Classic Novels Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which 1932 dystopian novel imagines a future World State where humans are hatched in bottles and conditioned from before birth into rigid castes, kept docile by the drug soma, casual sex and constant entertainment, with no families, no ageing and no discontent?

Question 2

Which 1881 novel by Henry James follows a spirited young American woman, Isabel Archer, who comes into a large fortune in Europe, turns down two eager suitors, and is then manoeuvred by the scheming Madame Merle into marrying the cold, controlling connoisseur Gilbert Osmond?

Question 3

Which 1897 novel, told through letters, diary entries and newspaper clippings, begins with the solicitor Jonathan Harker's business visit to a remote Transylvanian castle whose ancient count, he slowly realises, is a monster who plans to move to England?

Question 4

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 5

Which 1960 novel, narrated by a girl nicknamed Scout, is set in a small Alabama town during the Depression, where her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch, defends a Black man, Tom Robinson, against a false accusation of raping a white woman?

Question 6

Which 1813 English novel opens by observing that a single man with a good fortune must be in want of a wife, and follows the sharp-tongued Elizabeth Bennet, second of five daughters, as her low opinion of the wealthy, aloof Mr Darcy is slowly overturned?

Question 7

Which 1904 novel by Joseph Conrad, set in the imaginary South American republic of Costaguana, revolves around a silver mine whose output corrupts almost everyone it touches during a revolution, and around the trusted Italian dockworkers' foreman entrusted with smuggling a boatload of the silver to safety?

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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.