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book quiz


If someone were to ask you whether or not you’d read Trimalchio in West Egg, your first instinct might be to say ‘no’, and your second might be to marvel at the curious range of titles given to cookery books nowadays. Sorry to say, you’re possibly wrong on both counts – you might well have read Trimalchio in West Egg without realizing it, since that was an early title for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Authors often change the titles of their novels before publication – either as their thoughts develop, or at the request of the publisher. To celebrate World Book Day, we’re going to test your knowledge of working titles. Can you identify which famous books were nearly called something completely different?

Can you identify these classic novels by their working titles?

Game Over

Which of these titles did Jane Austen use for an early version of Sense and Sensibility?
A The Dashwood sisters
B Elinor and Marianne
C Elinor and Eligibility
D Never Trust a Man on a Horse
The Last Man in Europe was an early title for which of the following novels
A Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
B Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
C Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
D Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing
Which of these was the original title of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway?
A Flowers for a Party
B Clarissa
C The Hours
D Moments of Being
Strangers from Within was the provisional title of which famous novel?
A The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
B The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
C Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
D Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Which character in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird originally featured as the title of the novel?
A Scout
B Atticus
C Boo Radley
D Jem
Which of these was an early title of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury?
A The Agony and The Ecstasy
B Pain and Pleasure
C Voice in the Wilderness
D Twilight
The Kingdom by the Sea was an early title of which novel?
A Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
B Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
C Emma by Jane Austen
D Daisy Miller by Henry James
Ford Madox Ford chose the title to The Good Soldier as a joke. Which of these had he previously wanted to call it?
A The Longest Story
B The Most Unlikely Story
C The Cruellest Story
D The Saddest Story
An early title for Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is the same as which play by Shakespeare?
A All’s Well That Ends Well
B A Comedy of Errors
C Much Ado About Nothing
D Measure for Measure
Which much-loved classic was originally called First Impressions?
A Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
B Middlemarch by George Eliot
C Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
D Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
