🧠 Classic Literature Quiz

Ebenezer is a Hebrew name meaning 'stone of help' — a rather ironic name for a man who refuses to help anyone at the start of the story.

Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice when she was just 21, originally titling it 'First Impressions' before it was published in 1813.

Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein at just 18 years old, after Lord Byron challenged his guests to each write a ghost story during a stormy summer at Lake Geneva in 1816.

Gatsby's West Egg mansion is widely believed to be inspired by the Gold Coast of Long Island, where Fitzgerald himself lived briefly in the 1920s.

At roughly 580,000 words, 'War and Peace' features over 500 characters and took Tolstoy around six years to write, with his wife Sophia reportedly copying out the manuscript by hand multiple times.

Thornfield Hall meets a dramatic end in the novel when Rochester's first wife, Bertha Mason, sets it ablaze — leaving Rochester blinded and maimed before Jane returns to him.

Captain Ahab lost his leg to Moby Dick on a previous voyage and had it replaced with a peg made from a whale's jawbone, which Melville describes as an 'ivory leg'.

Dmitri Karamazov's trial for patricide forms the dramatic climax of the novel, and Dostoevsky based many of the courtroom scenes on real Russian legal proceedings of his era.

Hardy's fictionalised Christminster is widely understood to represent Oxford, and the novel's bleak portrayal of class barriers in education caused such controversy upon publication in 1895 that Hardy largely abandoned novel-writing afterwards.

Septimus Warren Smith never actually meets Clarissa Dalloway in the novel, yet his suicide profoundly affects her at her own party — Woolf uses him as a kind of dark double for Clarissa herself.