Choose wisely

“Name your favorite Jane Austen character”--along with its offshoots (favorite hero, favorite bad boy, Which Jane Austen Heroine Are You, etc.)--is a popular Janeite pastime. But like all such games, it comes with a side order of anxiety: What does this choice reveal about me?

Pick something too obvious, and you out yourself as boring and conventional. Pick something obscure, and you look like you’re trying too hard. Pick something really outré, and you just seem weird.

So draw your own conclusions from last month’s Guardian feature wherein twenty-three moderately well-known UK public figures—mostly novelists, screenwriters, and actors, plus a politician and a psychotherapist—play the favorite-character game.

Not surprisingly, Elizabeth Bennet finishes at the top, garnering four votes and a bit of apologetic acknowledgment: “I’m choosing the most obvious Austen character. . . but I’d be lying if I chose anyone else,” the playwright and screenwriter Abi Morgan admits. Indeed, Pride and Prejudice, perennially Austen’s most popular book, vacuums up ten votes, nearly half the total, with Mrs. Bennet, Mrs. Gardiner, Charlotte Lucas, and Lydia Bennet each earning one nod, while Mr. Bennet gets two.

(And while we’re on the topic of trying too hard: Mrs. Gardiner is your favorite character in all of Jane Austen? Rebecca Watson may be an excellent novelist—I don’t know, never having read her work—but she is a terrible liar.)

Along the way, the mini-essays that accompany each choice manage to highlight Austen’s multifariousness. On the one hand, here is her universality: "I saw myself–or who I felt myself to be–and felt understood, despite being a Black girl from east London, a few centuries removed from our heroine,” says British Nigerian writer Babu Babalola, one of the Lizzy Bennet fans.

And on the other hand, here is her slipperiness: Both novelist Tom Crewe and screenwriter Andrew Davies, he of the BBC’s beloved 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, choose Mr. Bennet as their favorite. But while Davies calls Mr. Bennet “a brilliant picture of a not very good parent,” Crewe says that it is Mr. Bennet’s touching concern for Elizabeth’s marital happiness that makes him cry at the end of the book. Who’s right? Maybe both!

Were I playing this game, I might have picked Elinor Dashwood (enough off the beaten path to seem discerning, yet not so random as to invite derision—am I right?) But I rather enjoyed the choice of the children’s book writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce, who says his favorite Jane Austen character is . . . Jane Austen.

Arguably, he’s cheating, not to mention committing the cardinal interpretative sin of conflating The Narrator with Austen herself, but even so, it’s hard to beat his description: “I love those moments where she makes you feel that you’re there in the Jane corner with her and she’s quietly digging you in the ribs, or whispering some smart, superior snark to you,” he writes. “She’s letting you know that she’s too cool for the world she’s created, and that makes you feel that you’re too cool too.”

So I guess that choice indicates that Cottrell-Boyce is cool? Well played, Janeite.