Literary characters we’d like to be

Recently, I wrote a post asking readers which literary character they’d most like to be. My thanks to everyone who sent in a response – the results were interesting.

One reader wrote in to say, ‘I should like to be Elphaba of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked. She lives according to her convictions, she has a passionate love affair and she can fly on a broom. Now, that’s living!’

It is indeed. Another reader chose Jane Eyre, who is ‘basically Cinderella, but smarter’.

A colleague wrote, ‘I’m one part Cassandra Mortmain (from I Capture the Castle), two parts Elizabeth Bennet (from Pride and Prejudice) and one part Dorothea Brooke (from Middlemarch), with a dash of Delysia Lafosse (from Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day) and a sprig of the Vicomte de Valmont (from Les Liaisons Dangereuses) as garnish. Served straight up with a twist of Emily Dickinson’.

Another reader wrote, ‘When I read Villette by Charlotte Brontë, I fell in love with the novel’s heroine, Lucy Snowe. On the surface, Lucy comes across as somewhat mousy and unexciting. However, look closer and plain old Lucy is brave, intelligent, shrewd and defiant. For a woman of her era she is remarkably strong-willed; her refusal to be anything other than true to herself and her beliefs (which tend to be worthy) is admirable even by today’s standards. Above all else, it is her free-spiritedness that resonates with me; in her own quiet way Miss Snowe is an intrepid adventurer. Like Lucy before her, Remedy, Anne Marsella’s American girl in Paris (from Remedy), is a feisty young woman who refuses to be anything other than herself – only she has a damn good time doing it, too. So, if I could be a character from a book, I’d be mixture of two – Lucy Snowe and Remedy O’Riley de Valdez!’

Someone else opted for ‘Clarisse from Fahrenheit 451... I think part of me was born in that book’.

Another reader wrote, ‘All my favourite characters from all my favourite books are sexy, passionate foreigners who meet sad, bloody ends. Or dour, unremarkable loners who remain largely dour and alone. People crumbling into suffering like the facades of old buildings. Unsurprisingly, these are not people I want to be. I don’t want to be tragic and romantic. I don’t think I know how. I don’t want to be realistic. I’m a skinny white girl doing a desk job in a grey city. I have enough realism in my life already. So I would like to be Michael K (from J.M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K). To walk and keep on walking. No passion, no glamour, no shoes. Just quiet and dignity and a field full of pumpkins’.

Other choices were Lara Antipova from Dr Zhivago, Cathy from Wuthering Heights (‘she gets to frolic with Heathcliff on the moors, even if he is a bastard’), Alice from Alice in Wonderland and Lady Macbeth!