Best literary character

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I was having this debate with someone the other day, who is the best literary character?

Dracula, Mrs Haversham, Elizabeth Bennett, Frankenstein's monster...

Who do you think?

Marion Halcombe in A Woman in White.

Nobody ever picks this but it’s Jem in To Kill a Mockingbird. The book is a homage to Jem’s coming of age and becoming a man.

Read the rabid dog chapter and the Atticus guarding the prison chapter then try and tell me I’m wrong.

Linda and Davey from The Pursuit of Love are both fabulous characters.

Kainene from Half of a Yellow Sun.

Obviously Mantel's Cromwell.

Oh Crumb.

I am thinking “best” in this context is most like a person - 3 dimensional, flaws and absurdities as well as good qualities and being someone you cared about.

Dorothea Brooke has to be a contender, I loved her. Middlemarch was a corker.

I agree with Cromwell in Wolf Hall too - a huge and powerful character, with flaws and conceits to match his many exceptional qualities.

Austen’s got three - Elizabeth, Emma and Anne. Emma’s annoying but very real.

Madame Bovary is depressingly realistic. And Anna Karenina.
Mr Collins, Lady Catherine de Bough, Miss Bates (Emma) and John Thorpe (Northanger Abbey) are all great comic characters.
David Copperfield (and Demon Copperhead for that matter) feel very rounded.
Iago is a fantastic villain.
There are so many!

Anne Shirley

Hareton in Wuthering Heights.

So many absolutely brilliant characters already mentioned, but none from Georgette Heyer yet. She has some of my all time favourites. Sophy from The Grand Sophy is my top pick, though I know some people really don't like her. Gil, Ferdy and George from Friday's Child, Freddy from Cotillion, Neville Fletcher from A Blunt Instrument, Randall from Behold, Here's Poison, Abby and Miles from Black Sheep... I could go on and on.

Granny Weatherwax (well any of Pratchett’s characters to be fair, but she’s my favourite)

Winston Smith - George Orwell, 1984. A bleakness and sadness that lives with me and always will.

I do have a soft spot for cut me own throat Dibbler and especially love the backstabbing wizards.

Lady Bracknell
Holly Sykes -a true heroine
Lizzie Bennett
Marion from Woman in White
Freda Klein and her long walks
Jackson Brodie
Dora Wexford

Definitely in my top five.

Thomas Cromwell as portrayed by Hilary Mantel.

Lord Peter Wimsey.

Harriet from the Olivia Manning ‘Fortunes of War’ books.

several characters from Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles.

i’m sure it’s no coincidence that these are all books I reread during lockdown.

Sherlock Holmes!

Yes, definitely. That’s why I tell my class every year that she’s my role model.

Oh yes lots of my favourites already mentioned, but I would like to add Count Alexander Rostov from A gentleman in Moscow please.

My choice is Charlotte Mullen from Somerville and Ross's The Real Charlotte (late-Victorian masterpiece which should be better known outside of Ireland than it is) -- a brilliantly, comically awful, yet relatable, villain.

@Impasse yes! The Real Charlotte is an absolute masterpiece. There was a tv series made of it a few years ago but Charlotte was shown as (physically) an attractive woman which made a nonsense of it.
All the characters are so well drawn and the end in which Francie battles with her conscience is outstanding writing.
I always wonder what happened next? Snobbish Charlotte behaved appallingly to those she considered her inferiors. If she was still alive when the Troubles broke out 30 years later they may have got their revenge…….

MapleTreeValley · Today 03:16
Linda and Davey from The Pursuit of Love are both fabulous characters

Definitely. Though I always thought Alfred was a prig, and Northey in Don't Tell Alfred was incredibly annoying - a goody-goody and a sneak. Did Nancy Mitford mean her to be so annoying?

Silas Marner

Sidney Carton

Anyone troubled who comes good in the end and whose name begins with S really

I find I'm caught between three options:

Sherlock Holmes, for solving plots I can't even imagine having the ideas to write.

Holden Caulfield, for being so realistically and awfully teenage. I hate him, and I love that.

Lestat de Lioncourt, for sheer charisma and moral complexity.

@FranticFrankie Holly |Sykes -oh yes.

So many absolutely brilliant characters already mentioned, but none from Georgette Heyer yet.

She wrote terrific secondary characters. Felix from Frederica or Edmund from Sylvester. In fact she wrote a whole range of small and adolescent boys.

Jerry Chirk from The Toll Gate

But especially Jonathan Chawleigh from A Civil Contract, a magnificent larger than life creation, worthy of Dickens.

Bessy in The Observations by Jane Harris is very amusing and a great narrative voice.
yes! one of the scandalously overlooked books I know

Bathsheba Everdene from Far From The Madding Crowd. Flawed but wonderful.

First choice, Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell. I was a bit in love with him, whilst still aware he ahem, had his flaws.
Second, Olive Kitteridge, complex, flawed and yet sympathetically drawn.