Greatest British novels

The following are descriptions of some of the greatest novels in British literature. Can you give both the title and the name of the author?

12 Questions

1. 'It was a cold bright day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen' is the opening line from this novel.
2. The 1989 winner of the Man Booker prize, it tells the story of Lord Darlington's loyal butler Stevens, during the years before World War Two.
3. The author started writing this story when she was 18 with the first edition published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was just 20.
4. The novel recounts the adventures of a lusty and strong-willed woman who is compelled, from earliest childhood, to make her own way in 17th-century England.








5. A 1927 novel which centres on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.
6. A 1847-1848 novel featuring one of the greatest anti-heroines in English literature, Becky Sharp.
7. This novel concerns two families of the landed gentry living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons.
8. Published in 1861, this classic novel chronicles the coming of age of the orphan Pip.
9. A study of relationships of a working-class English family. The novel centres around sensitive young artist Paul Morel whose love for his mother, Gertrude, overshadows his romances with two women.
10. Published in 1961, the story of an eccentric Edinburgh teacher who inspires cultlike reverence in her young students.
11. Set in a fictional English Midland town, in 1829 to 1832, it's a realist study of every class of society in the town but focuses on its two principal characters, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate.
12. This novel is set in impoverished rural England during the 1870s. The title character is the oldest child of John and Joan, uneducated peasants, however, John is given the impression by Parson Tringham that he may have noble blood.

Answers

1. Nineteen Eighty-four (George Orwell, 1949)
2. The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989)
3. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)
4. Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe, 1722)
5. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf, 1927)
6. Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848)
7. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte, 1847)
8. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens, 1861)
9. Sons and Lovers (DH Lawrence, 1913)
10. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1961)
11. Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1874)
12. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891)