Warm-up: heroes and heroines of the classics
Ten questions to open with, and most tables will take eight or nine of them. Every one describes a character and asks for a name, so they read aloud cleanly and they can be marked on a single word. If you are running this as a quiz night rather than reading it alone, this is the round to use for scoring practice before anything harder arrives.
The pattern worth noticing is how much of the English novel runs on unequal love. Darcy has to be humbled, Heathcliff is passed over for a richer man, Rochester is already married, Pip wants a girl raised specifically to hurt men, and Gatsby buys a mansion across the water from a woman who has moved on. Only three of the ten end up with the woman they wanted, and one of those has to wait fifty years for it.
Q1.Which wealthy gentleman first slights Elizabeth Bennet at a country ball, then falls in love with her?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mr Darcy (Fitzwilliam Darcy)
Pride and Prejudice opens on one of the most quoted sentences in English: 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.'
Q2.In Emily Bronte's only novel, who loves Catherine Earnshaw passionately while she marries a wealthier man for social advancement?Tap to reveal
Answer: Heathcliff
Catherine marries Edgar Linton, and Heathcliff spends the second half of Wuthering Heights ruining two families over it.
Q3.Which master of Thornfield Hall proposes to his governess, only for the wedding to be stopped by news that he already has a wife?Tap to reveal
Answer: Edward Rochester
Charlotte Bronte published Jane Eyre in 1847 under the male pen name Currer Bell; his first wife, Bertha Mason, is kept in the attic of the house.
Q4.Which Dickens orphan loves the cold and beautiful Estella, brought up by the eccentric Miss Havisham?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pip (Philip Pirrip)
Miss Havisham raises Estella deliberately to break men's hearts, having been jilted at her own wedding and stopped the clocks at twenty to nine.
Q5.Which Long Island millionaire builds a fortune and throws enormous parties to win back Daisy Buchanan?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jay Gatsby
The Great Gatsby sold poorly when Fitzgerald published it in 1925 and only became a fixture of American classrooms after cheap editions were shipped to troops in the Second World War.
Q6.Which pragmatic blockade runner is drawn to the coquettish Scarlett O'Hara?Tap to reveal
Answer: Rhett Butler
Margaret Mitchell won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Gone with the Wind, the only novel she published in her lifetime.
Q7.In Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, which medical student ruins himself over the shallow waitress Mildred Rogers?Tap to reveal
Answer: Philip Carey
The 1915 novel is heavily autobiographical: Maugham gave Philip a club foot in place of the severe stammer that shadowed his own youth.
Q8.Which character waits more than fifty years for Fermina Daza's husband to die before declaring himself again?Tap to reveal
Answer: Florentino Ariza
Gabriel Garcia Marquez counts the wait exactly in Love in the Time of Cholera: fifty-one years, nine months and four days.
Q9.Which American lieutenant deserts the Italian front and escapes to Switzerland with Catherine Barkley?Tap to reveal
Answer: Frederic Henry
Hemingway drove ambulances in Italy himself and was wounded at Fossalta in 1918, which is where A Farewell to Arms gets its detail.
Q10.In Thomas Hardy's novel, which husband flees with Tess after she has killed Alec d'Urberville?Tap to reveal
Answer: Angel Clare
The pair are caught at Stonehenge, where Tess falls asleep on the stone and wakes to the police - an ending Hardy's first readers found intolerable.
Authors and their books
Thirteen questions about the writers themselves. This round is harder than it looks, because knowing a novel is not the same as knowing who wrote it under what name and in what circumstances, and four of these turn on a pen name or a pseudonym. Allow a little longer per question and take answers in writing.
Pen names are the thread running through the round. The Bronte sisters published as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; Anna Gorenko became Akhmatova to spare her father embarrassment; David Cornwell became John le Carre because the Foreign Office would not let a serving officer publish under his own name. In each case the disguise was a condition of being read at all, and in each case it stuck long after the reason for it had gone.
Q1.Which English novelist sold Northanger Abbey to a publisher in 1803 but did not see it printed until after her death?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jane Austen
Crosby and Company bought the manuscript for ten pounds, sat on it for years, and sold it back; it finally appeared in December 1817 alongside Persuasion, months after Austen died.
Q2.Which of the Bronte sisters published under the pen name Ellis Bell?Tap to reveal
Answer: Emily Bronte
The three sisters first appeared in print together in an 1846 volume of poems as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, keeping their own initials but hiding their sex.
Q3.Which Victorian poet wrote Sonnets from the Portuguese for a husband who was also a famous poet?Tap to reveal
Answer: Elizabeth Barrett Browning
She was six years older than Robert Browning and an invalid in her father's house when they met in 1845; they eloped to Italy the following year.
Q4.Which American author wrote an antislavery novel that was first serialised in the newspaper The National Era?Tap to reveal
Answer: Harriet Beecher Stowe
Uncle Tom's Cabin ran as a serial through 1851 and 1852 before book publication, and it sold in numbers no American novel had reached before.
Q5.Which novelist, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, created a creature that refuses to eat meat?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mary Shelley
The creature tells its maker that acorns and berries are enough for him; Shelley's mother had written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman a generation earlier.
Q6.Which Russian poet was born Anna Gorenko and took a pen name at her father's insistence?Tap to reveal
Answer: Anna Akhmatova
Her father thought a poet in the family would disgrace the name, so she borrowed her great-grandmother's, and used it through decades of Soviet censorship.
Q7.Which Chilean novelist began The House of the Spirits on 8 January 1981, as a letter to her dying grandfather?Tap to reveal
Answer: Isabel Allende
She was living in exile in Caracas when word came that her grandfather was dying in Chile. The letter she began to him on 8 January 1981 turned into The House of the Spirits.
Q8.Which ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos wrote lyric verse meant to be sung to a lyre?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sappho
Almost all of her work is lost: what survives is one nearly complete poem and a scatter of fragments, many recovered from scraps of Egyptian papyrus.
Q9.Which eleventh-century Andalusian princess, daughter of a caliph of Cordoba, used her inheritance to run a literary salon?Tap to reveal
Answer: Wallada bint al-Mustakfi
Born around 1001, she taught poetry to women in Cordoba and traded verse - much of it insulting - with the poet Ibn Zaydun after their affair ended.
Q10.Which crime writer is generally reckoned the best-selling novelist of all time, at roughly two billion copies?Tap to reveal
Answer: Agatha Christie
Her estate puts it at over a billion copies in English and a billion more in translation, from sixty-six detective novels and fourteen short-story collections.
Q11.John le Carre was the pen name of which British writer?Tap to reveal
Answer: David Cornwell
He was working for the Foreign Office - and for British intelligence - when The Spy Who Came in from the Cold appeared, and serving officers could not publish under their own names.
Q12.Which Scottish author wrote the novella about a doctor who becomes cruel and remorseless after drinking a potion he has made?Tap to reveal
Answer: Robert Louis Stevenson
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was written in a few feverish weeks and published in January 1886; Stevenson's wife thought the first draft missed the point, and by the family's account he burned it and began again.
Q13.Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the memoir of a British officer better known by what name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Lawrence of Arabia (T. E. Lawrence)
He lost the entire first manuscript changing trains at Reading station in 1919 and rewrote it from memory and notes.
Great literary villains
Twelve villains, and this is where a literature round usually gets loud, because people argue about whether Lady Macbeth counts, whether Heathcliff should have been in this section instead of the first one, and whether the Marquise de Merteuil is a villain or simply the only honest person in her novel. Let the argument run for a minute and then move on.
Two of these were invented by writers who then could not get rid of them. Conan Doyle created Moriarty in order to kill Sherlock Holmes off at the Reichenbach Falls, and had to bring Holmes back a decade later under public pressure. Thomas Harris introduced Hannibal Lecter as a minor figure consulted by an investigator in Red Dragon, and spent the rest of his career writing about him instead.
Q1.Which Dickens villain, called a 'loathsome reptile' by his author, trains a gang of boys to pick pockets?Tap to reveal
Answer: Fagin
After a Jewish reader wrote to object, Dickens cut many of the references to Fagin's religion from the later chapters and from subsequent editions of Oliver Twist.
Q2.Which cringing, greedy clerk plots to take over Mr Wickfield's business in David Copperfield?Tap to reveal
Answer: Uriah Heep
His endless protests that he is 'very umble' turned the name into a byword for false modesty, and later gave a British rock band its name.
Q3.Which escaped convict turns out to be Pip's secret benefactor in Great Expectations?Tap to reveal
Answer: Abel Magwitch
The revelation destroys Pip's assumption that Miss Havisham has been funding him - the money came from the man he fed on the marshes in the first chapter.
Q4.Which Shakespearean villain convinces a general that his wife has been unfaithful?Tap to reveal
Answer: Iago
Iago has more lines than Othello himself, and he never gives a settled reason for what he does - he offers several and drops each one.
Q5.Which ambitious wife pushes her husband to murder Duncan, King of Scotland?Tap to reveal
Answer: Lady Macbeth
Shakespeare gives her no first name; the historical Macbeth's wife was called Gruoch, and he reigned for seventeen fairly stable years.
Q6.Which criminal does Arthur Conan Doyle describe as the 'Napoleon of crime'?Tap to reveal
Answer: Professor Moriarty
He is named in seven of the sixty Holmes tales but walks on stage in only one, The Final Problem - Conan Doyle invented him chiefly to have someone capable of killing Holmes off.
Q7.Which forensic psychiatrist created by Thomas Harris is also a cannibal?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hannibal Lecter
He was a supporting character in Red Dragon in 1981 and is on screen for only a fraction of the film of The Silence of the Lambs, which still won Anthony Hopkins the Best Actor Oscar.
Q8.Which scheming aristocrat manipulates everyone around her in the letters that make up Dangerous Liaisons?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Marquise de Merteuil
Choderlos de Laclos published Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1782, seven years before the Revolution swept away the class whose boredom it describes.
Q9.Which character in Steinbeck's East of Eden murders her own parents and uses everyone she meets?Tap to reveal
Answer: Cathy Trask (also called Kate)
She burns the family house down with her parents inside it in the opening chapters, and Steinbeck describes her flatly as a person born without a conscience.
Q10.Which Shakespearean usurper kills his brother, the King of Denmark, and marries the widowed queen?Tap to reveal
Answer: Claudius
Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play, and Claudius is the only character who confesses the murder outright - alone, trying and failing to pray.
Q11.Which villain of Dodie Smith's novel wants a litter of Dalmatian puppies for their fur?Tap to reveal
Answer: Cruella de Vil
The Hundred and One Dalmatians appeared in 1956 and Disney's animated film followed on 25 January 1961; the name is built to be heard as 'cruel devil'.
Q12.Which Shakespearean king has his own brother executed and two children killed to clear his path to the throne?Tap to reveal
Answer: Richard III
He is killed at Bosworth Field by Richmond, who becomes Henry VII - and since Shakespeare was writing under Henry's granddaughter Elizabeth I, the portrait was never going to be flattering.
Detectives, scientists and monsters
Thirteen questions on crime fiction and on the scientists who go too far, which turn out to be the two genres that put literature on the bestseller lists. Some of these are harder than anything above: the round starts with three detectives most people can name and ends with a detail from an Ian Fleming novel and an Elizabethan playwright who was dead at twenty-nine.
Truman Capote is the one to stop on. He read a short item in the New York Times about a farming family murdered in Holcomb, Kansas, went out there with his childhood friend Harper Lee, and spent six years on In Cold Blood - a book he insisted was a new form, the non-fiction novel. Lee did much of the interviewing, because the locals would talk to her and not to him. She published To Kill a Mockingbird while the work was still going on.
Q1.Which detective investigates the word RACHE written in blood beside a body in A Study in Scarlet?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sherlock Holmes
It is the first Holmes story, published in 1887; Lestrade reads the word as an unfinished 'Rachel' and Holmes points out that it is German for revenge.
Q2.Which detective is among the passengers when the American Samuel Ratchett is stabbed on a snowbound train?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hercule Poirot
Christie had been stranded on the real Orient Express by floodwater in 1931, three years before Murder on the Orient Express appeared.
Q3.Which Agatha Christie detective solves the case of a young woman's body found in the Bantrys' library?Tap to reveal
Answer: Miss Jane Marple
Christie said she wrote The Body in the Library to take the oldest cliche in detective fiction and see whether she could make it work; it was published in 1942.
Q4.In which Raymond Chandler novel is Philip Marlowe jailed over Terry Lennox's wife, then left a farewell note and a five-thousand-dollar bill?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Long Goodbye
Chandler wrote it while his wife Cissy was dying, and it is the most openly autobiographical of the Marlowe books - the drinking, the disgust, the friendship that fails.
Q5.Which Truman Capote book reconstructs the murder of the Clutter family on a Kansas farm?Tap to reveal
Answer: In Cold Blood
Capote called it a non-fiction novel and worked on it for six years; Harper Lee went to Kansas with him and did much of the interviewing.
Q6.In which James M. Cain novel does the drifter Frank Chambers meet Cora at a roadside diner and help her kill her husband?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Postman Always Rings Twice
Boston banned it on publication in 1934, and Camus said the flat, stripped narration was a direct model for The Outsider.
Q7.Which novel follows a St Petersburg student who murders a pawnbroker and is destroyed by his own conscience?Tap to reveal
Answer: Crime and Punishment
Dostoevsky was writing under crushing gambling debts and had to produce a second novel, The Gambler, in twenty-six days in the middle of it.
Q8.What is the first name of the student who assembles a creature from corpses in Mary Shelley's novel?Tap to reveal
Answer: Victor
The creature has no name at all; calling it Frankenstein is a mistake that dates back to the earliest stage adaptations of the 1818 book.
Q9.Which submarine captain appears in both Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island?Tap to reveal
Answer: Captain Nemo
Nemo is Latin for 'nobody' - the name Odysseus gives the Cyclops - and his submarine is called the Nautilus.
Q10.Which H. G. Wells character discovers a formula that makes a human body invisible?Tap to reveal
Answer: Griffin
The trap in The Invisible Man is that Griffin cannot reverse the process, and cannot eat without his food being visibly digested.
Q11.Experiments in which practice drive the plot of The Island of Doctor Moreau?Tap to reveal
Answer: Vivisection
Wells published it in 1896, at the height of the British campaign against animal experimentation, and reviewers at the time called the book revolting.
Q12.Which Bond villain survives a bullet through the chest because his heart is on the right side of his body?Tap to reveal
Answer: Doctor Julius No
The condition is dextrocardia; Dr No was Ian Fleming's sixth Bond novel, published in 1958, and the first of them to reach cinema screens, in 1962.
Q13.In Christopher Marlowe's play, whose shade does Doctor Faustus summon after selling his soul?Tap to reveal
Answer: Helen of Troy
The scene produces the line 'Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships' - written by a playwright who was Shakespeare's exact contemporary and was stabbed dead at twenty-nine.
Banned books and literary oddities
The hardest round, and the most interesting to read out, because the answer is rarely the strange part. Books have been suppressed for obscenity, for politics, for talking animals and for witchcraft, and the reasons say more about the censor than the book. Seven of these twelve are about bans; the last five are curiosities, including three words that entered written English through a playhouse.
One caution on those last three. The familiar claim that Shakespeare invented seventeen hundred words rests on how often the Oxford English Dictionary happened to quote him, and lexicographers have been quietly revising it downward for years as databases turn up earlier printed uses. What is safe to say is that the earliest recorded use of these particular words in English is Shakespeare's - not that nobody had ever said them before he wrote them down.
The human-skin binding is real and better documented than most quiz-night ghost stories. The practice has a name, anthropodermic bibliopegy, and a handful of confirmed examples survive in British and American collections; chemical testing in the last decade has also exposed a number of supposed examples as sheepskin.
Q1.Which James Joyce novel was barred from the United States until a 1933 court ruling found it was not obscene?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ulysses
Judge John Woolsey ruled that the book's effect was 'somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac', which was enough to let it in.
Q2.Which Nancy Garden novel about two girls falling in love was pulled from Kansas school libraries in the 1990s?Tap to reveal
Answer: Annie on My Mind
A federal court ruled in 1995 that removing it from the Olathe district's libraries had violated the First Amendment, and ordered the copies returned to the shelves.
Q3.Which Judy Blume novel about teenage sexuality has been among the most challenged books in American schools?Tap to reveal
Answer: Forever
Blume has had more titles on the American Library Association's challenged lists than almost any other author, and set up a fund to help writers fight censorship.
Q4.Which George Orwell novel was challenged in Jackson County, Florida in 1981 on the grounds that it was pro-communist?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell wrote it as an attack on Soviet totalitarianism, which makes it the most exactly backwards objection in the history of American book challenges.
Q5.Which Lewis Carroll book was banned in the Chinese province of Hunan in 1931 because animals in it used human speech?Tap to reveal
Answer: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
The censor's argument was that putting animals and people on the same level was an insult to human beings.
Q6.Which collection of stories, also known as The Thousand and One Nights, was ordered confiscated in Egypt in 1985 as a threat to public morals?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Arabian Nights
The unexpurgated edition had been in print in Cairo for a century; the case was brought against booksellers rather than the text itself.
Q7.Which children's series topped the American Library Association's list of most challenged books at the turn of the millennium, on the grounds that it promoted witchcraft?Tap to reveal
Answer: Harry Potter
It held the top spot for several consecutive years and was still the most challenged series of the whole decade to 2009.
Q8.A nineteenth-century copy of John Milton's poetical works held in Exeter is bound in what material?Tap to reveal
Answer: Human skin
It is the skin of George Cudmore, hanged at Devon County Gaol in March 1830; until the Anatomy Act, executed murderers were the main legal supply of bodies for dissection.
Q9.Which folklore has given us the witch Baba Yaga, who lives in a hut that walks on chicken legs?Tap to reveal
Answer: Russian and wider Slavic folklore
She is not a straightforward villain in the tales: she as often tests, feeds or advises the hero as she threatens to eat him.
Q10.The earliest recorded English use of the word 'puke' comes from which Shakespeare comedy?Tap to reveal
Answer: As You Like It
It is in the Seven Ages of Man speech - the infant 'mewling and puking in the nurse's arms'.
Q11.The earliest recorded English use of 'leapfrog' as a noun comes from which Shakespeare history play?Tap to reveal
Answer: Henry V
The king uses it while courting Katherine in the final act: if he could win a lady at leapfrog, he says, he would jump into a wife.
Q12.The earliest recorded English use of the adjective 'obscene' comes from which Shakespeare comedy, in which a king and three noblemen swear off women to study?Tap to reveal
Answer: Love's Labour's Lost
The word turns up in a wildly overwritten letter from the Spaniard Don Armado, which is the joke - it is a word chosen to sound impressive.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many literature questions should one quiz round have?
Ten to twelve. A literature round tires a table faster than a film or music round, because there is no tune or image to carry it and every question is answered from memory alone. If you want sixty questions in an evening, break them across the night rather than running them together.
Which books come up most often in literature trivia?
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Frankenstein and the Sherlock Holmes stories. They dominate because they are the books most people have been made to read at school, which is what a quiz round is really testing.
Are these suitable for a high-school English class?
The first two rounds are, and they line up well with a standard reading list. The banned-books round works for older students as a discussion prompt rather than a scoring round: the interesting question there is not what was banned but who decided, and on what grounds.
Can I print the questions and answers?
Yes. The page prints as a question sheet on its own or with the answers included, it is free, and there is no account to make.
Did Shakespeare really invent seventeen hundred words?
Almost certainly not. The figure comes from counting how often the Oxford English Dictionary cited him as the first recorded user, and the OED drew heavily on Shakespeare because his texts were exhaustively indexed while most printed matter of the period was not. As searchable databases of sixteenth-century printing have grown, earlier uses have kept turning up. The honest phrasing is 'first recorded use', not 'invented'.
What is the best-selling novel of all time?
Nobody can say. The figures quoted for Don Quixote and A Tale of Two Cities - five hundred million and two hundred million - trace back to no auditable source, and sales records for books published before the twentieth century barely exist. The firmest number belongs to an author rather than a book: Agatha Christie's estate puts her sales at over a billion copies in English and a billion more in translation.
