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Mar. 5th, 2005 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nigeltde100 Favourite Fictional Characters chosen by various British authors and other literary-type people. A great read, if only to remind you about all the wonderful people you can meet in a book. Here are some of my favourite bits:
Elizabeth Bennett
Just put Lizzie next to Fanny Price (Mansfield Park): Fanny will drone on about virtue; Lizzie will tell a joke. Fanny will praise the long sermons of her cousin, Edmund; Lizzie will make a provocative remark to Mr Darcy. Fanny will disapprove; Lizzie will laugh out loud.
Rupert Campbell-Black
I spent most of my teens wishing Rupert (from Jilly Cooper's Riders) would stride into my parents' kitchen in dirty hunting boots and whisk me away.
Me too :-D Although really only the Rupert fom Rivals onwards, and really, who could take him away from Taggie?
Josef K
In The Trial, Kafka's master-trap is to make us accept that Josef K's point of view is objective, narrative fact. In fact, Josef K is no timeless Everyman but a specific satirical character: a thoroughly modern salaryman with a goal-oriented, easy-to-clean mental world who is obsessed with office power-plays and visits a prostitute once a week.
Gandalf
JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings boasts the best white wizard in fiction - not morally ambiguous or neutral like Merlin, but not infallible either. Always wise when present and strangely comforting even when predicting doom and destruction.
Sir Lancelot
My favourite character - and the sexiest man in literature - is Sir Lancelot in Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott". He is drawn with hilariously euphemistic zest - all that stuff about his silver bugle and blazened baldric, and his helmet with its plume. It's barely decent, frankly, and it puts a smile on my face every time I read it.
Dr Watson
There is something appealing about a man who stows his stethoscope under his top hat.
Hamlet
For the charm of his intelligence, the quickness of his wit, the brilliance of his mimicry, the fastidiousness of his temperament, the soundness of his judgement, the excellence of his literary criticism, for his loathing of the world's opinion.
But seriously, where are Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin?
Elizabeth Bennett
Just put Lizzie next to Fanny Price (Mansfield Park): Fanny will drone on about virtue; Lizzie will tell a joke. Fanny will praise the long sermons of her cousin, Edmund; Lizzie will make a provocative remark to Mr Darcy. Fanny will disapprove; Lizzie will laugh out loud.
Rupert Campbell-Black
I spent most of my teens wishing Rupert (from Jilly Cooper's Riders) would stride into my parents' kitchen in dirty hunting boots and whisk me away.
Me too :-D Although really only the Rupert fom Rivals onwards, and really, who could take him away from Taggie?
Josef K
In The Trial, Kafka's master-trap is to make us accept that Josef K's point of view is objective, narrative fact. In fact, Josef K is no timeless Everyman but a specific satirical character: a thoroughly modern salaryman with a goal-oriented, easy-to-clean mental world who is obsessed with office power-plays and visits a prostitute once a week.
Gandalf
JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings boasts the best white wizard in fiction - not morally ambiguous or neutral like Merlin, but not infallible either. Always wise when present and strangely comforting even when predicting doom and destruction.
Sir Lancelot
My favourite character - and the sexiest man in literature - is Sir Lancelot in Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott". He is drawn with hilariously euphemistic zest - all that stuff about his silver bugle and blazened baldric, and his helmet with its plume. It's barely decent, frankly, and it puts a smile on my face every time I read it.
Dr Watson
There is something appealing about a man who stows his stethoscope under his top hat.
Hamlet
For the charm of his intelligence, the quickness of his wit, the brilliance of his mimicry, the fastidiousness of his temperament, the soundness of his judgement, the excellence of his literary criticism, for his loathing of the world's opinion.
But seriously, where are Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin?
