Gothic Literature Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Gothic Literature trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Gothic fiction began as a practical joke: an English aristocrat passed off his own novel as a translation of a medieval Italian manuscript, then admitted the hoax once it sold. Everything since, from the sublime frights of the 1790s to the split selves of the Victorian fin de siecle and the rotting mansions of the American South, has been arguing with that first haunted fortress. This quiz covers the genre's whole arc rather than its three most famous novels, which have their own pages. Expect the founding hoaxes and parodies, the penny dreadfuls that gave vampires their fangs, the critics who theorised fear and the sublime, the Southern Gothic school, and the twentieth-century revival in novels, films and streaming series. It suits book clubs, English teachers setting a Gothic unit, pub quiz hosts and anyone who has ever been unable to put down a ghost story. Difficulty runs from questions most readers will know to a handful only the genre's completists will get.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1764 novel, passed off by Horace Walpole as a translated Italian manuscript, is called the first Gothic novel?
The Castle of Otranto
The Castle of Otranto was published anonymously with a title page crediting an invented Italian canon and a fictitious English translator, William Marshal. Walpole only admitted authorship in the second edition.
Q 02Which jilted Dickens character stopped every clock at Satis House and wore her wedding dress for decades?
Miss Havisham
Miss Havisham in Great Expectations stopped the clocks at twenty minutes to nine, the exact moment she received her fiance's jilting letter, and left the wedding cake rotting on the table.
Q 03Which 1938 Daphne du Maurier novel opens with the line 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again'?
Rebecca
Rebecca never names its narrator, a shy young woman who marries the widower Maxim de Winter and finds his Cornish estate still ruled by the memory of his first wife, whose name the book carries instead.
Q 04Anne Rice objected to which actor's casting as Lestat in the 1994 Interview with the Vampire film, then recanted?
Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise struck Rice as all wrong for Lestat, and she said so in the press; after a pre-release screening she phoned him to say she had been wrong. Brad Pitt played the narrator and Kirsten Dunst the child vampire Claudia.
Q 05John Polidori, whose tale The Vampyre grew out of the wet summer of 1816, travelled with Lord Byron in what capacity?
Personal physician
Polidori was Byron's personal physician, hired at 20 for the European tour that stalled at Lake Geneva. His suave vampire Lord Ruthven became the template for every aristocratic bloodsucker since.
Q 06The Woman in Black ran in the West End from 1989 to 2023, second in longevity only to which play?
The Mousetrap
Only The Mousetrap has outlasted it: Stephen Mallatratt's adaptation of Susan Hill's ghost story began at a small Scarborough theatre in 1987 and went on to give 13,232 performances in the West End.
Q 07The word doppelganger, a Gothic staple coined by the German novelist Jean Paul in 1796, literally means what?
Double-walker
Double-walker, or double-goer, is the literal sense: Jean Paul coined the word in a footnote to his novel Siebenkas, and the Gothic made the spectral double its favourite device, from Stevenson to Poe.
Q 08In du Maurier's 1938 Manderley novel, which housekeeper devoted to the dead first wife torments the new Mrs de Winter?
Mrs Danvers
Mrs Danvers was lady's maid to the first Mrs de Winter and keeps her rooms as a shrine, needling the narrator that she will never match her predecessor. Judith Anderson's icy turn in the 1940 film fixed her in popular memory.
Q 09In The Picture of Dorian Gray, which painter of the portrait that ages in Dorian's place is later murdered by him?
Basil Hallward
Basil Hallward is infatuated with his sitter and calls the portrait his best work; years later Dorian stabs him in front of the corrupted canvas. Lord Henry Wotton, by contrast, merely talks Dorian into ruin.
Q 10Bluebeard, whose bride unlocks a forbidden room of murdered wives, was first printed in 1697 by which French author?
Charles Perrault
Charles Perrault printed Bluebeard in his 1697 Histoires ou contes du temps passe beside Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Its forbidden chamber haunts the Gothic: Jane Eyre likens Thornfield's top corridor to 'some Bluebeard's castle'.
Q 11In Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, which vampire tells his 200-year life story to a reporter in San Francisco?
Louis de Pointe du Lac
Louis de Pointe du Lac was a grieving Louisiana plantation owner when Lestat turned him in 1791; his confession to 'the boy' with the tape recorder launched Rice's Vampire Chronicles in 1976.
Q 12Which 1975 Stephen King novel returns writer Ben Mears to a Maine town whose Marsten House now shelters a vampire?
'Salem's Lot
'Salem's Lot grew from King wondering aloud over supper what would happen if Dracula returned to twentieth-century America; he has called the result Peyton Place meets Dracula.
Q 13Whose 2018 Netflix series recast The Haunting of Hill House as the story of the haunted Crain family?
Q 21Jekyll and Hyde drew on which Edinburgh cabinet-maker and councillor who was secretly a burglar by night?
Deacon Brodie
Deacon Brodie robbed the shops he fitted locks for to fund mistresses and gambling, and was hanged in 1788; Stevenson co-wrote a play about him before splitting the respectable citizen into two men.
Q 22Matthew Lewis claimed to have written which 1796 shocker, the tale of the devout Ambrosio's downfall, in just ten weeks?
The Monk
The Monk made its twenty-year-old author so notorious he was nicknamed 'Monk' Lewis for life; the fourth edition of 1798 cut the passages critics found objectionable, but the Devil still claims its Capuchin abbot, Ambrosio.
Q 23Which alias, a saint plus his great-uncle Maturin's Gothic wanderer, did Oscar Wilde adopt in France after prison?
Mike Flanagan
Mike Flanagan kept only the house, the Dudleys and a few names, turning Jackson's 1959 novel into a family drama; he followed it with The Haunting of Bly Manor, drawn from Henry James.
Q 14Which former court reporter's Le Fantome de l'Opera, serialised in Le Gaulois from 1909, gave the Paris Opera its phantom?
Gaston Leroux
Gaston Leroux, a court reporter turned novelist, built his Phantom around the real Palais Garnier, whose underground cistern 'lake' and a chandelier counterweight that really fell he folded into the plot.
Q 15Which 1851 Hawthorne novel follows the Pyncheon family, living under an old curse in New England?
The House of the Seven Gables
The House of the Seven Gables stands on land Colonel Pyncheon seized from Matthew Maule, who cursed the family from the gallows; Hawthorne's own ancestors had played a part in the Salem witch trials of 1692.
Q 16Which author of 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find' kept a flock of peafowl at her Georgia farm, Andalusia?
Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor wrote an essay on her birds called 'The King of the Birds' and worked peacock imagery into her fiction; lupus confined her to Andalusia, near Milledgeville, from 1951 until her death at 39.
Q 17Which director's 2015 Crimson Peak traps its heroine in Allerdale Hall, a Cumberland mansion sinking into red clay?
Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro named the estate for the warm red clay that leaches up from the mine and stains the winter snow, so the house appears to bleed; he has called the film a ghost story and Gothic romance.
Q 18Stevenson said the core of Jekyll and Hyde, 'a voluntary change becoming involuntary', came to him how?
In a dream
It arrived in a dream: Stevenson's wife woke him as he cried out in his sleep and he complained she had interrupted 'a fine bogey tale'. He wrote the first draft in days while bedridden in Bournemouth.
Q 19In which Jane Austen novel does Isabella Thorpe recommend seven 'horrid novels' that were all real books?
Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey is Austen's Gothic parody: Catherine Morland reads so much Radcliffe that she suspects her host of murdering his wife. Isabella's seven titles had sunk so far from view that one was thought to exist only in Austen's pages.
Q 20In Horace Walpole's 1764 novel, Prince Manfred's son Conrad is crushed on his wedding day by what falling object?
A giant helmet
A giant helmet drops from nowhere, fulfilling a prophecy that the castle will pass from Manfred's line when its true owner grows too large to live in it. It matches the one on a marble statue inside the church.
Sebastian Melmoth
Sebastian Melmoth fused the arrow-pierced Saint Sebastian with the soul-selling hero of Melmoth the Wanderer; Maturin, a Dublin clergyman, was Wilde's great-uncle by marriage, and Wilde died under the alias in Paris in 1900.
Q 24In Le Fanu's 1872 novella Carmilla, the vampire's other names Millarca and Mircalla are what, relative to her name?
Anagrams
Anagrams are the Countess Karnstein's one rule: every identity she adopts across the centuries rearranges the letters of Mircalla. Le Fanu's lesbian vampire beat Dracula into print by a quarter of a century.
Q 25For which 1794 novel did Ann Radcliffe's publisher pay an unheard-of £500, when a manuscript usually earned about £10?
The Mysteries of Udolpho
The Mysteries of Udolpho made Radcliffe the most popular novelist in England; her next book earned £800 and made her the highest-paid professional writer of the 1790s, after which she published no more fiction in her lifetime.
Q 26In Ann Radcliffe's most popular novel, the wax corpse that makes the heroine faint lies hidden behind what?
A black veil
A black veil hides the figure, which the heroine takes for a murdered woman's body until the last chapters reveal it as wax, made for a past owner's penance. It is Radcliffe's 'explained supernatural' at work.
Q 27Ann Radcliffe's posthumous essay split Gothic fear into which two emotions, one expanding the soul and one freezing it?
Terror and horror
Terror and horror, she argued, are opposites: terror's uncertainty 'awakens the faculties', while horror's explicit gore 'contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them'. Her camp got terror; Lewis's got horror.
Q 28Which composer turned Henry James's The Turn of the Screw into a chamber opera premiered in Venice in 1954?
Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten premiered it at Teatro La Fenice with an orchestra of just 13 players; the governess, the ghosts Quint and Jessel, and the children Miles and Flora are all sung, so the ghosts get voices the novella withholds.
Q 29Which 1936 Daphne du Maurier novel, set on Bodmin Moor around 1815, centres on a gang of Cornish wreckers?
Jamaica Inn
Jamaica Inn was born of du Maurier's 1930 stay at the real pub, which still trades on Bodmin Moor; orphan Mary Yellan discovers her uncle leads the wreckers who lure ships onto the rocks.
Q 30In which 1930 Faulkner story do the townsfolk of Jefferson force a locked bedroom and find the long-dead Homer Barron?
A Rose for Emily
A Rose for Emily ends with a strand of iron-grey hair on the pillow beside the body, revealing that Miss Grierson had slept beside the body for years. It was Faulkner's first story in a national magazine.