Classic Literature
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8correct to beat the crowd
This classic book trivia quiz has 100 free questions with answers and covers the novels, plays and epics that fill every English literature syllabus: Beowulf and Chaucer, Shakespeare's tragedies, Milton, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, Hardy and Wilde, alongside the great world classics from Homer, Dante and Cervantes to Tolstoy, Flaubert, Kafka and Hugo. It asks who narrates, who guides, who betrays, and which pen names hid which authors. It is written for book clubs, English students revising for exams, teachers building a literature round, and readers who want to see how much of the canon they really remember. Most questions sit in the easy-to-medium range, with a handful of harder ones on publication history and pseudonyms. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedic sources on the works themselves, so you can quote it in your next book club argument.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Jane Austen novel features Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy?
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice was published in January 1813; its opening line about a single man in possession of a good fortune is among the most quoted in English fiction.
Q 02In Shakespeare's Hamlet, which character is Polonius's daughter and loves the prince?
Ophelia
Ophelia is a prominent character in Shakespeare's 'Hamlet,' whose tragic arc sees her driven to madness and ultimately drowning.
Q 03Which 1932 dystopian novel is set in a World State where citizens are engineered into a social hierarchy?
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' explores a society that sacrifices individual freedom and human values for manufactured happiness and stability through conditioning and genetic manipulation.
Q 04Who wrote 'The Aeneid,' the epic of Aeneas's journey after the fall of Troy?
Virgil
Virgil, a Roman poet, wrote 'The Aeneid' between 30 and 19 BC, an epic that establishes a founding myth for Rome and glorifies its principles.
Q 05Which Russian author wrote 'Crime and Punishment', about Rodion Raskolnikov?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' is a psychological novel that delves into the mental anguish and moral struggles of a former student who commits murder.
Q 06In Melville's Moby-Dick, who is the monomaniacal captain of the Pequod?
Ahab
Captain Ahab commands the Pequod, obsessed with the white whale that bit off his leg on a previous voyage; Starbuck is his first mate.
Q 07In Cervantes's novel of 1605, which earthy farm labourer is recruited as Don Quixote's squire?
Sancho Panza
Sancho Panza's earthy common sense is set against his master's lofty chivalric rhetoric throughout the book.
Q 08Charlotte Brontë first published Jane Eyre in October 1847 under what pen name?
Currer Bell
Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre as Currer Bell in October 1847; her sisters Emily and Anne used the matching pseudonyms Ellis Bell and Acton Bell.
Q 09Which English author wrote the 1818 Gothic novel subtitled The Modern Prometheus?
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley began Frankenstein at eighteen; the first edition appeared anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was twenty.
Q 10In which cathedral city stood the shrine of Thomas Becket that Chaucer's pilgrims ride toward?
Canterbury
Chaucer wrote the twenty-four tales, mostly in verse, between 1387 and 1400.
Q 11Which orphan narrates Charles Dickens's Great Expectations?
Pip
Pip narrates Great Expectations; the story opens in a graveyard, where the escaped convict Abel Magwitch seizes him.
Q 12In Great Expectations, which jilted recluse still wears her wedding dress in Satis House?
Miss Havisham
Miss Havisham, jilted on her wedding morning, stopped every clock in Satis House and raises her adopted daughter Estella to break men's hearts.
Q 13A Tale of Two Cities is set in London and which other city during the French Revolution?
Paris
The two cities are London and Paris; Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine in Paris in place of Charles Darnay.
Q 21In Beowulf, what is the name of the Danish mead hall terrorised by the monster Grendel?
Heorot
Heorot is King Hrothgar's great hall; the Old English epic runs to 3,182 alliterative lines and survives in a single manuscript.
Q 22Which scheming heroine drives Thackeray's Vanity Fair, subtitled A Novel without a Hero?
Becky Sharp
Becky Sharp, the penniless and ambitious governess, schemes her way through Regency society; the title comes from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
Q 23Lewis Carroll's Wonderland heroine shares her name with a real girl from which family he knew in Oxford?
The Liddells
The story was conceived on a boat trip on 4 July 1862 and published in 1865.
Q 14In Wuthering Heights, which tenant of Thrushcross Grange hears Nelly Dean's story?
Mr Lockwood
Mr Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, narrates the frame story; housekeeper Nelly Dean tells him the Earnshaw and Linton history during his winter illness.
Q 15What was the real name of George Eliot, author of Middlemarch?
Mary Ann Evans
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans; Middlemarch appeared in eight instalments in 1871-72, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life.
Q 16Bram Stoker's Dracula opens with which English solicitor travelling to a castle in Transylvania?
Jonathan Harker
Jonathan Harker, a young solicitor, travels to Count Dracula's castle to complete a property purchase; his journal entries open the 1897 novel.
Q 17Thomas Hardy set Tess of the d'Urbervilles and most of his novels in which fictional English region?
Wessex
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.
Q 18In Gulliver's Travels, which land is inhabited by tiny people caught up in petty political disputes?
Lilliput
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'.
Q 19Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe spends how many years on his desert island?
28
Crusoe is marooned for 28 years, two months and nineteen days; the tale was likely inspired by Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years on a Pacific island.
Q 20In what poetic form is John Milton's Paradise Lost written?
Blank verse
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.
Q 24Who narrates The Great Gatsby?
Nick Carraway
Nick Carraway, Gatsby's neighbour and Daisy's cousin, narrates; Fitzgerald set the 1925 novel among the parties of Long Island's North Shore in 1922.
Q 25Along which river do Huck and Jim travel by raft in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?
The Mississippi
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.
Q 26Which Puritan heroine is punished in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter?
Hester Prynne
Hester Prynne must wear a scarlet A for adultery; she refuses to name the father of her child, the minister Arthur Dimmesdale.
Q 27Tolstoy's War and Peace is set during which conflict?
The Napoleonic Wars
War and Peace spans the Napoleonic Wars from 1805 to the French invasion of Russia in 1812, following five aristocratic families.
Q 28What recurring setting frames the major plot turns of Anna Karenina, including its ending?
Railway trains and stations
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.
Q 29Who is the ex-convict at the heart of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables?
Jean Valjean
Jean Valjean, jailed nineteen years for stealing bread, is pursued by Inspector Javert; the 1862 novel culminates in the June Rebellion of 1832 in Paris.
Q 30Gustave Flaubert was put on trial in 1857 over which debut novel, on the grounds that it was obscene?
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary was serialised in the Revue de Paris in 1856; Flaubert was acquitted on 7 February 1857 and the novel appeared in book form that April.