Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Percy Bysshe Shelley trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Percy Bysshe Shelley trivia quiz covers the poet whose life was as turbulent as his verse. The easy questions are the ones every English student meets: his birth year, the wife who wrote Frankenstein, the sonnet about a ruined statue, the elegy for Keats, and the boat that went down off the Italian coast. From there it moves into the expulsion from Oxford over an atheist pamphlet, the two elopements with sixteen-year-olds, the summer with Byron on Lake Geneva, and the years of exile in Italy. The harder end is for readers who know the poems: the pen name he used for Ozymandias, the friend he wrote it against, the verse form of Ode to the West Wind, the number of Spenserian stanzas in Adonais, the fairy of Queen Mab, the character who topples Jupiter in Prometheus Unbound, and the political line from The Mask of Anarchy that protesters still chant. There are also questions on his vegetarianism, his heart that would not burn, and the newspaper that gloated over his death. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Shelley and his major works before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and John Keats quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which year was Percy Bysshe Shelley born?
1792
He was born at Field Place in Warnham, Sussex, the eldest son of a baronet's heir who sat in Parliament.
Q 02How old was Shelley when he died?
29
He drowned in a boating accident in 1822, having produced most of his best work in four years of Italian exile.
Q 03Shelley's second wife wrote which famous novel?
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley conceived the story during a wet Swiss summer with Byron in 1816.
Q 04Shelley wrote Ozymandias in a friendly sonnet competition with which banker and writer?
Horace Smith
Smith's own sonnet on the same subject was published a few weeks after Shelley's.
Q 05Ozymandias is the Greek name for which Egyptian pharaoh?
Ramesses II
Shelley began the poem in anticipation of a huge fragment of a Ramesses statue arriving in Britain.
Q 06Under what pen name was Ozymandias first published in The Examiner in 1818?
Glirastes
The name means lover of dormice; Dormouse was his pet name for Mary.
Q 07Which ancient historian's description of a colossal statue inspired the Ozymandias sonnets?
Diodorus Siculus
The historian quoted the inscription: King of Kings Ozymandias am I.
Q 08Which statue fragment, headed for the British Museum, prompted Shelley to write Ozymandias?
The Younger Memnon
The seven-ton head-and-torso fragment came from the Ramesseum and did not reach London until 1821.
Q 09From which university was Shelley expelled in 1811?
Oxford
He refused to answer questions about whether he had written an atheist pamphlet.
Q 10What was the title of the pamphlet that got Shelley expelled?
The Necessity of Atheism
He mailed copies to all the bishops and heads of colleges.
Q 11Which university friend co-wrote the atheism pamphlet and was expelled alongside Shelley?
Thomas Jefferson Hogg
Hogg later tried to seduce Shelley's first wife while the poet was away.
Q 12Which school did Shelley later recall with loathing, where bullies staged 'Shelley-baits'?
Eton
He gave a master an electric shock and blew up a tree stump with gunpowder there.
Q 13What nickname did the young poet's schoolmates at the boarding school he loathed give him?
Mad Shelley
His peculiarities and violent rages earned it, and he tried to raise spirits with occult rituals.
Q 21Beside which lake did Shelley and Byron spend the famous summer of 1816?
Geneva
A boating tour of the lake inspired Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.
Q 22What was Byron reciting when Shelley suffered a panic attack with hallucinations at Villa Diodati?
Christabel
The previous night Mary had had the nightmare that inspired her famous novel.
Q 23Which mountain gave its name to a Shelley poem written after a tour of Chamonix?
Mont Blanc
He signed guest books on the tour with a declaration that he was an atheist.
How did Shelley's first wife die in December 1816?
Q 14What was the name of Shelley's first wife, whom he eloped with to Scotland in 1811?
Harriet Westbrook
She was sixteen and a pupil at the same boarding school as his sisters.
Q 15Where was Shelley married to his first wife?
Edinburgh
Both fathers cut off their allowances when they heard of the elopement.
Q 16Shelley's father sat in Parliament for which party?
Whig
Sir Timothy Shelley was MP for Horsham and later Shoreham.
Q 17Who was the mother of Shelley's second wife, a pioneering feminist writer?
Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley and Mary declared their love at her grave in St Pancras churchyard.
Q 18Where did Shelley and Mary Godwin declare their love for each other in June 1814?
At her mother's grave
Godwin banished Shelley from the house when he announced he would leave Harriet.
Q 19Which of Mary's step-sisters went along when Shelley and Mary eloped to Europe in 1814?
Claire Clairmont
She later began an affair with Byron and bore his daughter Allegra.
Q 20Shelley's radical mentor, whose daughter he ran off with, wrote which work?
Political Justice
William Godwin had softened his views by the time Shelley wrote to him offering himself as a disciple.
She drowned herself
Pregnant and living alone, she believed her new lover had abandoned her.
Q 25Which legal body denied Shelley custody of his children by Harriet?
Court of Chancery
The judges cited his abandonment of his wife and his atheism.
Q 26What was Shelley's 1813 utopian poem, later a 'bible' for the Chartists?
Queen Mab
Its notes preached atheism, free love and republicanism, and pirated editions spread it among the working classes.
Q 27How many copies of his 1813 utopian poem did Shelley print in the private first edition?
250
Only around 70 sets were bound and given to friends; the rest sat in a London bookshop until they were pirated.
Q 28In Shelley's 1813 fairy-tale poem, whose sleeping spirit does the fairy queen carry off on a tour of the universe?
Ianthe
Shelley later gave the same name to his first daughter.
Q 29Which 1819 event in Manchester prompted Shelley to write The Mask of Anarchy?
The Peterloo Massacre
He finished the poem within two weeks of hearing the news in Livorno.
Q 30In what year was The Mask of Anarchy finally published, a decade after Shelley's death?
1832
Leigh Hunt had withheld it from The Examiner for fear of a seditious libel prosecution.