Q 01/05

What was George Eliot's real name?

A) Violet Paget

B) Amantine Dupin

C) Mary Ann Evans

D) Frances Clarke

Answer · why

C) 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 ...

Q 02/05

George Eliot was born in 1819 in which Midlands county?

A) Warwickshire

B) Northamptonshire

C) Lincolnshire

D) Gloucestershire

Answer · why

A) 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 stori...

Q 03/05

George Eliot's 1854 journey to Germany with her partner was partly research for his biography of which writer?

A) Schiller

B) Goethe

C) Heine

D) Hoffmann

Answer · why

B) 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 04/05

The narrator of George Eliot's eerie 1859 novella The Lifted Veil is cursed with which unwanted power?

A) Clairvoyance

B) Immortality

C) Invisibility

D) Shape-shifting

Answer · why

A) 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...

Q 05/05

What did George Eliot's father do for a living?

A) Kept a public house

B) Ran a ribbon factory

C) Managed a country estate

D) Served as a parish curate

Answer · why

C) 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 ...