100 Fun Facts About Classic Literature

Which Jane Austen novel features Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy?

Pride and Prejudice was published in January 1813; its opening line about a single man in possession of a good fortune is among the most quoted in English fiction.

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, which character is Polonius's daughter and loves the prince?

Ophelia is a prominent character in Shakespeare's 'Hamlet,' whose tragic arc sees her driven to madness and ultimately drowning.

Which 1932 dystopian novel is set in a World State where citizens are engineered into a social hierarchy?

Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' explores a society that sacrifices individual freedom and human values for manufactured happiness and stability through conditioning and genetic manipulation.

Who wrote 'The Aeneid,' the epic of Aeneas's journey after the fall of Troy?

Virgil, a Roman poet, wrote 'The Aeneid' between 30 and 19 BC, an epic that establishes a founding myth for Rome and glorifies its principles.

Which Russian author wrote 'Crime and Punishment', about Rodion Raskolnikov?

Fyodor Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' is a psychological novel that delves into the mental anguish and moral struggles of a former student who commits murder.

In Melville's Moby-Dick, who is the monomaniacal captain of the Pequod?

Captain Ahab commands the Pequod, obsessed with the white whale that bit off his leg on a previous voyage; Starbuck is his first mate.

In Cervantes's novel of 1605, which earthy farm labourer is recruited as Don Quixote's squire?

Sancho Panza's earthy common sense is set against his master's lofty chivalric rhetoric throughout the book.

Charlotte Brontë first published Jane Eyre in October 1847 under what pen name?

Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre as Currer Bell in October 1847; her sisters Emily and Anne used the matching pseudonyms Ellis Bell and Acton Bell.

Which English author wrote the 1818 Gothic novel subtitled The Modern Prometheus?

Mary Shelley began Frankenstein at eighteen; the first edition appeared anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was twenty.

In which cathedral city stood the shrine of Thomas Becket that Chaucer's pilgrims ride toward?

Chaucer wrote the twenty-four tales, mostly in verse, between 1387 and 1400.

Which orphan narrates Charles Dickens's Great Expectations?

Pip narrates Great Expectations; the story opens in a graveyard, where the escaped convict Abel Magwitch seizes him.

In Great Expectations, which jilted recluse still wears her wedding dress in Satis House?

Miss Havisham, jilted on her wedding morning, stopped every clock in Satis House and raises her adopted daughter Estella to break men's hearts.

A Tale of Two Cities is set in London and which other city during the French Revolution?

The two cities are London and Paris; Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine in Paris in place of Charles Darnay.

In Wuthering Heights, which tenant of Thrushcross Grange hears Nelly Dean's story?

Mr Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, narrates the frame story; housekeeper Nelly Dean tells him the Earnshaw and Linton history during his winter illness.

What was the real name of George Eliot, author of Middlemarch?

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans; Middlemarch appeared in eight instalments in 1871-72, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life.

Bram Stoker's Dracula opens with which English solicitor travelling to a castle in Transylvania?

Jonathan Harker, a young solicitor, travels to Count Dracula's castle to complete a property purchase; his journal entries open the 1897 novel.

Thomas Hardy set Tess of the d'Urbervilles and most of his novels in which fictional English region?

Hardy's Wessex, named for the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom, is a fictionalised south-west England; Tess and Angel Clare stumble upon Stonehenge near the novel's end.

In Gulliver's Travels, which land is inhabited by tiny people caught up in petty political disputes?

Lilliput's six-inch inhabitants feud over which end of an egg to break; Swift said he wrote the 1726 satire 'to vex the world rather than divert it'.

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe spends how many years on his desert island?

Crusoe is marooned for 28 years, two months and nineteen days; the tale was likely inspired by Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years on a Pacific island.

In what poetic form is John Milton's Paradise Lost written?

Paradise Lost is in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter; Milton, blind since 1652, dictated it and defended the lack of rhyme in a prefatory note.

In Beowulf, what is the name of the Danish mead hall terrorised by the monster Grendel?

Heorot is King Hrothgar's great hall; the Old English epic runs to 3,182 alliterative lines and survives in a single manuscript.

Which scheming heroine drives Thackeray's Vanity Fair, subtitled A Novel without a Hero?

Becky Sharp, the penniless and ambitious governess, schemes her way through Regency society; the title comes from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

Lewis Carroll's Wonderland heroine shares her name with a real girl from which family he knew in Oxford?

The story was conceived on a boat trip on 4 July 1862 and published in 1865.

Who narrates The Great Gatsby?

Nick Carraway, Gatsby's neighbour and Daisy's cousin, narrates; Fitzgerald set the 1925 novel among the parties of Long Island's North Shore in 1922.

Along which river do Huck and Jim travel by raft in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

Huck and Jim raft down the Mississippi aiming for Cairo, where the Ohio joins it in the free state of Illinois, but drift past it in fog.

Which Puritan heroine is punished in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter?

Hester Prynne must wear a scarlet A for adultery; she refuses to name the father of her child, the minister Arthur Dimmesdale.

Tolstoy's War and Peace is set during which conflict?

War and Peace spans the Napoleonic Wars from 1805 to the French invasion of Russia in 1812, following five aristocratic families.

What recurring setting frames the major plot turns of Anna Karenina, including its ending?

Railway trains and stations frame the novel: Anna meets her future lover at a Moscow station where a guard is crushed, and at the end she throws herself under a train.

Who is the ex-convict at the heart of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables?

Jean Valjean, jailed nineteen years for stealing bread, is pursued by Inspector Javert; the 1862 novel culminates in the June Rebellion of 1832 in Paris.

Gustave Flaubert was put on trial in 1857 over which debut novel, on the grounds that it was obscene?

Madame Bovary was serialised in the Revue de Paris in 1856; Flaubert was acquitted on 7 February 1857 and the novel appeared in book form that April.

In Dante's Divine Comedy, which woman guides the pilgrim through Paradise?

Beatrice, Dante's idealised beloved, guides him through Paradise; Virgil, who leads him through Hell and most of Purgatory, represents human reason.

In Homer's Odyssey, what is the name of Odysseus's faithful wife, besieged by suitors?

Penelope holds off the suitors by weaving and unravelling a shroud; Odysseus's journey home from Troy takes ten years and every one of his crew dies along the way.

Homer's Iliad traces the wrath of which Greek warrior?

The Iliad opens by invoking the wrath of Achilles; despite popular belief, the poem never depicts the Trojan Horse or the fall of Troy.

Who painted the portrait in Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray?

Basil Hallward paints the portrait that ages in Dorian's place; a shorter version appeared in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890 before the 1891 book.

Treasure Island was first serialised in a children's magazine under what pseudonym?

Stevenson signed the 1881-82 Young Folks serial 'Captain George North'; the tale gave popular culture its X-marked maps and one-legged pirates with parrots.

Jane Austen's Emma is set in which fictional Surrey village?

Emma Woodhouse lives at Hartfield in the village of Highbury; Austen predicted she would create 'a heroine whom no one but myself will much like'.

Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811 with what in place of the author's name on the title page?

The 1811 title page read 'By A Lady'; the novel follows the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, after they lose the family estate.

James Joyce's Ulysses takes place over a single day, now celebrated as Bloomsday, in which year?

Ulysses takes place on 16 June 1904; Sylvia Beach published the book in Paris on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday.

In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Marlow travels upriver in search of which ivory trader?

Kurtz, the Inner Station's ivory agent, has set himself up as a god among the locals; the novella inspired Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis opens with salesman Gregor Samsa transformed into what?

Kafka's German phrase, ungeheueres Ungeziefer, means "monstrous vermin"; the cockroach is a later convention.

Which tutor in Voltaire's Candide insists that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds?

Dr Pangloss parrots Leibnizian optimism through every disaster in Candide; Voltaire's reply, in the last line, is that 'we must cultivate our garden'.

What is the surname of the four sisters in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women?

The March sisters are Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy; Jo's school at Plumfield is the setting of the sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys.

In Uncle Tom's Cabin, which brutal Louisiana planter buys Tom after St. Clare's death?

Simon Legree, a cruel cotton planter on the Red River, buys Tom at a New Orleans auction after Augustine St. Clare's death and later has him beaten to death.

In which island prison is Edmond Dantès held in The Count of Monte Cristo?

Dantès spends fourteen years in the Château d'If, an island fortress off Marseille, where fellow prisoner Abbé Faria reveals the location of the Monte Cristo treasure.

Which of these is NOT one of the original three musketeers in Dumas's novel?

D'Artagnan, the young Gascon, is befriended by Athos, Porthos and Aramis, 'the three inseparables', but cannot immediately join the musketeer corps.

Which is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy, first performed around 1606?

Macbeth, about half the length of Hamlet, is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy; actors' superstition renamed it 'the Scottish play'.

Which ensign manipulates Othello into suspecting his wife Desdemona of infidelity?

The play moves from Venice to Cyprus, and Iago's is one of Shakespeare's four longest roles.

Which daughter does King Lear disown for saying she loves him only according to her duty?

Cordelia's honesty costs her everything: Goneril and Regan's flattering speeches win them her share of the kingdom.

Who leads the gang of juvenile pickpockets that Oliver Twist falls in with in London?

Fagin trains the boys, including the Artful Dodger, to pick pockets; Dickens himself had worked in a blacking warehouse at twelve.

What object do the stranded boys use to call meetings in William Golding's Lord of the Flies?

Ralph blows the conch shell to summon assemblies and it becomes the symbol of order; Golding wrote the 1954 novel as a grim reply to R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island.

In George Orwell's 1984, what has Great Britain been renamed?

Britain has become Airstrip One, a province of the superstate Oceania ruled by Big Brother.

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's final novel, revolves around what crime?

The novel revolves around patricide: the murder of Fyodor Karamazov, for which his son Dmitri is tried; Dostoevsky died less than four months after the serialisation ended in 1880.

Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) is set in England during which decade?

It broke from Scott's habit of setting the Waverley novels in Scotland, and shaped popular images of Richard the Lionheart, Prince John and Robin Hood.

Under what title did Jonathan Cape publish Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises in London in 1927?

Cape issued it as Fiesta; Hemingway's first novel is a roman à clef built from his Paris circle and a 1925 trip to the San Fermín festival in Pamplona.

What is the name of the endless Chancery lawsuit at the centre of Dickens's Bleak House?

Jarndyce and Jarndyce arose from conflicting wills and consumes the whole estate in costs; Dickens's satire fed the reform movement that merged the courts in the 1870s.

In Dante's Inferno, which traitor is chewed in Satan's central mouth?

At the frozen bottom of Hell, Satan's three mouths chew Judas Iscariot in the centre, with Brutus and Cassius, Caesar's assassins, on either side.

Which Jane Austen heroine, aged 27, gets a second chance with Captain Frederick Wentworth?

Anne Elliot, persuaded eight years earlier to break the engagement, reunites with Wentworth; Persuasion appeared in December 1817, five months after Austen's death, alongside Northanger Abbey.

George Eliot's Silas Marner is subtitled 'The Weaver of' which village?

Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe was published in April 1861; the deceptively simple tale of a linen weaver takes on religion, industrialisation and community.

Which Gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe is the one most often referenced in Austen's Northanger Abbey?

Catherine Morland devours The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and imagines Northanger Abbey as a Radcliffe castle; Austen sold the manuscript in 1803 but it appeared only after her death, in December 1817.

Gogol burned the manuscript of the second part of which 1842 novel shortly before his death?

Gogol called Dead Souls an 'epic poem in prose'; what survives of Part Two was pieced together from his notebooks, and the book ends mid-sentence.

Which narrator introduces himself in the famous opening sentence of Moby-Dick?

Ishmael signs on to the Pequod at Nantucket and is the only survivor left to tell the tale, kept afloat by Queequeg's coffin.

In A Christmas Carol, what is the name of Scrooge's dead business partner?

Jacob Marley has been dead seven years when the story opens; his ghost drags chains and cash boxes forged by a lifetime of greed.

Anna Karenina's scandalous affair is with which cavalry officer?

Count Alexei Vronsky, a dashing cavalry officer, becomes Anna's lover; they flee to Italy to escape Petersburg society, but after returning to Russia their lives steadily unravel.

What is the name of Phileas Fogg's French valet in Around the World in Eighty Days?

Jean Passepartout is hired on 2 October 1872 after Fogg sacks his previous valet for bringing shaving water two degrees too cold.

To Kill a Mockingbird is set in which fictional Alabama town?

Maycomb is modelled on Harper Lee's real hometown of Monroeville; Scout Finch narrates three Depression years, 1933 to 1935.

In Animal Farm, which cart-horse is sold to the knacker after collapsing at the windmill?

Boxer, the loyal cart-horse, is driven off in a knacker's van; Squealer announces a hero's death, but Napoleon has pocketed the money and bought whisky for the pigs.

What is the name of the O'Hara family's Georgia plantation in Gone with the Wind?

Tara, named for the ancient seat of Irish kings, is Gerald O'Hara's plantation; Twelve Oaks is the neighbouring Wilkes plantation that Scarlett covets along with Ashley.

Which hot-tempered cousin of Juliet does Romeo kill, earning his exile from Verona?

Tybalt has just stabbed Mercutio under Romeo's arm; Prince Escalus banishes Romeo rather than executing him.

In Goethe's Faust, which devil wagers with God that he can corrupt the scholar Faust?

Mephistopheles first enters Faust's life as a black poodle, which transforms in the study into a travelling student who refuses to give his name.

What was Lewis Carroll's real name?

Dodgson spent most of his life at Christ Church, Oxford, as a mathematics scholar, teacher and Anglican deacon, and was also a pioneering photographer.

Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle sleeps for how many years in the Catskills?

He dozes off a loyal subject of King George and wakes to find he has slept through the entire American Revolution.

Victor Frankenstein builds his creature while studying at which university?

Victor leaves Geneva for the University of Ingolstadt, in Bavaria, after his mother dies of scarlet fever; the creature later learns his origins from Victor's journal, taken from the laboratory.

Under what working title did Jane Austen draft Pride and Prejudice in 1796–97?

Austen drafted it as First Impressions; her father offered the manuscript to the London bookseller Thomas Cadell in November 1797 and was turned down by return of post.

What weapon does Raskolnikov use to murder the pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment?

Raskolnikov kills the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna with an axe, then also kills her half-sister Lizaveta, who stumbles in on the scene, a second death his theory never allowed for.

Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond stood near which Massachusetts town?

Walden Pond lies just outside Concord; Thoreau stayed two years, two months and two days on woodland owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and wrote his first book there.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson first appeared in which 1887 story?

A Study in Scarlet ran in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887 after several rejections; Conan Doyle was paid £25 for the copyright.

What name does Odysseus give the Cyclops Polyphemus before blinding him?

When the blinded giant cries that Nobody is hurting him, the other Cyclopes assume the gods are to blame and leave him be.

In Sophocles' tragedy, Oedipus unwittingly becomes king of which city?

Oedipus won the throne of Thebes by solving the riddle of the Sphinx, then married the widowed queen Jocasta, his own mother.

In Search of Lost Time: which cake dipped in tea unlocks Proust's narrator's memories?

The madeleine dipped in tea triggers an involuntary memory of childhood in Combray, the theme the whole seven-volume novel keeps circling back to.

Camus's The Stranger sees Meursault kill an unnamed man on a beach in which country?

Camus was himself born in French Algeria; at trial Meursault is condemned less for the killing than for failing to weep at his mother's funeral.

Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca is haunted by which West Country estate?

'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again' opens the novel; the unnamed narrator is tormented by the housekeeper Mrs Danvers's devotion to the first Mrs de Winter.

In the Iliad, Achilles returns to battle after Hector kills which close companion?

Patroclus had led the Myrmidons into battle wearing Achilles' armour; his death drives the poem's final books to their bloody climax.

In Gulliver's Travels, the rational Houyhnhnms are what kind of creature?

The Houyhnhnms are rational horses who share their land with the Yahoos, savage human-like brutes; Gulliver comes home preferring the company of his stable to his family.

The ending of Moby-Dick was based on the 1820 sinking of which real whaleship?

A sperm whale rammed the Nantucket ship 2,000 miles off South America; first mate Owen Chase's account of the wreck was one of Melville's sources.

Which lawyer investigates the link between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Stevenson's novella?

Gabriel John Utterson's weekly walk with his kinsman Enfield opens the story; Enfield's tale of a man trampling a girl in the street sets the investigation going.

In Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester's first wife Bertha Mason comes from which island?

Rochester married Bertha in Spanish Town, Jamaica; Jean Rhys's 1966 prequel Wide Sargasso Sea retells her Caribbean girlhood under the name Antoinette.

In Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke marries which elderly clergyman and scholar?

Edward Casaubon, a dry clergyman-scholar, is her first husband; on their Roman honeymoon she discovers the sterility of his never-finished Key to All Mythologies and befriends his young cousin Will Ladislaw.

Which 1895 Hardy novel was received so badly that a bishop reportedly burned it?

Jude the Obscure so offended critics that the Bishop of Wakefield said he had burned it; some booksellers sold it in brown paper bags, and Hardy turned to poetry for the rest of his life.

In The War of the Worlds, the first Martian cylinder lands near which Surrey town?

The cylinder lands on Horsell Common near Woking, where Wells had moved in 1895; his Martians destroy much of the town before marching on London.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Jack was found as a baby in a handbag at which station?

Jack was found in a handbag in the cloakroom at Victoria station, 'the Brighton line'; Miss Prism had put her manuscript in the pram and the baby in the handbag.

Which novel made Edith Wharton the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?

The Age of Innocence won in 1921 after the jury had initially recommended Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, which the board overruled.

Which was Anton Chekhov's last play, first staged by Stanislavski in January 1904?

The Cherry Orchard opened at the Moscow Art Theatre on 17 January 1904, six months before Chekhov's death; he called it a comedy with touches of farce, while Stanislavski staged it as tragedy.

In The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, what kind of animal is Esmeralda's pet Djali?

Djali performs tricks for coins, telling the time and spelling out Phoebus's name, and the poet Gringoire ends up fonder of the goat than of Esmeralda.

Which 18th-century novel includes a page printed entirely in black to mourn a character?

Tristram Shandy's black page mourns the parson Yorick; Sterne also gave readers a marbled page, blank pages and paragraphs censored with asterisks.

Dickens's father was jailed in which debtors' prison, later the setting for Little Dorrit?

John Dickens was sent to the Marshalsea in February 1824, and the 12-year-old Charles had to leave school; Amy Dorrit is born inside its walls.

Milton's 1674 second edition rearranged Paradise Lost into how many books?

The 1667 first edition had ten books; the new division followed the model of Virgil's Aeneid.

Which poet was prosecuted and fined 300 francs in 1857 over Les Fleurs du mal?

Six poems were suppressed as an outrage to public decency; the ban on publishing them in France was not lifted until 1949.

Chaucer's pilgrims gather at which Southwark inn before setting out for Canterbury?

The Tabard stood on Borough High Street until its demolition in 1873; its neighbour the George is London's last surviving galleried coaching inn.

In Poe's The Raven, the bird perches on a bust of which classical figure?

Pallas is an epithet of Athena, goddess of wisdom; the bust sits above the chamber door, where the raven is still sitting as the poem ends.

Which 14th-century book has ten young Florentines tell 100 tales while fleeing the plague?

Boccaccio's Decameron has seven women and three men each tell a story a day for ten days in a villa outside Florence; it has been nicknamed the Human Comedy.