RANDOM JOTTINGS

I was trawling through old posts the other day and came across one entitled Favourite Characters.  It was interesting to read as it was several years old and views I expressed some time ago have more or less stayed the same.

• Jo in Little Women (Meg was too bossy, Amy too self obsessed and Beth just TOO good to be true)

• Anne Eliot – Persuasion (yes I love her more than Elizabeth Bennett, she is so true, so steadfast)

• Provincial Lady – Diary of a Provincial Lady by EM Delafield

• Newland Archer – Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.  A man who had the misfortune to be engaged and then married to a seemingly innocent young thing who turns out to be manipulative and underhand. He gave up the love of his life for her.  A good man.

• Jane Eyre – Yes I know some people feel she can be a bit of a pain with her O poor me attitude but she is brave and fiery and her passionate claim to equality with Rochester is still, to me, one of the defining moments in women’s literature

• Aunt Betsy Trotwood – David Copperfield.  One of Dicken’s finest characters. Her taking in of the unloved unhappy orphaned David and her routing of the Murdstones. My favourite part of this favourite book

• Anne – Anne of Green Gables by L M Montgomery.  Red haired, hot tempered, endlessly funny and I love the way she gets up each day determined to wring every ounce of fun and enjoyment out of life.  Never tire of reading and re-reading these books

• Katy – What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge.  Yet another childhood book I love and re-read as we see how tomboyish, thoughtless Katy copes with a life changing accident.  The rest of the books in this series are all wonderful but the first is the best.

• Mary Lennox – A Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.  Neglected by her parents, plain, stubborn, proud and inside longing for love and affection, a marvellous character and I always get cross when this book stops being about her and switches focus to Colin half way through.

• Obadiah Slope – Barchester Towers by Trollope. No need to explain why this ghastly creature is one of my favourite characters, but has nothing to do with Alan Rickman! I just find him utterly slimy and revolting and to see him get his come uppance is a joy.  One of the funniest and best of Trollope’s prodigious output

• Mrs Wilkins (Lotty) – The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. Oh how I love this book and how I love Lotty who decides she has had enough of rainy miserable days and cooking fish for her boring husband and who takes off to an Italian castle for a month.  Bliss.

• Maria Merryweather – The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge.  Enchanting, magical story of the redoubtable Maria coming to Moonacre Manor to right wrongs and to find her heart’s desire.

• Jenny – A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer.  I have read all of this author’s output and love them all in varying degrees, but I think this book is her best.  Jenny, quiet, plain and deeply in love with Adam and undertaking a marriage whereby her fortune rescues his estates and finding happiness.  This is not a tale of derring do or the usual dashing hero/heroine romance that we expect from Heyer but a quieter more thoughtful book and one that I return to time and time again.

• Roderick Alleyn – Ngaio Marsh’s charismatic detective and his wife, Agatha Troy.  Never get bored with these books, all read so many times I know the dialogue off by heart but Alleyn is fascinating and gorgeous; which leads me onto:

• Lord Peter Wimsey – for those DL Sayer’s afficionados out there, no explanation is necessary. A fascinating man,

I also noted that I had noted the Donna Leon books set in Venice and featuring her detective, Brunetti.  I remember really enjoying them until they palled mainly because there seemed to character progression at all. Now the same could be said of other long running series, but in this case I began to find Brunetti’s wife, a lover of Henry James, and a superb cook who seemed to be able to whip up a pasta dish of supreme wonderfulness at the drop of a hat,  rather irritating.  And then for entertainment in the evenings they would sit and discuss philosophy and  Brunetti would be reading Aeschylus or some such. It all got a bit wearing.

Then the books began to get vaguer and vaguer as if the author was as fed up writing them as I was reading them so I gave up.

I was also reading the Inspector Montebalno books by Camilleri and these were huge fun which at times had me crying with laughter. But, once again, the characters remained the same, nothing changed and though I enjoyed them, they also began to tail off.

On looking at the list above I would not change any of them, they remain my favourites to this day and I cannot see that changing.

I realise I could quite easily go on and on as more and more of my favourites come to mind (Dorothea in Middlemarch, Mr Jarndyce in Bleak House, Emma, Helen in Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Miss Pettigrew, Emily Fox-Seaton in Making of a Marchioness, Pippi Longstocking, Roberta from the Railway Children, Poirot, Miss Marple), but I will desist – for the moment anyway. Looking at this list what leaps out at me is that I have no contemporary fiction represented at all, this comes as no surprise to me, but I feel this is a shame and do wish I could think of somebody in recent fiction who I have fallen in love with, but try as I might I cannot.  I will keep pondering on this one…

Also, a lot of books I read as a child, but I still love them so much and their happiness and enjoyment I experienced when I first read them, remains with me still.

Would love to hear what your favourite characters are and your thoughts on the above.