Oxford World’s Classic Quiz: The Answers

It’s the moment of truth… how did you do? Below are the answers to the Oxford World’s Classics Quiz which we have been running for fun on OUPblog all this week. Congratulations if you got them all right, and if you didn’t, may I suggest you invest in a few of our new editions?

Section One: Their Daily Bread
1. The witch of the place presides over a rotten wedding feast.
ANSWER: Miss Haversham from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
2. His sweet tooth eats through a Wilkie Collins epic.
ANSWER: Count Fosco from The Woman in White.
3. He fried his kidney in Dublin town.
ANSWER: Bloom from Ulysses by James Joyce
4. She takes the credit for the boef en daube.
ANSWER: Mrs Ramsay from To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
5. Her cupboard was full of jam tarts, lemon tarts, Spanish tarts and cheese-cakes
ANSWER: Mrs Morel from Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence.

Section Two: ‘It’s a hard-knock life’
1. Misselthwaite’s maid
ANSWER: Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
2. Raksha’s man-cub
ANSWER: Mowgli from The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling
3. Discovered in a handbag at Victoria Station
ANSWER: Ernest from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
4. This clever orphan would rather sail the Mississippi than paint a fence
ANSWER: Tom Sawyer from The Adventures of Tom Saywer by Mark Twain
5. She left Kansas for emerald delights
ANSWER: Dorothy from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Section Three: Black and White and Read All Over
1. A seductive Mother Superior and a naïve with no vocation
ANSWER: The Nun by Denis Diderot
2. This cloistered anti-hero’s downfall is akin to Legion’s end
ANSWER: The Monk by Matthew Lewis
3. This eighteenth-century reverend faces the trials of Job in Edenic England
ANSWER: The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
4. This almost-saint journeyed from Huntingdon to St Albans
ANSWER: Christina of Markyate
5. His saucy epic satires spite his regal Roman name
ANSWER: Alexander Pope

Section Four: In the Wars
1. Russian epic retelling of the Napoleonic invasion
ANSWER: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
2. The Wretched man the barricades in grande Paris
ANSWER: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
3. A story of young Henry at Chancellorsville
ANSWER: The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
4. He led the invasion of Gallia and wrote about it
ANSWER: Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
5. A Prussian intellectual’s military manifesto
ANSWER: On War by Carl von Clausewitz

Section Five: That’s Amore
1. Sanskrit text on life, love and spirituality
ANSWER: Kamasutra by Vatsyayana
2. Banned as obscene, this book revolutionised the understanding of female sexuality
ANSWER: Married Love by Marie Stopes
3. Roman poet banished for his subject of adultery
ANSWER: Ovid
4. This Parisian’s deviance gave his name to unconventional proclivities
ANSWER: The Marquis de Sade
5. This classic mother murdered the progeny as the ultimate revenge
ANSWER: Medea

Section Six: Neither Flesh, Fish, nor Fowl
1. An Italian puppet with greater ambitions
ANSWER: Pinocchio
2. This mad scientist’s creation begs for a female companion
ANSWER: Frankenstein
3. Has coffin, will travel
ANSWER: Dracula
4. This loch-dwelling mum seeks medieval revenge
ANSWER: Grendel’s mother from Beowulf
5. Gothic nocturnal female whose bloodlust stoked a later novel
ANSWER: Carmilla from JS Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly

Section Seven: Espionage
1. Spy for Walsingham and stabbed in a brawl, as legend has it
ANSWER: Christopher Marlowe
2. Pseudo-equine archetypal guise for malice
ANSWER: The Trojan Horse from Virgil’s Aeneid
3. The Prince’s schoolmates set against him by a usurping uncle
ANSWER: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Shakespeare’s Hamlet
4. An anarchist plots to blow up the Greenwich Observatory
ANSWER: The Secret Agent by Jospeph Conrad
5. A holiday sailing trip cum plot to foil the Germans
ANSWER: The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

Section Eight: Political Animals
1. A sea monster lends its name to his principle of a strong state
ANSWER: Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
2. Taking America as a model, it Pained the English government
ANSWER: The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
3. Her vindication laid the foundations for modern feminism
ANSWER: Mary Wollstonecraft
4. For everyone and no-one, this book killed the deity
ANSWER: Thus Spake Zarathustra by Neitzsche
5. This tract takes its title from a head of state
ANSWER: The Prince by Macchiavelli

Section Nine: Explorations
1. He set out for Terra Nova and never made it back
ANSWER: Robert Falcon Scott
2. Journey into ‘The horror!’ of the Congo
ANSWER: The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
3. York castaway considered by some as the prototypical colonist
ANSWER: Robinson Crusoe
4. A ‘swift’ sailing satire
ANSWER: Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
5. The story of Everyman’s journey from this world to the next
ANSWER: The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

Section Ten: Man’s Best Friend
1. Montmorency accompanied them from Kingston to Oxford
ANSWER: Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
2. Woolf’s four-legged subject
ANSWER: Flush
3. Hardship leads a domesticated canine to return to baser instincts
ANSWER: The Call of the Wild by Jack London
4. This fiendish incarnation haunts the Devonshire moors
ANSWER: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
5. This ship bore the father of natural selection
ANSWER: The Beagle was Charles Darwin’s boat