1. Anna Karenina comes to an unfortunate end when 'something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back'. But what deals the final blow?

   1. The wheels of a passing train

   2. A cossack's sabre

   3. The butt of Vronsky's hunting rifle

   4. A copy of War and Peace

2. 

   One of the young Dorothea Brooke’s projects in Middlemarch is to …

   1. Write and star in a comic operetta about provincial life

   2. Improve the tenant farmers' cottages on her uncle’s estates

   3. Design a trend-setting dress for her sister Celia

   4. Write a prayer book “for earnest gentlewomen”

3. Which AS Byatt character insisted ‘I won’t be a lady novelist’?

   1. Olive Wellwood in The Children’s Book

   2. Christabel LaMotte in Possession

   3. Stephanie Potter in Still Life

   4. Frederica Potter in The Virgin in the Garden

4. 

   In Fifty Shades of Grey, lead character Ana is presented by her dominating lover Christian with a first edition of which 19th-century novel?

   1. Tess of the D’Urbervilles

   2. Jane Eyre

   3. Wuthering Heights

   4. Pride and Prejudice

5. Towards the end of Madame de Lafayette's eponymous novel, The Princess of Cleves falls ill with a "violent sickness". As she recovers, she finds that Monsieur de Nemours is not in fact completely 'effaced from her heart' and takes an important decision. Does she:

   1. Ride to find Monsieur de Nemours at the court in Poitou and declare her love

   2. Withdraw to a nunnery, saying she needs a change of scene

   3. Write an autobiographical novel of frustrated love

   4. Travel to the island of Lesbos and found a literary commune

6. 

   When Elizabeth Bennet's father calls her to the library towards the end of Pride and Prejudice to discuss Mr Darcy's marriage proposal, how does he begin their discussion:

   1. 'One cannot know what a man really is by the end of a fortnight'

   2. 'Come here, child … I have sent for you on an affair of importance'

   3. 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife'

   4. 'Lizzy, what are you doing? Are you out of your senses, to be accepting this man?'

7. How does Ursula Todd meet her end in Kate Atkinson's Life After Life?

   1. She is swept away by the tide on a Cornish beach

   2. She dies in the ruins of Berlin at the end of the second world war

   3. She kills herself

   4. All of the above

8. 

   Who is the Italian artist that Ali Smith reinvents as a woman In How to be Both

   1. Piero della Francesco

   2. Fra Angelico

   3. Francesco Del Cossa

   4. Frank Corleone

9. What is the name of the protagonist of Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

   1. Maireadh

   2. Saoirse

   3. Mary

   4. We don’t know her name

10. 

    What is the event that kick-starts the plot of Alan Warner’s novel Morvern Callar?

    1. She takes some bad esctasy at a rave

    2. She finds her boyfriend dead in the kitchen

    3. She has a fight with a man at a bus stop

    4. She decides to write a novel

Solutions

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

Scores

1. 3 and above.

   Very poor. We don't want to accuse you of misogyny, but do much worse and we may have to

2. 7 and above.

   Fair to middling. Your reading is not quite leading the struggle, but it can't be accused of male chauvinism

3. 10 and above.

   Excellent. If there was a Baileys women's prize for fiction readers, you'd definitely make the shortlist