Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
70 free Jane Austen trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Jane Austen published four novels in her lifetime, all of them anonymously, and died at 41 without ever seeing her name on a title page. This set of Jane Austen trivia questions covers the whole story: the Hampshire rectory where she read her drafts aloud to her family, the flirtation with an Irish law student, the marriage proposal she accepted for one night, the manuscript a publisher bought for ten pounds and never printed, and the eight quiet years at Chawton in which every one of the six novels was finished. The novels get their share too. You will be asked about working titles, settings, estates and plot turns from Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, plus the unfinished Sanditon and the early novella Lady Susan. A final run covers the afterlife: the nephew's memoir, the Janeites, the Bank of England note and the films from Clueless to Emma. and Persuasion. The questions range from easy to genuinely hard, so it works for a book club, a classroom or a Regency-themed quiz night. Every answer has been checked against a primary or encyclopaedic source, and the explanations add a detail you can use to win the argument afterwards.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which English county was Jane Austen born in December 1775?
Hampshire
She was born at the rectory in Steventon, a village of a few hundred people in north Hampshire, and lived there until she was 25.
Q 02What was the occupation of Jane Austen's father, George Austen?
Anglican rector
He supplemented a modest clerical income by farming and by taking in three or four boys at a time as boarding pupils.
Q 03Jane Austen was one of how many children in her family?
8
Six of the eight were boys; Jane and her elder sister were the only daughters, which is part of why the two were so close.
Q 04Which sibling was Jane Austen's only sister and lifelong closest companion?
Cassandra
Their mother said that if Cassandra's head were going to be cut off, Jane would have hers cut off too. Cassandra is also believed to have burned most of Jane's letters after her death.
Q 05Which disease nearly killed the young Jane Austen in 1783 at school in Southampton?
Typhus
Both girls were sent home ill, and Jane was afterwards educated at home apart from a short spell at a boarding school in Reading.
Q 06Austen wrote the satirical epistolary tale Love and Freindship (her spelling) at what age?
14
It mocked the fashionable novels of sensibility. She copied 29 early pieces into three notebooks that scholars now call the Juvenilia.
Q 07Which young Irish visitor flirted with the 20-year-old Austen in 1795-96, as recorded in her earliest letters?
Tom Lefroy
His family sent him away at the end of January 1796, and she never saw him again. The 2007 film Becoming Jane is built around the episode.
Q 08The Irish law student Austen flirted with in her early twenties went on to hold which high office?
Lord Chief Justice of Ireland
He also sat as MP for Dublin University for over a decade and lived to 93, outliving Austen by more than 50 years.
Q 09Whose December 1802 marriage proposal did Austen accept, then withdraw from the next morning?
Harris Bigg-Wither
He was heir to large estates near where she grew up; the match would have secured her family's future, and she still turned it down.
Q 10In 1801 the Austen family left Steventon and moved to which fashionable city?
Bath
Her father retired there suddenly. She wrote almost nothing new during the years that followed, and the family left the city after his death in 1805.
Q 11Which brother offered Austen's mother and sisters the Chawton cottage in 1809?
Edward
He had been adopted by wealthy childless relatives and inherited their estates, taking the surname Knight; the cottage sat on his Chawton estate.
Q 12Two of Austen's siblings rose to the rank of admiral in which service?
The Royal Navy
Their careers gave her the naval detail in Mansfield Park and Persuasion, where prize money and promotion drive whole plotlines.
Q 13What was the highest rank eventually reached by Austen's brother Francis?
Admiral of the Fleet
As captain of the sloop Peterel he took some 40 ships. He died in 1865 at 91, the longest-lived of the Austen siblings.
Q 21Which illness do most biographers, following a 1964 diagnosis, blame for Austen's death at 41?
Addison's disease
Hodgkin's lymphoma has been proposed as an alternative. She made light of it as bile and rheumatism, and put down her pen for good on 18 March 1817.
Q 22Austen died in July 1817, aged 41. Where was she buried?
Winchester Cathedral
Her brother arranged the burial through his clerical connections. The 2017 £10 note with serial number AA01001817 was donated to the cathedral to mark the year.
Q 23What does the epitaph on Austen's gravestone conspicuously fail to mention?
That she wrote novels
Q 14Which London publisher bought Austen's manuscript Susan for £10 in 1803 and never printed it?
Benjamin Crosby
She wrote him an angry letter in 1809 and eventually bought the copyright back for the same £10 in 1816. The book finally appeared after her death under a different title.
Q 15Instead of Austen's name, what appeared on the title page of Sense and Sensibility in 1811?
By a Lady
Her later books were billed as by the author of Sense and Sensibility. Her name never appeared on any of her novels in her lifetime.
Q 16For how much did Austen sell the copyright of Pride and Prejudice outright to Thomas Egerton?
£110
It was the only novel she sold outright rather than publishing at her own risk. Had she published it on commission she would have made about £475, twice her father's annual income.
Q 17In 1815 Austen moved from Egerton to which better-known London publisher, who brought out Emma?
John Murray
Emma sold well, but Murray's second edition of Mansfield Park flopped and wiped out most of the profit.
Q 18Emma was dedicated, at his librarian's heavy hint, to which royal whom Austen privately disapproved of?
The Prince Regent
He kept a set of her novels at each of his residences. She thought him a womaniser and a spendthrift but could hardly refuse.
Q 19Austen's satirical Plan of a Novel was written as revenge on the pompous literary advice of whom?
A royal librarian
James Stanier Clarke kept sending suggestions for her next book. She turned them into a parody outline of the perfect novel.
Q 20Which leading novelist anonymously reviewed Emma in 1815, praising its copying from nature?
Sir Walter Scott
He used the review to defend the whole disreputable genre of the novel. Austen, for her part, joked that he had no business writing novels when he was already so successful a poet.
It praises the extraordinary endowments of her mind but says nothing of her books. A later brass tablet, paid for from her first biography's proceeds, finally called her known to many by her writings.
Q 24Whose Biographical Notice, published with her last two novels in 1817, first publicly named Austen as author?
Her brother Henry
He had acted as her go-between with publishers for years, and his bank's collapse in March 1816 was one reason her final novels were delayed.
Q 25Roughly how many of the estimated 3,000 letters Austen wrote in her lifetime survive?
About 160
Her sister is thought to have destroyed the rest, possibly to keep the younger nieces from reading Jane's acid remarks about neighbours and relations.
Q 26Under what working title did Austen originally write the novel that became Pride and Prejudice?
First Impressions
Her father offered it to a London publisher in 1797; it came back marked Declined by Return of Post.
Q 27Sense and Sensibility began life as an epistolary novel under which working title?
Elinor and Marianne
It was read to the family before 1796 as a story told in letters; she rewrote it in third person over 1797-98.
Q 28Under what working title did Austen write Persuasion in 1815-16?
The Elliots
Dissatisfied with the ending, she rewrote the last two chapters in the summer of 1816; her brother chose the published title after her death.
Q 29Austen called the unfinished novel we now know as Sanditon by what working title?
The Brothers
She wrote twelve chapters between January and mid-March 1817, mocking hypochondriacs even as her own health failed. It was first published in 1925.
Q 30Lady Susan, the epistolary novella Austen wrote around 1794, was not published until which year?
1871
It appeared in the enlarged second edition of her nephew's memoir, alongside the fragment The Watsons. Its heroine has been described as a sexual predator with a greater intelligence than anyone she meets.