Brontë Family Trivia
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60 free Brontë Family trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Brontë family trivia quiz covers the parsonage household that produced three of the greatest novelists in English. It starts with the family itself: the Irish curate who respelt his name, the mother from Penzance and the aunt who replaced her, the school that killed the two eldest girls, the twelve toy soldiers that spawned Glass Town, Angria and Gondal, and the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Then it turns to the books: Jane Eyre and its madwoman, Wuthering Heights and its narrators, Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Charlotte's suppression of it, Shirley and Villette. The second half is the people and their fates: Charlotte in Brussels and the torn-up letters to Héger, Emily refusing the doctor, Anne's grave in Scarborough, Branwell's pillar, his railway job and his affair, Patrick's gun and his long survival, Gaskell's biography and its libel trouble, the film Heathcliffs and Kate Bush. About a third of the questions suit anyone who has read one Brontë novel; the rest are for those who know their Gondal from their Angria. Our Jane Austen and Victorian literature quizzes are natural companions. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Brontë family, its members, their novels and Haworth, and each explanation adds one more detail.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Yorkshire village were Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë born, before the family moved to Haworth?
Thornton
Thornton: the house where they and Branwell were born spent years as a butcher's shop and then a cafe. After a community fundraising campaign bought it, the house opened as a museum in 2025.
Q 02Charlotte Brontë said the pen names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were chosen because they were what?
Not clearly male or female
Not clearly male or female: Charlotte wrote that the sisters scrupled to take names 'positively masculine' yet did not want to declare themselves women, because authoresses were 'looked on with prejudice'.
Q 03Patrick Brontë, a poor farmer's son, entered which university in 1802 at the age of 25?
Cambridge
Cambridge: he arrived at St John's College as Patrick Brunty, a former village schoolmaster and tutor, and it was there that he began to sign himself Brontë.
Q 04One theory says Patrick Brontë chose his new surname to echo which admiral, who was Duke of Bronte?
Horatio Nelson
Horatio Nelson was made Duke of Bronte in 1799 by the King of Naples and Sicily, a reward for defending his throne, and Patrick is said to have admired him. Why he really changed the spelling is unknown.
Q 05Although the Brontës are tied to Yorkshire, their father Patrick was born in which country?
Ireland
Ireland: Patrick was born in County Down on St Patrick's Day 1777, one of ten children of a family so poor that he had to make his own way from his teens.
Q 06Which Jane Eyre character did Charlotte Brontë base on Maria, the eldest of the six Brontë children, who died aged 11?
Helen Burns
Helen Burns. Like Maria, Helen is punished again and again by one teacher and dies of consumption; Charlotte's first biographer called her 'as exact a transcript' of Maria as Charlotte could give.
Q 07Where was Maria Branwell, the mother of the Brontë children, born and raised?
Penzance, Cornwall
Penzance, Cornwall. Maria came north in 1812 to visit an uncle near Leeds, met the clergyman Patrick Brontë there, and the two were wed that December.
Q 08After Maria Brontë died in 1821, which relative moved into Haworth Parsonage to help raise her six children?
Her elder sister
Her elder sister. Elizabeth Branwell came to nurse Maria and stayed for 21 years as 'Aunt Branwell', running the household until she died and leaving her savings to her nieces.
Q 09The two eldest Brontë sisters died in 1825 after attending which harsh boarding school?
Cowan Bridge
Cowan Bridge. Patrick brought Charlotte and Emily home from the cheap school for clergy daughters once their sisters fell ill; Charlotte later rebuilt it as Lowood in Jane Eyre.
Q 10The Reverend William Carus Wilson, founder of a school the Brontë sisters attended, was the model for which Jane Eyre character?
Mr Brocklehurst
Mr Brocklehurst. Charlotte, a pupil at eight, drew him as the preacher who keeps Lowood's girls cold and hungry; when her biography named the model, Carus Wilson and his friends threatened to sue.
Q 11What gift from Patrick Brontë to his son Branwell in June 1826 sparked the children's imaginary worlds?
Twelve wooden soldiers
Twelve wooden soldiers. Patrick brought them back from Leeds, and next morning each child seized one to name and keep, the start of years of shared stories written in tiny handmade books.
Q 12Charlotte Brontë made which real commander the hero of her childhood Glass Town stories?
The Duke of Wellington
The Duke of Wellington. Charlotte claimed him as her own hero while Branwell took Bonaparte, and her tales soon starred the Duke's two sons in an African colony the children invented.
Q 13Which imaginary land did Emily and Anne Brontë invent as children and keep writing about as adults?
Q 21Which London firm published Jane Eyre in October 1847?
Smith, Elder & Co
Smith, Elder & Co. The firm had turned down her first novel so courteously that she sent it Jane Eyre instead, and the book was in print within two months.
Q 22To which novelist was the second edition of Jane Eyre dedicated?
William Makepeace Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray. She admired him above every living writer but knew nothing of his life and had never met him; the tribute set readers guessing afresh about who the unknown author was.
Q 23Which secret is revealed at Jane Eyre's wedding to Rochester?
He already has a wife, Bertha
Gondal
Gondal. The sisters never outgrew it: on a trip to York in 1845, both in their twenties, they spent the journey playing its characters, as Emily's diary paper records.
Q 14At which Mirfield school did Charlotte Brontë study in 1831, meeting lifelong friends Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor?
Roe Head
Roe Head. Charlotte came back in 1835 as a teacher, bringing Emily as a pupil; Emily was so homesick that she went home within months and Anne took her place.
Q 15Which Poet Laureate told young Charlotte Brontë literature 'cannot be the business of a woman's life'?
Robert Southey
Robert Southey. Charlotte thanked him and promised she would 'never more feel ambitious to see my name in print'; a decade later Jane Eyre made her famous.
Q 16In which city did Charlotte and Emily Brontë study at the Héger Pensionnat in 1842?
Brussels
Brussels. After six months the school offered to keep both sisters on without fees if they would teach: Charlotte took the English classes and Emily taught music.
Q 17What became of Charlotte Brontë's letters to Constantin Héger?
His wife pieced the torn pages together
His wife pieced the torn pages together. Héger had ripped most of the letters up; she stitched them and kept them in secret, and in 1913 their son gave the four that survive to the British Museum.
Q 18How many copies did the Brontë sisters' 1846 book of poems sell in its first year?
Two
Two. Charlotte told one author that only the publisher knew 'by what painful efforts he succeeded in getting rid of these two', and sent him one of the unsold copies as a present.
Q 19Which Brontë novel, rejected before Jane Eyre, was published only after its author's death?
The Professor
The Professor. After several publishers refused it, Charlotte reworked its story of a teacher abroad into Villette; her widower saw the original into print two years after her death.
Q 20Where was Charlotte Brontë when she began writing Jane Eyre in August 1846?
At her father's bedside in Manchester
At her father's bedside in Manchester. Patrick, nearly blind, had a cataract removed there and lay bandaged in a dark room; her first novel came back rejected on the day of the operation, and she began another.
He already has a wife, Bertha. A lawyer halts the service by declaring 'the existence of an impediment', and Rochester marches the whole party home to show them the woman he keeps locked upstairs.
Q 24Which two words complete Jane Eyre's famous line 'Reader, I …'?
married him
Married him. 'Reader, I married him' opens the final chapter, and after all the novel's drama it is 'a quiet wedding', with only the parson and the clerk present.
Q 25In Jane Eyre, what is the name of Rochester's house, where Jane teaches the French girl Adèle?
Thornfield Hall
Thornfield Hall. Jane arrives assuming it belongs to the kindly Mrs Fairfax, who is in fact only looking after it for its absent master; by the novel's end the house is a burnt-out ruin.
Q 26Which 1966 novel by Jean Rhys is a prequel to Jane Eyre?
Wide Sargasso Sea
Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys, who grew up in Dominica, renames Brontë's 'madwoman in the attic' Antoinette Cosway and gives her a girlhood in 1830s Jamaica; it was her first novel in 27 years.
Q 27How many novels did Emily Brontë write?
One
One. Wuthering Heights appeared in December 1847 and Emily died a year later; in 1850 Charlotte edited a new edition, conceding in her preface that to outsiders it 'must appear a rude and strange production'.
Q 28In Wuthering Heights, from which city does Mr Earnshaw bring home the orphan Heathcliff?
Liverpool
Liverpool. Mr Earnshaw walks the sixty miles each way and comes home with the starving child inside his greatcoat, the fiddle he had promised his son crushed to pieces.
Q 29Who tells most of the story of Wuthering Heights to the tenant Mr Lockwood?
Nelly Dean, the housekeeper
Nelly Dean, the housekeeper. She grew up beside the Earnshaw children and has served both families, so she can give Lockwood the whole history from the inside while he is laid up ill.
Q 30In Wuthering Heights, what is the name of the Linton family's refined house down in the valley?
Thrushcross Grange
Thrushcross Grange. Cathy and Heathcliff creep up to spy on its drawing room, the Lintons' dog seizes her ankle, and her five weeks recovering there send her home a young lady.