Classic Novels Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which short 1942 French novel opens with its narrator learning that his mother has died and feeling almost nothing, then, days later, shooting an Arab man dead on a blazing Algiers beach, by his own account because of the glare of the sun?

Question 2

Which 1847 novel, narrated by a plain, orphaned governess, takes her from a cruel charity school to Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her brooding employer Mr Rochester, only to learn on their wedding day that he keeps his mad first wife locked in the attic?

Question 3

Which 1920 novel, which made its author the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is set in the closed, ritualised world of 1870s New York high society, where a young lawyer engaged to the conventional May Welland finds himself drawn to her unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska, who has fled a bad European marriage?

Question 4

Which short 1945 book, subtitled A Fairy Story, has the animals of an English farm drive out their drunken owner and run the place themselves under the slogan that all animals are equal, only for the pigs to take charge and gradually become indistinguishable from the humans?

Question 5

Which 1818 novel, subtitled The Modern Prometheus and written by a teenager on a rainy holiday by Lake Geneva, tells of a Swiss student of natural philosophy who assembles a living being from parts of corpses, is horrified by it, and abandons it to a lonely, murderous rage?

Question 6

Which 1915 novella begins with a travelling salesman waking in his bed to find he has been turned overnight into a monstrous insect, and traces how his family's initial shock hardens into resentment and neglect until he dies alone under the sofa?

Question 7

Which short 1759 satire by Voltaire follows a naive young man, taught by his tutor Pangloss that this is the best of all possible worlds, through a relentless string of catastrophes: an earthquake, a shipwreck, the Inquisition, war, slavery and betrayal, across Europe and the Americas?

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About Classic Novels

This quiz is about the world's most famous classic novels: eighty questions, each describing one by its plot, its setting, its central character or its opening situation, and asking you to name it from four choices, then filling in the background. Only widely recognised classics are included, from Don Quixote to Beloved, across four centuries and many countries.

The first pack is the very best known: Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights; War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov; Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby; Nineteen Eighty-Four, To Kill a Mockingbird and One Hundred Years of Solitude; Don Quixote, Frankenstein, Dracula and Moby-Dick; Les Miserables, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Catcher in the Rye.

The second pack widens out. More Dickens, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol; more Austen, Sense and Sensibility, Emma; Madame Bovary and Middlemarch; Tom Sawyer, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde; Uncle Tom's Cabin, Little Women and The Scarlet Letter; The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and A Farewell to Arms; Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies; Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and Animal Farm; Ulysses, The Trial, The Metamorphosis, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, Lolita and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; and, from around the world, Beloved, Things Fall Apart, Midnight's Children, Doctor Zhivago, The Master and Margarita and Fathers and Sons.

The third pack rounds out the eras and regions: Vanity Fair, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Portrait of a Lady, The Age of Innocence; the French masters Balzac, Stendhal, Hugo, Dumas and Verne; Gone with the Wind; Camus's The Stranger; The Name of the Rose; A Passage to India; The Sound and the Fury, Invisible Man, The Handmaid's Tale, Rebecca, Joyce's Portrait, and Conrad's Nostromo.

The wrong answers are always other famous novels, usually from a similar period or country, so a shaky guess is easily caught. Only widely recognised classics appear: no obscure titles, no personal favourites. Because a book cover or an author's portrait would nearly always give the answer away, images are used only where a neutral photograph, a shelf of old books, a reading room, a fountain pen and inkwell, fits all four options equally and reveals nothing about which is right. Plots, dates, first lines and the spellings of characters' names have all been checked against reference sources.