Which of the great writers would you like to have met?

*Roald

It’s so funny to see this question - I was recently hit by the realisation that I’ll never meet any of the people whose imagination I’ve spent so much time with. My favourite writers seem more real to me than the people I know, in some ways, because they ‘let you in’. I had a few minutes feeling sad that I’d never meet PG Wodehouse or Dickens

Anyway…I’d have

Loved: Jane Austen, PG Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, James Joyce, George Orwell, RCC Sherriff, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Shirley Jackson, Sue Townsend, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons, Seamus Heaney, Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare..

Been Intrigued By: Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Daphne du Maurier, Hilary Mantel, Emily Brontë, John Keats, Mary Shelley, John Clare, Ronald Dahl, Philip Larkin, Edgar Allen Poe, Ted Hughes.

Disliked: Enid Blyton, Nancy Mitford, Martin Amis, William Golding.

And to lower the tone:

Shag: Ted Hughes
Marry: Douglas Adams
Avoid: Martin Amis.

I met Hilary Mantel a couple of times and didn’t take to her, though I think she’s an astonishing novelist. And I met Ted Hughes not long before his death. All he talked about was fishing. A friend knew Patrick Fermor quite well in his later years, though mostly his impression of him was bafflement that anyone could be so fit and smoke 80 cigarettes a day.

I’d like to have met Charlotte Bronte, though I suspect she’d have been a dreadful combination of shy and self-righteous. And Virginia Woolf. Elizabeth Bowen.

I would dearly love to have met Dickens because he fascinates me, flawed though he was as a person.

If I can have Samuel Pepys as a writer, I’ll add him like a shot (but see: flawed etc)

I'm afraid Charlotte Brontë, much as I love her, would probably have been quite hard work. But Austen much more indiscreet and fun.

(@Tortielady the letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh are hilariously funny - they were great friends I think, and understood each other well. Definitely worth reading)

I'd pick a writer with a sense of humor.

I've daydreamed about going back in time to tell Jane Austen how her work would endure, how widely read she would be.

I would have loved to have talked with Robertson Davies.

I love Waugh as a writer. As a human being, he seems to have been unbearable!

I'd have liked to have met PG Wodehouse, Seamus Heaney, Edith Wharton, Daphne du Maurier, Muriel Spark, Dorothy Parker, Terry Pratchett, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and Jessica Mitford (I'm not so sure about Nancy. Apparently she had a cruel tongue in her head and a close relationship with none other than Evelyn Waugh.) I'd also like to break bread with Karl Marx; he was clever and could be very funny, but his dinner companions soon learned to come with enough money to cover his share. He was always short of the ready. It would have been fun to have had Agatha Christie along too. I wonder what those two would have made of each other?

I always feel a bit sorry for Evelyn Waugh.