Harriet M Welsch, in Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, is a precocious 11-year-old New Yorker who is obsessed with spying. Finally, Madame Bovary should fumble her way to our table, flushed-looking and late, to dish some dirt on the judges.Ĭhosen by Tracy Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring) The Cheshire Cat would be welcome for his humour and his knack with practical metaphysics. I can't pick just one, but at the Fictional People Awards Ceremony I hope they put me on a table with Mikhail Bulgakov's Devil and Robert Bolt's Thomas More, for their erudition and conversation. Mrs Norris in the glittering satire Mansfield Park, is Austen's most profound, subtle portrait of the banality of evil. The narrator of the book, she's engaging and - typically for a cat - regards herself as an important member of the expedition.She was the only casualty of the expedition and the book ends when they are about to shoot her because they couldn't take her across the ice.Ĭhosen by Sally Beauman (The Landscape of Love) Mrs Chippy, from Mrs Chippy's Last Expedition by Caroline Alexander, is a character based on the real-life cat that went on the Endurance with Shackleton. He chimed with all my fantasies of heroism and toughness and loneliness.Ĭhosen by Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves) Philip Marlowe, the private detective created by Raymond Chandler, is the most inspirational and influential character I have ever met. It's barely decent, frankly, and it puts a smile on my face every time I read it. He is drawn with hilariously euphemistic zest - all that stuff about his silver bugle and blazened baldric, and his helmet with its plume. My favourite character - and the sexiest man in literature - is Sir Lancelot in Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott". The literary hero who has remained most dear to me is Geoffrey Willans's schoolboy, Nigel Molesworth - a fearless critic, a comedian, a subversive, a philosopher who discusses Camus on the football pitch and whose trenchant powers of social commentary are, as any fule kno, enhanced by his appalling spelling.Ĭhosen by Wendy Holden (The Wives of Bath) But what made me want to listen to the music was the feisty Elephant's Child, who, with his newly acquired trunk, has such sweet revenge on all his chastising relatives. The Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling taught me to love the music in words. Nicer than I am by a long way.Ĭhosen by Michael Morpurgo (Private Peaceful) And, bless her, she is truly ashamed when she does, because she is actually very nice.
She is always plunging into such embarrassing mistakes - and yet they're the mistakes one longs to make oneself, like telling the tediously garrulous Miss Bates to shut up. Always wise when present and strangely comforting even when predicting doom and destruction.Ĭhosen by Diana Wynne Jones (Conrad's Fate) 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. Chosen by Mary Hoffman (Stravaganza City of Flowers)
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