Robinson Crusoe adds that the family name was really Kreutznaer, worn down by English tongues because his father was a foreigner from Bremen.

Which novel, narrated by a horse, opens with his first memory of a pleasant meadow and a pond?

Black Beauty was the only novel its author, Sewell, ever wrote; she meant it to induce kindness to horses and died just five months after it was published.

Which storybook bear is introduced in his first line as 'Edward Bear', bumping downstairs on the back of his head?

Winnie-the-Pooh comes down behind Christopher Robin, and the narrator adds that it is, as far as the bear knows, the only way of coming downstairs.

Which Ernest Hemingway novel opens by noting that Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton?

The Sun Also Rises has its narrator, Jake Barnes, add at once that he is not very impressed by that boxing title, though it meant a lot to Cohn.

Which work co-written by Friedrich Engels opens with the line 'A spectre is haunting Europe'?

The Communist Manifesto names its ghost in the same breath, the spectre of communism, and says the powers of old Europe have allied to exorcise it.

Which Old Testament book opens with the words 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth'?

Genesis is known in Hebrew as Bereshit, a title taken directly from that first word, which means 'in the beginning'.

Homer's Iliad opens by asking a goddess to sing of the anger of which Greek warrior?

Achilles, son of Peleus, enters the poem already furious, and Homer says at once that his anger brought countless ills upon his own side, the Achaeans.

Cervantes opens Don Quixote in a village whose name the narrator declines to recall, somewhere in which Spanish region?

La Mancha's unnamed village has been argued over for four centuries, and the narrator's refusal to recall its name became a stock phrase in Spanish.

Which Franz Kafka story opens with salesman Gregor Samsa waking one morning as a monstrous insect?

The Metamorphosis never settles what Gregor has become: Kafka's German phrase means roughly 'monstrous vermin', and English translators have rendered it many different ways.

Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales opens by praising the sweet showers of which month?

April's rains and warm western wind restore life to the earth, the prologue says, and that is the season when people long to go on pilgrimages.

Dante's Inferno opens with the poet, midway through life's journey, astray in what kind of place?

A dark forest is where Dante strays at 35, half the biblical lifespan of seventy, until the shade of the Roman poet Virgil arrives to guide him.

Which John Milton epic opens with the words 'Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree'?

Paradise Lost was composed by dictation: Milton had gone blind in 1652, so amanuenses and friends wrote the poem down as he spoke it.

Bram Stoker's Dracula opens with the travel journal of which young solicitor bound for Transylvania?

Jonathan Harker starts his entry on 3 May at Bistritz, grumbling about a late train, and the whole novel is told through diaries, letters and newspaper articles.

Which novel opens with narrator Ponyboy Curtis leaving a cinema, his mind on Paul Newman and getting home?

The Outsiders comes full circle: it ends with Ponyboy starting a school essay whose first sentence is the very line that opens the book.

Which Daphne du Maurier novel opens with its unnamed narrator dreaming of a return to the estate of Manderley?

Rebecca is named after the dead first wife whose memory haunts the house, while the woman who dreams of it never gets a name of her own.

Which Albert Camus novel opens with its narrator, Meursault, learning that his mother has died?

The Stranger turns on that death: at Meursault's murder trial, the prosecutor dwells less on the killing than on his failure to cry at the funeral.

Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio begins 'Once upon a time there was' not a king, readers are told, but a what?

A piece of wood is all the hero is at first: just a common block of firewood, the narrator says, of the kind burned in winter to warm cold rooms.

Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer opens with a shout of 'Tom!' from which exasperated character?

Aunt Polly calls three times without an answer, then catches the boy slipping out of a closet with jam on his mouth.

Which English novelist wrote 'It was a dark and stormy night' and inspired a contest for terrible opening sentences?

Edward Bulwer-Lytton opened his 1830 novel Paul Clifford with it, yet the same writer coined 'the pen is mightier than the sword'.

Which dinosaur does Charles Dickens imagine waddling up Holborn Hill in the muddy opening paragraph of Bleak House?

Megalosaurus had become the first dinosaur ever given a scientific name in 1824, a generation before Dickens put one forty feet long in the London mud.

Which famously difficult novel opens mid-sentence, completing the unfinished line that ends its final page?

Finnegans Wake took seventeen years to write, and its looping design means the last words of the final page run straight on into the first.

Which Ford Madox Ford novel opens with the line 'This is the saddest story I have ever heard'?

The Good Soldier was first titled The Saddest Story; when war broke out the publishers wanted a change, and Ford's sarcastic suggestion stuck.

L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables opens not with Anne but with which sharp-eyed Avonlea neighbour?

Rachel Lynde sits at her window through one winding sentence of nearly 150 words, then spots Matthew Cuthbert driving off in his best suit.

George Bernard Shaw's play Arms and the Man takes its title from the first line of which ancient epic?

The Aeneid opens with Virgil stating his theme, 'Of arms and the man I sing', and only gets round to invoking the Muse some seven lines later.

Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway opens with Clarissa Dalloway saying she will buy what herself for that evening's party?

The flowers replaced a pair of gloves: Woolf's earlier short story, 'Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street', began with almost the same sentence about buying those.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein opens with letters to his sister from which Arctic explorer, who later rescues Victor?

Robert Walton writes from St. Petersburgh to his sister, Mrs. Saville, and Victor's whole story reaches readers through the captain's letters.