Passing (Nella Larsen Novel)
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50 free Passing (Nella Larsen Novel) trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Nella Larsen's Passing is a short novel that keeps growing in the mind. Two women who grew up together on the South Side of Chicago meet again by chance as adults: Irene Redfield has built a careful, respectable life uptown in New York, while Clare Kendry has crossed the colour line and married a man who must never learn where she came from. What follows is part social comedy, part psychological thriller, told so closely through Irene's eyes that readers still argue about what really happens on the last page. This quiz covers the whole book: the letter that opens it, the rooftop reunion, Clare's tense tea with her husband, the charity dance, Irene's growing suspicion and the party where everything breaks. Other questions look at Larsen's own remarkable life, the real events and ideas behind the story, how critics have read it, and the film adaptation. It is written for students meeting the novel in an American literature course or an anthology, for book clubs, and for anyone who has just finished it and wants to check what they caught. Every question is multiple choice, and each answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Passing, what does Clare Kendry say is the only thing stopping her from leaving John Bellew?
Her daughter
Her daughter is all that holds her back, Clare says on her last night; if Bellew ever learned the truth, she adds, she would move uptown and do as she pleased.
Q 02Clare Kendry dies at a crowded party on the last pages of Passing after falling from where?
An open window
An open window on the sixth floor is where Clare is standing when her husband bursts in; a moment later she is gone, and Larsen never says exactly how.
Q 03John Bellew explains his racist pet name for Clare in Passing by joking that what is happening?
Her skin is getting darker
Her skin is getting darker, Bellew says with a grin, though she was as white as a lily when they married; he has no idea that he is joking about the truth.
Q 04Which actor made her feature directing debut with the 2021 film adaptation of Nella Larsen's Passing?
Rebecca Hall
Rebecca Hall wrote and directed it after reflecting on her own family: her mother was of mixed race, and some of her relatives had passed as white.
Q 05To which country does Irene's restless husband Brian long to move in Nella Larsen's Passing?
Brazil
Brazil is Brian's old dream of escape from America; Irene once fought the idea so hard that she hinted she would end the marriage.
Q 06On the roof of which Chicago hotel does Irene Redfield run into Clare Kendry in Passing?
The Drayton
The Drayton has a rooftop tea room where Irene, sheltering from the August heat, is herself passing for white when Clare recognises her.
Q 07In the final part of Passing, what does Irene become convinced is going on between Brian and Clare?
A love affair
A love affair is what Irene suspects after Brian invites Clare to a party she had left her out of; she never finds proof, and the reader sees only her fear.
Q 08Nella Larsen's Passing is a landmark novel of which African-American cultural movement of the 1920s?
The Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance made Larsen's name, and she has been called its premier novelist, though she published only two novels before falling silent.
Q 09At Clare's tea in Passing, what do Clare and Gertrude both say they dreaded throughout pregnancy?
A dark-skinned baby
A dark-skinned baby would have exposed Clare to her husband; Irene, listening, answers coolly that one of her own boys is dark.
Q 10The 2021 film adaptation of Nella Larsen's Passing was shot in which distinctive visual style?
Black and white
Black and white photography, framed in a nearly square 4:3 ratio, was chosen to evoke the texture of the 1920s, one of the film's stars said.
Q 11What is the profession of Brian Redfield, a job he privately says he has come to hate, in Passing?
Doctor
Doctor is Brian's calling in name only: he complains of sick people and their meddling families, and it was Irene who insisted he keep his New York practice.
Q 12In Passing, which job did Clare Kendry's father Bob do in the Chicago building where they lived?
Janitor
Janitor was a puzzling job for Bob Kendry, who had been in college with the fathers of Irene's friends; drink, the novel hints, brought him down.
Q 13Orphaned at fifteen in Passing, which relatives take in Clare Kendry and work her like a servant?
Her father's aunts
Q 21Which subject does Brian raise at dinner in front of his sons, against Irene's wishes, late in Passing?
A lynching
A lynching he has read about in the evening paper leads Brian to tell young Ted why such things happen; Irene wants the boys shielded for a few more years.
Q 22Which real 1920s lawsuit crosses Irene's mind in Passing as she wonders if Bellew could divorce Clare?
The Rhinelander case
The Rhinelander case of 1925 saw a wealthy white New Yorker sue to annul his marriage, claiming his wife had hidden her colour; the jury sided with her.
Q 23Nella Larsen divides Passing into three parts titled Encounter, Re-Encounter and which third word?
Finale
Her father's aunts, white, pious and poor, hide Clare's ancestry from the neighbours, which later makes it easy for her to pass.
Q 14Which of these does Irene Redfield decide is the most important and desired thing in life in Passing?
Security
Security matters more to Irene than anything else, she admits on the final night, which is why Clare's presence feels like a threat to her whole life.
Q 15Where is young Margery Bellew at school while her parents spend the winter in New York in Passing?
Switzerland
Switzerland keeps Margery far from her mother's risky visits uptown; Clare dreads sailing back in the spring, though it will reunite them.
Q 16On the hotel roof in Passing, what finally makes Irene recognise the staring stranger as Clare Kendry?
Her laugh
Her laugh, a trill like a small bell, gives Clare away after twelve years; until then Irene had taken her for a white stranger.
Q 17Clare invites herself to which organisation's annual dance in Passing, where Irene runs the tickets?
Negro Welfare League
Negro Welfare League tickets cost a dollar, and Irene warns that anyone can buy one; Clare goes anyway and dances again and again with Brian.
Q 18What does Irene Redfield let slip and shatter at the party she hosts for Hugh Wentworth in Passing?
A teacup
A teacup slips from her hand as rage at Clare and Brian boils up; she then jokes to Hugh that she broke the ugly heirloom on purpose.
Q 19Which friend, unmistakably Black, is arm in arm with Irene when she collides with John Bellew in Passing?
Felise Freeland
Felise Freeland is visibly Black, so Bellew grasps in a glance that Irene, and therefore his own wife, may not be what he assumed.
Q 20When John Bellew greets Irene on a Manhattan street late in Passing, how does she respond?
She pretends not to know him
She pretends not to know him, giving the cool stare she keeps for mashers, yet later regrets it: one word of introduction would have exposed Clare.
Finale is a musical word for the closing section, which runs from a mild December through Christmas to the night of the last party.
Q 24Passing begins with an epigraph asking what Africa means to the speaker, written by which poet?
Countee Cullen
Countee Cullen's verse pictures a speaker generations removed from the land his ancestors knew, a distance from origins that shadows Clare too.
Q 25To which white novelist and photographer, with his wife Fania Marinoff, did Nella Larsen dedicate Passing?
Carl Van Vechten
Carl Van Vechten, a white champion of Black writers, had helped Larsen find a publisher for her early work, and the two were close friends.
Q 26Nella Larsen tells Passing in which narrative mode, filtered throughout by Irene Redfield's point of view?
Third person
Third person narration stays so close to Irene's thoughts that readers never see Clare except through her jealous, unreliable eyes.
Q 27What position does Zulena, small and mahogany-coloured, hold in the Redfields' house in Passing?
Maid
Maid to the Redfields, Zulena lets critics such as Mary Wilson show how Irene, for all her race loyalty, is at ease being waited on by another Black woman.
Q 28What weather sets in over New York on the day of the fatal party that ends Passing?
A snowstorm
A snowstorm lasts all day, leaving the courtyard below the party white and untouched; the story had begun, by contrast, in the blaze of a Chicago August.
Q 29What colour is the shining gown Clare Kendry wears to the party on the last night of her life in Passing?
Red
Red makes Clare a flame in Irene's eyes that night; she had worn green at the hotel, blue at her tea and black taffeta to the dance.
Q 30Gertrude Martin's white husband Fred, who knows she is Black, follows which trade in Passing?
Butcher
Butcher is the family trade: Fred Martin took over his father's Chicago meat market, and Irene thinks unkindly that Gertrude now looks the part.