Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Brontë Family trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Brontë family trivia quiz covers the parsonage household that produced three of the greatest novelists in English. It starts with the family itself: the Irish curate who respelt his name, the mother from Penzance and the aunt who replaced her, the school that killed the two eldest girls, the twelve toy soldiers that spawned Glass Town, Angria and Gondal, and the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Then it turns to the books: Jane Eyre and its madwoman, Wuthering Heights and its narrators, Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Charlotte's suppression of it, Shirley and Villette. The second half is the people and their fates: Charlotte in Brussels and the torn-up letters to Héger, Emily refusing the doctor, Anne's grave in Scarborough, Branwell's pillar, his railway job and his affair, Patrick's gun and his long survival, Gaskell's biography and its libel trouble, the film Heathcliffs and Kate Bush. About a third of the questions suit anyone who has read one Brontë novel; the rest are for those who know their Gondal from their Angria. Our Jane Austen and Victorian literature quizzes are natural companions. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Brontë family, its members, their novels and Haworth, and each explanation adds one more detail.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Yorkshire village were Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne born before the 1820 move to Haworth?
Thornton
The birthplace near Bradford is a place of pilgrimage; the Haworth parsonage draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.
Q 02Under what male pseudonyms did Charlotte, Emily and Anne publish?
Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell
The initials matched their own; the surname Bell may have come from their father's curate Arthur Bell Nicholls.
Q 03What was the original Irish family surname before Patrick Brontë changed the spelling?
Brunty
It anglicised the clan name Ó Pronntaigh, hereditary scribes of Fermanagh; Patrick added the diaeresis to show two syllables.
Q 04One theory says Patrick chose 'Brontë' to link himself with which admiral, who was Duke of Bronte?
Horatio Nelson
Biographer Clement Shorter proposed the idea in 1896.
Q 05Where was Patrick Brontë born in 1777?
County Down, Ireland
One of ten children of a poor family, he won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge.
Q 06How many children did Patrick and Maria Brontë have?
Six
Maria and Elizabeth, the two eldest, died in childhood in 1825.
Q 07Where did the children's mother, Maria, come from?
Penzance, Cornwall
She died of cancer in 1821 aged 38, and her sister Elizabeth came from Penzance to raise the children.
Q 08Who was 'Aunt Branwell'?
The children's mother's sister who raised them
A Methodist from Penzance, she left the girls £900 in her will, which freed them from teaching and governess work.
Q 09The two eldest Brontë sisters died in 1825 after attending which harsh boarding school?
Cowan Bridge
It became Lowood in Jane Eyre, and Maria inspired the saintly Helen Burns.
Q 10Which real headmaster inspired the tyrannical Mr Brocklehurst of Jane Eyre?
William Carus Wilson
He managed the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in the Brontës' time.
Q 11What gift to the only son in June 1826 sparked the children's imaginary worlds?
Twelve wooden soldiers
They called them the Young Men and gave them names.
Q 12What was the name of the imaginary African kingdom the children invented in 1827?
Glass Town
Charlotte and Branwell later developed it into the Empire of Angria.
Q 13Which imaginary island continent, ruled by a woman, did Emily and Anne create?
Gondal
They began it after Charlotte left for school in 1831; Emily wrote Gondal poems all her life.
Q 21Which London firm published Jane Eyre on 19 October 1847?
Smith, Elder & Co
It appeared under the name Currer Bell.
Q 22To which novelist was the second edition of Jane Eyre dedicated?
William Makepeace Thackeray
Charlotte later met and befriended him in London.
Q 23Which secret is revealed at Jane Eyre's wedding to Rochester?
He already has a wife, Bertha
Bertha Mason is the madwoman in the attic; Jean Rhys told her story in Wide Sargasso Sea.
Q 14At which Mirfield school did Charlotte Brontë study in 1831, meeting lifelong friends Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor?
Roe Head
She left after a year to teach Emily and Anne at home.
Q 15Which Poet Laureate told young Charlotte Brontë literature 'cannot be the business of a woman's life'?
Robert Southey
She had written announcing her ambition 'to be forever known'.
Q 16In which city did Charlotte and Emily study at the Héger Pensionnat in 1842?
Brussels
Charlotte fell in love with the married director, Constantin Héger, who inspired Rochester and The Professor.
Q 17What happened to Charlotte's love letters to Constantin Héger?
He tore them up and his wife pieced them together
His children gave them to the British Museum and they were printed in 1913.
Q 18How many copies did the sisters' 1846 collection of poems, published under pen names, sell in its first year?
Two
Charlotte sent copies to Wordsworth, Tennyson and De Quincey anyway.
Q 19Which Charlotte Brontë novel, rejected before Jane Eyre, was published only after her death?
The Professor
It finally appeared in 1857.
Q 20Where was Charlotte when she began writing Jane Eyre in August 1846?
At her father's bedside in Manchester
Patrick was recovering from a cataract operation performed without anaesthetic.
Q 24Complete Jane Eyre's famous line: 'Reader, I...'
married him
The couple settle at Ferndean Manor.
Q 25What is the name of Rochester's house, where Jane teaches the French girl Adèle?
Thornfield Hall
Jane's childhood was spent at Gateshead with the Reed family.
Q 26Which 1966 novel by Jean Rhys retells the story of Rochester's first wife?
Wide Sargasso Sea
It is the best-known reimagining of Jane Eyre.
Q 27Emily Brontë wrote how many novels?
One
Wuthering Heights, published as by Ellis Bell in 1847, was the only one.
Q 28From which city does Mr Earnshaw bring home the orphan Heathcliff?
Liverpool
The dark-featured foundling is spoiled by his adoptive father and hated by his adoptive brother Hindley.
Q 29Who tells most of the story of Wuthering Heights to the tenant Mr Lockwood?
Nelly Dean, the housekeeper
The novel uses five or six narrators in all.
Q 30What is the name of the Lintons' house, the second estate in Wuthering Heights?
Thrushcross Grange
Ponden Hall near Haworth, which Emily often visited, is said to have inspired it.