George Eliot Trivia
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60 free George Eliot trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, a farm manager's daughter from Warwickshire who translated German theology, ran a radical London journal, lived openly with a married man and then wrote what many critics call the greatest novel in English. This quiz covers the life first: Nuneaton and Arbury Hall, the Coventry freethinkers, the Strauss translation, the Westminster Review, the scandal of George Henry Lewes, the late marriage to John Cross and the burial in Highgate rather than Westminster Abbey. The second half is the books. There are questions on all seven novels: Adam Bede and its infanticide trial, the Tulliver siblings and the flood in The Mill on the Floss, the weaver and the golden-haired child in Silas Marner, Savonarola's Florence in Romola, Felix Holt, the eight-part serial that became Middlemarch, and the Zionist thread of Daniel Deronda. Easy questions ask which sex the author was; the expert tier asks for publishers, dates and minor characters. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on George Eliot and on each novel, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was George Eliot's real name?
Mary Ann Evans
Mary Ann Evans gave even her own publisher nothing but the pen name, offering it in an 1857 letter 'as a tub to throw to the whale in case of curious inquiries'.
Q 02George Eliot was born in 1819 in which Midlands county?
Warwickshire
Warwickshire: cut off from her family there once she set up home with Lewes, Eliot turned to her early memories of the county and made her first stories out of them.
Q 03George Eliot's 1854 journey to Germany with her partner was partly research for his biography of which writer?
Goethe
Goethe: the Life that Lewes published the next year became his best-known book, and the trip served the unmarried couple as a honeymoon.
Q 04The narrator of George Eliot's eerie 1859 novella The Lifted Veil is cursed with which unwanted power?
Clairvoyance
Clairvoyance: he foresees his own death and overhears other people's thoughts, and the tale ends with a blood transfusion briefly reviving a corpse, a world away from her usual realism.
Q 05What did George Eliot's father do for a living?
Managed a country estate
Managed a country estate: her Tory father threatened to turn her out when at 22 she refused to go to church, yet she kept house for him until the day he died.
Q 06Where did the 'George' in George Eliot's pen name come from?
Her partner's first name
Her partner's first name: she later explained that George was Lewes's Christian name, and that Eliot was simply 'a good, mouth-filling, easily pronounced word'.
Q 07George Eliot's first major work was a translation of a controversial German book about what?
The life of Jesus
The life of Jesus: David Strauss's book argued that the Gospel miracles were myths added later, and the pious schoolgirl of a decade before brought it into English without putting her name to it.
Q 08Which left-wing journal did George Eliot effectively run as assistant editor from 1851?
The Westminster Review
The Westminster Review: founded by Jeremy Bentham as the voice of the Radicals, it enjoyed under her, one biographer wrote, its most brilliant run since John Stuart Mill's day.
Q 09In which periodical did the first work of "George Eliot" appear in 1857?
Blackwood's Magazine
Blackwood's Magazine took the tale blind: her partner sent it to the Edinburgh publisher without naming the writer, so its editor began printing a new author whose identity he did not know.
Q 10Adam Bede's narrator stops the story to praise the truthful, homely pictures of which nation's painters?
Dutch
Dutch paintings, chapter 17 says, are ones 'lofty-minded people despise', yet an old woman bent over her flower-pot moved Eliot more than angels and heroes, and her own fiction set out to do the same.
Q 11Which admirer of Adam Bede commissioned paintings of two of its scenes?
Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria commissioned Edward Corbould to paint Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel for her, even though polite society was then shunning the author for living openly with a married man.
Q 12Which famous novelist wrote to "George Eliot, Esq." in 1858 to say he suspected the new author was a woman?
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens had spotted 'womanly touches' in her first stories, and told her that if a man had written them, no man had ever made himself 'mentally so like a woman since the world began'.
Q 13Where is George Eliot buried?
Highgate Cemetery
Q 21Which German philosopher sneered at Eliot's morality as that of "little moralistic females à la Eliot"?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche's complaint, in Twilight of the Idols, was that the English had got rid of the Christian God and so clung all the tighter to Christian morality, and he made her his example.
Q 22The Spanish Gypsy, which George Eliot published in 1868 after a research trip to Spain, is a book-length work of what?
Poetry
Poetry: illness made her drop the first draft in 1865, and she went to Spain two years later to finish it. It sold well at first, but her verse never held readers the way her novels did.
Q 23What is the subtitle of Middlemarch?
A Study of Provincial Life
Highgate Cemetery: friends proposed Westminster Abbey, but her rejection of Christianity and her years with a married man told against it. A memorial stone in the Abbey followed only in 1980.
Q 14Which comedian wrote and starred in A Simple Twist of Fate, a 1994 film updating Silas Marner to modern America?
Steve Martin
Steve Martin plays a betrayed music teacher turned reclusive cabinetmaker, and his script ends in a courtroom, with a custody trial over the child he has raised.
Q 15Which American novelist called George Eliot "magnificently ugly — deliciously hideous" after their first meeting?
Henry James
Henry James took it back in the same letter home: within minutes, he told his father, a 'most powerful beauty' stole out and charmed him, so that he ended 'in falling in love with her'.
Q 16George Eliot's 1856 essay attacking the trivial plots of contemporary women's fiction was called what?
Silly Novels by Lady Novelists
She published it in the Westminster Review just before turning to fiction herself.
Q 17Which philosopher did George Eliot translate from Latin in the 1850s, in a version left unpublished until 1981?
Spinoza
Spinoza: she finished his Ethics in 1856, but her partner fell out with the publisher over terms, so the translation sat in manuscript and was not printed until 1981.
Q 18Which American essayist did the young George Eliot meet in 1848 at the home of her freethinking friends, the Brays?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson called on the Brays that July and went with them and Eliot to Stratford, and she told a friend afterwards: 'I have seen Emerson, the first man I have ever seen.'
Q 19After her father's death in 1849, George Eliot spent months living alone in which European city?
Geneva
Geneva: she went abroad with the Brays soon after the funeral, stayed on by herself when they turned for home, and lodged with the artist François D'Albert Durade, who painted her portrait there.
Q 20What finally moved George Eliot's estranged brother Isaac to write to her?
Her legal marriage
Her legal marriage: Isaac had cut her off when she set up home with a married man, and wrote only when she wed in 1880. She replied that their long silence had never broken her affection for him.
A Study of Provincial Life is exact: the subject is a whole town, not one hero, with gentry, clergy, tradesmen and labourers caught up in several plots that echo one another.
Q 24In Middlemarch, Dorothea loses her husband's fortune by marrying whom?
Will Ladislaw
Will Ladislaw, her husband's young cousin, is the one man the codicil names. The insult sets the town gossiping about the pair, and in the end she gives up the fortune and marries him anyway.
Q 25Middlemarch is set in the years immediately before which piece of legislation?
The 1832 Reform Act
The 1832 Reform Act hangs over the plot: Dorothea's uncle stands for Parliament as a reformer and is pelted with eggs at the hustings while the crowd jeers at an effigy of him.
Q 26In Middlemarch, whom does Dorothea marry first?
Edward Casaubon
Edward Casaubon is a dry clergyman-scholar far older than Dorothea. She marries him hoping to serve a great mind, and learns on their honeymoon in Rome how little warmth or greatness the marriage holds.
Q 27In Middlemarch, what scholarly work does Dorothea's first husband never finish?
The Key to All Mythologies
The Key to All Mythologies is meant to trace every myth back to a single origin, but its author cannot read German, so the scholarship that has already overtaken him sits unread.
Q 28Which idealistic young doctor in Middlemarch ruins his ambitions by marrying the vain Rosamond Vincy?
Tertius Lydgate
Tertius Lydgate arrives hoping to reform medicine and find the primitive tissue of all life. Rosamond's spending sinks him in debt, and he ends as a fashionable doctor who calls himself a failure.
Q 29Which Middlemarch banker's sordid past is exposed by the arrival of the drunkard John Raffles?
Nicholas Bulstrode
Nicholas Bulstrode, the town's pious banker, built his fortune on a concealed inheritance. When the blackmailing Raffles falls ill under his roof he hastens the man's death, and the scandal ruins him anyway.
Q 30Who unexpectedly inherits Peter Featherstone's fortune in Middlemarch instead of Fred Vincy?
His illegitimate son Joshua Rigg
His illegitimate son Joshua Rigg turns up at the will-reading, a stranger to every hopeful relative in the room. He takes the Featherstone name, then sells the land to set up as a money-changer.