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60 free George Eliot trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, a farm manager's daughter from Warwickshire who translated German theology, ran a radical London journal, lived openly with a married man and then wrote what many critics call the greatest novel in English. This quiz covers the life first: Nuneaton and Arbury Hall, the Coventry freethinkers, the Strauss translation, the Westminster Review, the scandal of George Henry Lewes, the late marriage to John Cross and the burial in Highgate rather than Westminster Abbey. The second half is the books. There are questions on all seven novels: Adam Bede and its infanticide trial, the Tulliver siblings and the flood in The Mill on the Floss, the weaver and the golden-haired child in Silas Marner, Savonarola's Florence in Romola, Felix Holt, the eight-part serial that became Middlemarch, and the Zionist thread of Daniel Deronda. Easy questions ask which sex the author was; the expert tier asks for publishers, dates and minor characters. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on George Eliot and on each novel, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen.
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Q 01What was George Eliot's real name?
Mary Ann Evans
She was also known as Mary Anne or Marian, and died as Mary Ann Cross.
Q 02In which English county was George Eliot born?
Warwickshire
She was born at South Farm on the Arbury Hall estate near Nuneaton, where her father managed the estate.
Q 03How many novels did George Eliot write?
Seven
They run from Adam Bede in 1859 to Daniel Deronda in 1876.
Q 04Which married philosopher and critic lived with Eliot as her partner from 1854 to 1878?
George Henry Lewes
He stayed legally married to Agnes Jervis, and Eliot signed herself Mary Ann Evans Lewes.
Q 05What did George Eliot's father do for a living?
Managed a country estate
Robert Evans ran the Arbury Hall estate, which gave his daughter access to the hall's library.
Q 06Where did George Eliot get the first name of her pen name?
It was Lewes's forename
She told J. W. Cross that Eliot was simply "a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word".
Q 07George Eliot's first major work was a translation of a controversial German book about what?
The life of Jesus
The Earl of Shaftesbury called her Strauss translation "the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell".
Q 08Which left-wing journal did George Eliot effectively run as assistant editor from 1851?
The Westminster Review
John Chapman was officially the editor, but she did most of the work of producing it.
Q 09In which periodical did the first work of "George Eliot" appear in 1857?
Blackwood's Magazine
Readers assumed the author of Scenes of Clerical Life was a country parson, or perhaps a parson's wife.
Q 10Eliot's first complete novel has a realist aesthetic inspired by which country's visual art?
The Netherlands
Its success brought a pretender, Joseph Liggins, who claimed to be the author, which pushed Eliot to reveal herself.
Q 11Which reigning monarch was so impressed with Adam Bede that she commissioned paintings of scenes from it?
Queen Victoria
The artist was Edward Henry Corbould; the queen read all of Eliot's novels.
Q 12Whom did George Eliot marry in May 1880, seven months before her death?
John Walter Cross
He was twenty years her junior, and on their Venice honeymoon he jumped from a hotel balcony into the Grand Canal.
Q 13Where is George Eliot buried?
Highgate Cemetery
She was denied the Abbey because of her agnosticism and her life with Lewes; she lies beside him near Karl Marx.
Q 21Which German philosopher sneered at Eliot's morality as that of "little moralistic females à la Eliot"?
Friedrich Nietzsche
He read Middlemarch in a translation owned by his mother and sister.
Q 22George Eliot's foray into verse, published in 1868, was a dramatic poem set in Spain called what?
The Spanish Gypsy
Its initial popularity did not last, and she is remembered almost entirely for the novels.
Q 23What is the subtitle of Middlemarch?
A Study of Provincial Life
The fictional town of Middlemarch, a silk-ribbon manufacturing town, is probably based on Coventry.
Q 14A memorial stone to George Eliot was placed in Poets' Corner in 1980, between which two poets?
W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas
It was set on the centenary of her death and quotes Scenes of Clerical Life.
Q 15Which American novelist called George Eliot "magnificently ugly — deliciously hideous" at their first meeting?
Henry James
He went on to say that within minutes her personality charmed him and he ended by "falling in love with her".
Q 16George Eliot's 1856 essay attacking the trivial plots of contemporary women's fiction was called what?
Silly Novels by Lady Novelists
She published it in the Westminster Review just before turning to fiction herself.
Q 17George Eliot translated the Ethics of which philosopher, a version not published in her lifetime?
Spinoza
She finished it in 1856, but the publisher refused to pay the requested 75 pounds; it finally appeared in 1981.
Q 18Which ribbon manufacturer and his wife drew the young Eliot into a circle of radical freethinkers?
Charles and Cara Bray
Their home Rosehill hosted Robert Owen, Herbert Spencer, Harriet Martineau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Q 19After her father's death in 1849, George Eliot spent months living alone in which European city?
Geneva
She lived on the second floor of a house on the rue de Chanoines, where a plaque now marks her stay.
Q 20Which brother cut off George Eliot when she began living with Lewes, reconciling only after she married Cross?
Isaac
Isaac had married and taken over the family home when she was twenty-one, sending her and her father to Foleshill.
Q 24In how many paper-bound instalments was Middlemarch first published in 1871-72?
Eight
The two-monthly format was borrowed from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables to avoid slicing the novel into small parts.
Q 25Middlemarch is set in the years immediately before which piece of legislation?
The 1832 Reform Act
The action runs from September 1829 to May 1832, forty years before the book appeared.
Q 26In Middlemarch, whom does Dorothea Brooke marry first?
Edward Casaubon
She hopes to help with his research, The Key to All Mythologies, which is hopelessly out of date because he cannot read German.
Q 27What is the name of Casaubon's never-finished scholarly work in Middlemarch?
The Key to All Mythologies
He resents Dorothea's youth partly because her help would expose how stale his research has become.
Q 28Which idealistic young doctor in Middlemarch ruins his ambitions by marrying the vain Rosamond Vincy?
Tertius Lydgate
The Finale has him prosper in a conventional career and die at 50.
Q 29Which Middlemarch banker's sordid past is exposed by the arrival of the drunkard John Raffles?
Nicholas Bulstrode
He hastens Raffles's death, and the disgrace spreads to Lydgate, who had accepted his money.
Q 30Who unexpectedly inherits Peter Featherstone's fortune in Middlemarch instead of Fred Vincy?
His illegitimate son Joshua Rigg
Rigg is also the stepson of John Raffles, which is how Raffles first comes to town.