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 earned Jane Austen just £110: she sold the copyright outright to the publisher Thomas Egerton, so the profits of its success went to him.
Q 02In Shakespeare's Hamlet, which character is Polonius's daughter and loves the prince?
Ophelia
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.
Q 03Which 1932 dystopian novel imagines citizens bred in hatcheries and conditioned into fixed social castes?
Brave New World
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.
Q 04Who wrote 'The Aeneid,' the epic of Aeneas's journey after the fall of Troy?
Virgil
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.
Q 05Which Russian author wrote 'Crime and Punishment', about Rodion Raskolnikov?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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.
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 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.
Q 08Charlotte Brontë first published Jane Eyre in October 1847 under what pen name?
Currer Bell
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'.
Q 09Which English author wrote the 1818 Gothic novel subtitled The Modern Prometheus?
Mary Shelley
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.
Q 10In which cathedral city stood the shrine of Thomas Becket that Chaucer's pilgrims ride toward?
Canterbury
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.
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 13In A Tale of Two Cities, who swaps places with Charles Darnay and goes to the guillotine for him?
Sydney Carton
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'.
Q 21In Beowulf, what is the name of the Danish mead hall terrorised by the monster Grendel?
Heorot
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.
Q 22Which scheming heroine drives Thackeray's Vanity Fair, subtitled A Novel without a Hero?
Becky Sharp
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.
Q 23Lewis Carroll's Wonderland heroine shares her name with a real girl from which family he knew in Oxford?
The Liddells
Q 14In Wuthering Heights, which tenant of Thrushcross Grange hears Nelly Dean's story?
Mr Lockwood
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.
Q 15What was the real name of George Eliot, author of Middlemarch?
Mary Ann Evans
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'.
Q 16Bram Stoker's Dracula opens with which English solicitor travelling to a castle in Transylvania?
Jonathan Harker
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!'
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 19In Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, what name does Crusoe give the man he rescues from cannibals?
Friday
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.
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.
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.
Q 24Who narrates The Great Gatsby?
Nick Carraway
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.
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
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.
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 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.
Q 30Gustave Flaubert was put on trial in 1857 over which debut novel, on the grounds that it was obscene?
Madame Bovary
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.