1. Charlotte Brontë
   Anne Brontë
2. Emily Brontë
   Jane Austen

This novel about doomed love was written by the most doomed of the three Brontë sisters, all of which lived rather tragic and short lives.

1. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
   Ulysses
2. The Great Gatsby
   Dubliners

Joyce was an Irish Catholic author noted for his modernist approach. His most notable novel is the 1922 work, Ulysses.

1. Use of language
   Which themes they included
2. Which structure they use
   The setting they created

Any "how" question is usually asking about the tools the author used to convey something, that is, their choice of words. "What" questions are about their choice of themes or stories.

1. Animal Farm
   Keeping the Aspidistra Flying
2. 1984
   Lord of the Flies

George Orwell's dystopia came out in 1949 and is one of the most important books of all time, examining how democracy can fall into absolute tyranny aided by technology. It's also a cracking good read.

1. An octave and a sextect
   Thematic switch at line 9
2. 14 lines
   Iambic pentameter

While sonnets can play with a cheeky spondee or trochee here and there, they should be 14 lines (an octave of 8 plus a sextet of 6) with a specific rhyme scheme, typically ABBAABBA for the octave and CDCDEE or CDCDCD for the sextet. The sextet will often start with a "but" or "yet" to mark a thematic shift, but that's not compulsory.

1. Romantic poets
   Modernist poets
2. Dadaists
   Metaphysical poets

Donne was one of the foremost Metaphysical poets and mostly wrote about love - of ladies and of God. These poems are usually very thorny and complex, with highly complex imagery, arcane conceits. Breaking them down to understand them takes a while in high school but it's worth every bit of it to learn how to read them, as they are often beautiful and sometimes very funny and satirical.

1. Write something to elevate English to the level of Homer
   Make fun of Charles II
2. Make fun of Oliver Cromwell
   Make Oliver Cromwell happy so he wouldn't have him killed

Milton thought it unfortunate that the great epic poems, like The Iliad and Gilgamesh, were not in English - so he wrote Paradise Lost so we'd have our own. He was blind by the time he wrote it so he recited it to his daughters, who were his scribes. Milton was also a key figure in the English Civil War, and his anti-monarchist tendencies appear in Paradise Lost and doubly so in Paradise Regain'd in the (then very shocking) sympathetic, and, frankly, pretty darn sexy depiction of Satan.

1. 34 and 193
   22 and 281
2. 37 and 154
   19 and 87

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets and 37 plays that we know of.

1. Emily
   Anne
2. Charlotte
   Edwina

Charlotte was the oldest sister but no more tragic than the others. She produced more writing, and was the leader in their youthful writing about Gondal and Angria, magical lands they created together.

1. One is about the story, the other about the meaning
   One is about the characters, the other about the plot
2. One is about the meaning, the other is about the use of language
   One is about the genre, the other about the message

Thematic is about what a piece means or might be commenting on. For instance, in "To Kill A Mockingbird," themes include racism, bigotry, the nature of family, and growing up/loss of innocence. Dramatic means the actual story, so dramatically, "Mockingbird" is the story of a young girl whose hometown is rocked by a criminal trial in which her father defends a black man against an unjust accusation.

1. George Evans
   Charlotte Evans
2. Mary Anne Evans
   Angelica Evans

Mary Anne Evans was one of many authors who published under a male name, simply to get people to consider her work. We think we are more enlightened now, but J.K. Rowling still had to hide her gender only 25 years ago to be taken seriously in the swords and sorcery genre!

1. Late 1700s to early 1800s
   Early and mid-1800s
2. Early to late 1700s
   Late 1800s

The Romantics were a response to the Industrial Revolution, which kicked off in 1750. They not only eulogized the natural world that was being threatened by the new industrial world, they essentially invented childhood as a time of innocence.

1. A Parlement of Foules
   The Canterbury Tales
2. Pearl
   The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle

This story is about saving King Arthur's life from a deadly knight by successfully answering what a woman most desires. A hideous crone offers to tell Sir Gawain if he will marry her. She says women most want "sovereignty", that is, the right to choose for themselves. Arthur is saved, Gawain marries hideous Lady Ragnelle, but on his wedding night she is transformed into a beautiful lady. She says to him that she is under a curse and he can choose whether she will be beautiful by night (in bed with him) or by day (in public at court). He remembers the lesson of sovereignty and says she is the only one who can choose. That breaks the spell and Ragnelle remains beautiful all the time. It's feminism, 350 years before the word was even coined.

1. William Shakespeare
   Andrew Marvell
2. William Blake
   Alexander Pope

Pope said this and a lot of other quotes you know, such as "a little learning is a dangerous thing" and "hope springs eternal." Pope was a very successful poet whose shortest and arguably most charming poem was written to be embroidered onto the collar of the King's dog, which lived at the palace at Kew. It read "I am his Highness' dog at Kew. Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?"

1. Tamburlaine
   Dr. Faustus
2. The Jew of Malta
   Dido, Queen of Carthage

Dr. Faustus is the original story about a deal with the devil. Marlowe didn't think of the story but wrote it especially well.

1. William Thomas Beckford
   Mary Shelley
2. Percy Shelley
   H. G. Wells

Mary Shelley, born Wollstoncraft, was the wife of Percy Shelley, but she is more famous for being the mother of science fiction.

1. Roxana
   Moll Flanders
2. Robinson Crusoe
   Colonel Jack

Robinson Crusoe is technically the first novel, by modern definition. It was written by Daniel Defoe. His most fun work, though, is probably Moll Flanders.

1. No place, Thomas More
   Any place, Thomas a Becket
2. Some place, Thomas Cromwell
   That place, Thomas More

Utopia's title led people to think that perhaps Sir Thomas More meant it as a joke or to suggest it could never be real. It inspired a great many books of similar type.

1. The death of Elizabeth I
   Getting in good with Elizabeth I
2. Getting in good with James I
   Richard II was a hit

Censorship was a big deal in the Elizabethan age. A play about a corrupt Yorkist king was thus a very good idea to please a queen from the winning Lancastrian side, if you wanted permission to put something on.

1. Agnes d'Harcourt and Dante
   Chretien de Troyes and Giovanni Boccaccio
2. Marguerite d'Oingt and Dino Compagni
   Moses ibn Tibbon and Riccobaldo of Ferrara

Mallory got the stories mostly from Boccaccio and de Troyes, who also influenced Chaucer and Shakespeare.

1. five
   ten
2. 17
   19

Five tercets of three lines then a quatrain of four make up a villanelle. Probably the most famous villanelle is "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas. Probably the worst is the intentionally terrible one Joyce wrote for his hero, Stephen Daedalus, in "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," to prove what a pretentious twit the character is meant to be.

1. George Gordon, Lord Byron
   Lady Tennyson
2. Arthur Henry Hallam
   Percy Shelley

Tennyson's dear friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, died suddenly and prematurely of a stroke. Tennyson wrote this beautiful elegy about him and about the nature of death and friendship. He also named his son for Hallam.

1. He forgot the dream he had while high
   He got bored
2. He ran out of ideas
   It's meant to be that length

Coleridge took a load of opium and dreamed up the entire poem in one go. He sobered up and began to write it down. The postman arrived, however, and distracted him from his writing. By the time he sat down to work again, he couldn't remember the rest of the poem, so he just wrapped it up with four rather weird lines that don't quite fit, and called it a day. (Note: opium is orders of magnitude weaker than today's related drugs, so while neither should be recommended as a way to get one's artistic juices going, one should not consider Coleridge's use of it in the same light as a writer today taking heroin or another opioid.)

1. Eruption of Mt Tambora, Indonesia
   Quake in Tabriz, Iran
2. Hurricane of Independence, America
   Hurricane in Barbados

Tambora threw up so much ash, it was called the "year without a summer" as the planet cooled. Millions starved and the ice on the Hudson was so thick you could roll a cannon across it. Shelley and her friends went to Geneva for the summer where they had a lake house but the awful weather meant they could barely go out. They stayed in and wrote ghost and monster stories instead.

1. Edith Wharton
   Walt Whitman
2. Edgar Allan Poe
   Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wharton, along with Henry James, was the leading writer of novels about rich people fending off the malaise and corruption of wealth, and struggling to stay rich!

1. That's not poetry
   Blank verse
2. Free verse
   Metrical verse

Free verse is when poetry doesn't rhyme or scan. Blank verse scans but doesn't rhyme.

1. Assonance
   Consonance
2. Rhyme
   Dissonance

Consonance is when the sounds made by the consonants are similar.

1. Eugene O'Neill
   Noel Coward
2. Tallulah Bankhead
   Dorothy Parker

This group of writers worked and played together constantly, meeting daily for lunch at the Algonquin. O'Neil wasn't a member but his agent was.

1. two
   11
2. six
   three

They are Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey. Lady Susan is her other notable work, but it is novella-sized.

1. Concrete poem
   Structured poem
2. Polygon poem
   Shapery

This is when the words help tell the story by how they are printed. It's one of the most instinctively easy forms of poetry to grasp.

1. H. G. Wells
   H. P. Lovecraft
2. Jules Verne
   Emma Ortczy

Jules Verne is one of the most adapted writers even today, inspiring many people with his tales of sci-fi adventure. Many of his ideas turned out to be surprisingly prescient.

1. Polysyndeton
   Hyperbole
2. Imagery
   Alliteration

Alliteration is one of the most fun devices to use when reading aloud and is common in tongue twisters. Try saying "She sells sea-shells by the sea-shore" aloud, quickly, five times!

1. Elizabeth Gaskell
   Charles Dickens
2. William Makepeace Thackeray
   Lewis Carroll

Dickens' novels were often serialized, with cliffhangers at the end of chapters, like many of today's episodic TV shows. He was paid per word, which is one reason why his books are such doorstops. He was one of the most financially successful writers of all time and his work still produces millions in revenue through adaptations.

1. Siegfried Sassoon
   Wilfred Owen
2. Rupert Brooke
   Robert Graces

Owen was one of the great poets of World War I, and along with Sassoon, is considered to be one of its most evocative writers. Dulce Et Decorum Est describes a gas attack. The full phrase is "dule et decorum est pro patria mori," first coined by Horace in The Odes. It means "it is sweet and proper to die for the fatherland." Owen calls this The Old Lie.

1. Michael Ondaatje
   Alice Munro
2. Leonard Cohen
   Margaret Atwood

Atwood is one of the most successful writers of all time, and The Handmaid's Tale - a feminist dystopia - is one of her most noted works. A very good adaptation of it (most recent of many) is currently on American TV.