Harriet Mallinson 

How well do you know rewritten classics? – quiz

From Shakespeare to Jane Austen and beyond, new fiction is often spun off from old stories. Take this quiz to find out how much you know about literature past and present
  
  


  1. Which Greek myth did Margaret Atwood adopt for a spin-off novel?

    1. The Aeneid

    2. The Odyssey

    3. The labours of Hercules

    4. The story of Theseus

  2. Which author wrote a Pride and Prejudice-inspired novel including this line: “Singletons should not have to explain themselves all the time but should have an accepted status — like geisha girls do”?

    1. Sophie Kinsella

    2. Celia Ahern

    3. Helen Fielding

    4. Victoria Hislop

  3. Which author wrote Foe, a modern retelling of Robinson Crusoe?

    1. Jeanette Winterson

    2. Andrew Motion

    3. Paulo Coelho

    4. JM Coetzee

  4. “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.” This was the first line of Jean Rhys's prequel to which book?

    1. To Kill a Mockingbird

    2. Jane Eyre

    3. Invisible Man

    4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  5. What was the title of Jane Smiley’s modernisation of King Lear, set on a farm in Iowa in the 20th century?

    1. A Thousand Splendid Suns

    2. A Thousand Tears

    3. A Thousand Acres

    4. The Book of a Thousand Eyes

  6. What’s notable about Jo Baker’s Longbourn?

    1. It retells Pride and Prejudice from the servants’ perspective

    2. It tells the story of Darcy and Elizabeth’s marriage

    3. It’s a 21st-century version of Middlemarch

    4. It’s a sequel to Bleak House

  7. Caryl Phillips’s new novel, The Lost Child, delves into the history of which literary characters?

    1. Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson

    2. Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan

    3. Mr Earnshaw and Heathcliff

    4. David Copperfield and Agnes Wickfield

  8. Which classic author’s novels were rewritten to include zombies?

    1. Thomas Hardy

    2. Jane Austen

    3. Charlotte Brontë

    4. Virginia Woolf

  9. Which Zadie Smith novel is a homage to EM Forster’s Howards End?

    1. On Beauty

    2. The Autograph Man

    3. White Teeth

    4. NW

  10. Which classic did Posy Simmonds model her graphic novel Tamara Drewe upon?

    1. Far from the Madding Crowd

    2. Madame Bovary

    3. Zuleika Dobson

    4. Mapp and Lucia

Solutions

1:B, 2:C, 3:D, 4:B, 5:C, 6:A, 7:C, 8:B, 9:A, 10:A

Scores

  1. 3 and above.

    Dear oh dear, get back to the bookshelves

  2. 7 and above.

    Not bad. You either need to read more classic books, or more contemporary work. Or both

  3. 10 and above.

    Classic work! You clearly know both your Great Books as well as your contemporary novels

 

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