Q 01/05

Which novel did Mary Shelley begin after a ghost-story challenge among friends at a villa near Geneva in 1816?

A) The Vampyre

B) Frankenstein

C) The Last Man

D) Dracula

Answer · why

B) Frankenstein

Frankenstein grew out of a wet summer when the party stayed indoors reading German ghost stories aloud. Mary Shelley was 18 when she began it, and the...

Q 02/05

Which animal did Lord Byron keep as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where the rules banned pet dogs?

A) A bear

B) A wolf

C) A lynx

D) An otter

Answer · why

A) A bear

A bear broke no rule, because the college statutes never mentioned one. Byron even suggested that he would apply for a college fellowship for it.

Q 03/05

Which English Romantic poet qualified as an apothecary before dying of tuberculosis in Rome at just 25?

A) Lord Byron

B) Percy Bysshe Shelley

C) John Keats

D) John Clare

Answer · why

C) John Keats

John Keats asked for a gravestone with no name on it, only a line saying his name was written in water. His poems had been in print for less than four...

Q 04/05

Which French Romantic wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and published Les Misérables while exiled on Guernsey?

A) Alexandre Dumas

B) Honoré de Balzac

C) Gustave Flaubert

D) Victor Hugo

Answer · why

D) Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo drew more than two million people to his funeral procession through Paris in 1885. His plays Cromwell and Hernani had put him at the front...

Q 05/05

Which composer, who wrote his Ninth Symphony while nearly deaf, led music from the Classical style into Romanticism?

A) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

B) Ludwig van Beethoven

C) Joseph Haydn

D) Johannes Brahms

Answer · why

B) Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven never went totally deaf, and could still make out low tones and sudden loud sounds in his final years. The Ninth had its premiere...