The 20 greatest Jane Austen characters

Are you team Emma or team Elizabeth? Pro-Darcy or more enamoured of Captain Wentworth? There’s no escaping Jane Austen and the indelible mark her characters have left as the anniversary of her birth approaches – and in reading her novels 250 years on, her very best fictional creations retain a teasing complexity that feels as fresh today as it ever did.

As a dyed-in-the-wool Austen fan since my teens, and a book critic now for 20 years, I’ve been celebrating the anniversary by rereading all six of her (completed) novels in order to produce the definitive guide to those fictional creations. It has been no easy task – even the most minor characters have a hard-to-ignore specificity.

I’ve become peculiarly fond, for instance, of Anne Elliot’s peevish sister Mary who channels her frustrations at the domestic obligations of her gender, notably motherhood, into an endless stream of complaint. And who could not relish the perfectly ghastly Lady Catherine de Bourgh, particularly as played by Dame Judi Dench in the 2005 film?

After much thought and argument, here’s my pick of her very best characters, in all their flawed, mercurial, immortal glory.

Emma

Mr Woodhouse

“A much older man in ways than in years,” whose “spirits required support”, wrote Jane Austen of Emma Woodhouse’s nervous, pernickety and indulgent father. Today we might interpret Mr Woodhouse’s distracted anxiety as evidence of mild dementia, but Austen instead embraces it as benign manifestations of his character: he’s an elderly fusspot who agonises over the richness of wedding cake, who has a “horror of late hours and large dinner parties” and who, like so many of us, has “habits of gentle selfishness… never able to suppose that other people could feel differently from himself”.

His uncompromising love for his daughter is a reliable constant running through Austen’s tale; that Emma should privately fear the prospect of spending the rest of her days alone with him is a measure of the novel’s sly, comic genius.

Mr Knightley

We are told almost immediately by Austen that Mr Knightley is “one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse and the only one who ever told her of them”. In other words, his moral clarity and upstanding decency is predominantly a narrative foil for Emma’s catastrophic delusions and lack of judgment.

He’s a vintage Austen male protagonist in that he’s kind, sympathetic, dependable and yet prone to sudden thrilling outpourings of feeling. Although one can’t help but wonder whether, had Emma got to see a bit more of the world, she would have chosen someone a bit more, well, lively…

Emma Woodhouse

In Emma Woodhouse, Jane Austen set out to create a “character whom no one but me will much like”. That in doing so she created one of the most multifaceted characters in English fiction is surely proof that likeability is one of the least significant qualities with which to judge a protagonist, particularly a female one.

The hopelessly idealistic Emma is a much more interesting heroine than Lizzy Bennet, precisely because of her many flaws – her vanity, her lack of self knowledge, her appalling snobbery, her insistence on believing she knows best what other people want; not to mention her stubborn inability to see the error of her ways.

She’s unusually isolated for an Austen heroine, having no social life to speak of, and trapped too by her domestic obligations to her father, which is partly why her journey towards maturity is so satisfying. But we see her at a complicated proximity: Austen wrote the novel in free indirect style, meaning it is almost entirely from Emma’s point of view. A radical fictional character in more ways than one.

Sense and Sensibility

Edward Ferrars

You might initially think of Edward Ferrars, cast as an early match for the sensible Elinor Dashwood, as quite dull. It’s certainly hard to get excited by a man whose wishes are “centred in domestic comfort and the quiet of private life”, as Austen first presents him, while Elinor’s sister Marianne puts it more bluntly: “his eyes want that spirit, that fire”; worse, “he has no real taste.”

Yet, appearances being as slippery as they are in an Austen novel, Ferrars turns out to be full of backbone, sticking with an unhappy engagement to the ghastly Lucy Steele out of duty, and eventually marrying for love rather than money. Emma Thompson even dared to imagine him as a doe-eyed floppy-haired Hugh Grant in her 1995 Oscar-winning screenplay, although Austen herself might have regarded that as a stretch too far.

Colonel Brandon

“But he talks of flannel waistcoats and with me a flannel waistcoat is invariably connected with aches, cramps, rheumatisms and every species of ailment that can affect the old and feeble,” wails Marianne in horror of Colonel Brandon, whom she dismisses as “the wrong side of five and 30”.

Yet flannel waistcoats can conceal hidden depths. Brandon is the inverse of John Willoughby in every way – he’s somewhat Byronic, having once tried to elope with his cousin Eliza, but he also later quietly supported her and her illegitimate daughter by another man. Alan Rickman made a career-defining performance of the role in the 1995 film, driving home why this sensitive deep thinker isn’t merely a booby prize for Marianne, but her perfect match.

John Willoughby

The dashing John Willoughby is a devil of a character – indecently handsome and utterly charming but also weak of purpose and prone to treating women in a way that today would promptly be labelled “toxic”. Still, Sense and Sensibility would be a much duller novel without him – he swoops Marianne literally off her feet after she suffers a sprained ankle, and looks particularly excellent in a shooting jacket.

His hedonistic enthusiasms and love for dancing and poetry find a mutual sympathy in the sparkier Dashwood sister. Yet while he also behaves appallingly, to both Marianne and to Eliza Williams, whom he gets pregnant and promptly abandons, Austen less shows us an obnoxious cad than a man who is pitifully, pathologically lost.

Marianne Dashwood

Austen’s first novel has its design built into the title – Elinor Dashwood is the sensible sister while Marianne possesses the livelier, less cautious and more romantic sensibility. Marianne is as appealing and nonconformist as Lizzy Bennet but for very different reasons: she’s impulsive, artistic and wont to seizing life in all its joyful and painful intensity. She falls in love with Willoughby not only for his looks, but because he shares her wild poetic spirit and unbridled appetite for the sensuous and fun.

Only through marriage to the wiser, more mature Colonel Brandon does she come to realise happiness lies not with someone who is exactly like her but with someone who allows her to fully realise her true self. A very Austen distinction.

Elinor Dashwood

The elder Dashwood sister possesses “a strength of understanding and coolness of judgment... her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong but she knew how to govern them”. She stands, of course, in opposition to her rather more excitable younger sister Marianne – but it would be a mistake to write off Elinor as a sensible bore. Her inner life is just as turbulent as that of her impetuous sibling; in fact, we’re invited to imagine it is all the more so precisely because so little is on display. She keeps her agony on hearing of Edward Ferrars’s engagement to Lucy Steele to herself for some time, and on hearing that Edward is able to marry her after all, expresses her happiness in an unexpected rush of tears. One of Austen’s most selfless creations.

Pride and Prejudice

Mr Collins

I’m not sure that there exists a more enjoyably ghastly character in British fiction than the clergyman heir presumptive to Mr Bennet’s estate of Longbourn who, as Austen puts it in Pride and Prejudice, “is not a sensible man”.

He gets a point for his plan to “atone” for his inheritance by marrying a Bennet sister, but it scarcely compensates for his vanity, obsequiousness, wilful blindness and obscene self-regard. To be fair to him, he had a miserable, closeted upbringing at the hands of his “illiterate and miserly” father, and nowhere in the novel is he represented as the physically repulsive creep he’s invariably depicted as on screen. He’s also, let’s not forget, only about 25. Still, he’s the ultimate social climber, and, as his admonishing letter to the Bennets on Lydia’s elopement suggests, terribly screwed up about sex. Poor Charlotte Lucas.

Mr Bennet

Austen may give Mr Bennet some of the best lines in Pride and Prejudice, but his caustic wit and barely disguised intolerance for the hypocrisies and obligations of polite society also point to his own consequential shortcomings as a father and a husband. Absence is Mr Bennet’s preferred modus operandi: he’s a man who retreats to his study whenever real life demands from him even a smidgen of parental responsibility. And though his scorn for the idiotic woman he married is fabulously on point, it’s often borderline abusive.

Let’s not forget Mrs Bennet’s anxious fretful witterings stem in part from his failure to secure the future of the estate. And then he has the audacity to mock her for it. “You mistake me my dear,” he replies when she accuses him of showing no compassion for her nerves. “I have the highest respect for them. They’ve been my constant companion these 20 years.”

But it’s his indifference to the fate of his three youngest daughters that causes the greatest damage, when he allows Lydia to run off to Brighton. We love Mr Bennet for his ironic detachment from a socially determined, frequently absurd world, and, too, for his conspiratorial affectionate relationship with his beloved Lizzy. But his failings ultimately speak to a fatal lack of moral courage.

Mr Wickham

Charm is Mr Wickham’s greatest weapon; in fact, it’s arguably all he has. He’s so good at deploying it that he initially blinds Lizzy Bennet, who’s instinctively sceptical. Yet his intentions are entirely self-serving and dangerous: he’s a man willing to risk the reputation of Lydia for the consolation of a fun weekend in Brighton, and only marries her when paid to do so.

An inveterate gambler, he leaves financial carnage wherever he goes and is also a pathological fantasist, consistently constructing a parallel version of his life in which he is the victim of other people’s duplicity rather than the architect of his own disasters. And yet: Austen throws him a very tiny bone. This most weak-willed of bounders is also capable if not of shame then at least embarrassment. After his marriage to Lydia he endures a tricky conversation in the garden with Lizzy, seeking to draw a veil over the matter; but instead he’s left almost uncomfortable. “She held out her hand; he took it with affectionate gallantry, though he hardly knew how to look, and they entered the house.”

Mr Darcy

Sebastian Faulks has described Mr Darcy as perhaps the first depressive in an English novel to feature as a romantic lead. For pretty much everyone else, he’s defined first and foremost by Colin Firth emerging from a lake in the 1995 BBC adaptation – a moment so influential in TV history it became a keystone gag in the 2001 film adaptation of Bridget Jones’s Diary. The Beatrice-Benedick dynamic between him and Lizzy Bennet – so much darker and uncompromising than in Shakespeare – may be one of the most rewarding courtships in English literature, but Darcy remains a tough nut to crack. His taciturn, dour exterior largely stems from a terror of behaving in a way that invites ridicule, and that vanity is almost his undoing. I’d argue Darcy remains essentially unknowable, though readers can see him most clearly at the end through Lizzy’s redemptive love.

Lydia Bennet

Spare a thought for Lydia – the hot mess of the Bennet family who is only 15 when the novel begins and is giddily in love with frippery, gossip and status. She’s no ingénue, but rather a teenage rebel unconcerned by propriety and who flouts the restrictions placed upon her gender by openly swanning off with Mr Wickham. She’s impulsive, candid and says exactly what she thinks; she’s also spoiled, selfish and cares not a fig for anyone but herself. There’s no personal reckoning for Lydia in Pride and Prejudice but it’s hard at times not to feel for this callow, needy, silly little girl who so craves the respect of others. Returning home disgraced, husband in tow, she declares: “O mamma, do the people here abouts know I am married today? I was afraid they might not… we overtook William Goulding in his curricle… and I let my hand rest upon the window frame so that he might see the ring, and then I bowed and smiled like anything.”

Elizabeth Bennet

The second Bennet daughter might be English literature’s equivalent of Jo March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women: she’s the female character with whom young female readers tend to identify more than any other, and the literary heroine they most aspire to be. Austen is fully on Lizzy’s side from the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, a bias that can blind readers to her faults. For one, she’s uncompromising in her disdain for those who cannot match her very high standards (mostly her own family), and her feelings for Darcy only start to turn when she first catches sight of his glorious estate, Pemberley. But goodness me – her wit; her vivacity; her merry disruption of social convention; her knack for knowing exactly what to say in almost every moment. I just love her.

Persuasion

Captain Wentworth

It’s not insignificant that Captain Wentworth is the hero of Austen’s final novel: he symbolises a new world order throwing off the shackles of inherited wealth and oppressive social roles. A well-regarded naval officer, he’s also a self-made man and brims with hope and ambition for the future. He’s human enough to resent Anne breaking off their engagement and licks his wounds by regarding her behaviour as dishonourable – and yet he’s not so proud as to conceal his feelings for her. Few readers would regard Captain Wentworth as their favourite Austen male protagonist – he’s not quite exciting enough for that – but one wonders whether in him, Austen was creating her ideal man.

Anne Elliot

“A heroine who is almost too good for me,” is how Jane Austen once described the protagonist of her final, subtle novel. “Good” might sound strange to modern readers, who may instead see the sallow Anne Elliot as infuriatingly passive: after all, she abandoned her engagement eight years previously to her beloved but penniless Wentworth on the advice of her step-mother. And at the age of 27, she appears to have stoically accepted her lot as the family drudge. Yet Anne is also Austen’s most profoundly realised character. The loss of Wentworth is for her a kind of death, that “clouded every enjoyment of youth”, though her air of resignation is only surface to her inner life, that’s painfully rich with unexpressed feeling. We root for Anne because of all of Austen’s female protagonists, she is most like us: a woman all too aware that, while the possibility of love always exists, so does that of a life lived out in regret.

Mansfield Park

Mary Crawford

The ambiguous Mary Crawford is a particularly sparkling Austen creation: she’s lively, clever, funny, ambitious and determinedly independent. As she declares at one point: “Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like. She’s always looking for a good time, enlivening every conversation; yet her moral standing in the novel becomes complicated both by her refusal to condemn her caddish brother Henry and ultimately the damning opinion other characters have of her, notably that of Edmund. In another story, this quick-witted woman might be the heroine; instead, and ironically, given the disparaging view most readers have of Fanny Price, she plays second fiddle. As Austen herself puts it: “[Mary] had none of Fanny’s delicacy of taste, of mind, of feeling; she saw Nature, inanimate Nature, with little observation, her attention was all for men and women, her talents for the light and lively.”

Henry Crawford

The brother of Mary is not one of Austen’s most distinguished characters. He’s a shallow and trivial pleasure-seeker who pursues women with restless but rarely lasting enthusiasm. For many he symbolises the bright new lights of city living, and one that Austen presents as an existential threat to the older, more conservative country way of life. His unlikely love for Fanny Price, who refuses him, could have been the great tragic event of Mansfield Park, yet Austen never allows him the dimension of a tragic hero. Instead he blows his chances by fooling around with the married Maria. Would he have been redeemed by marriage to Fanny? Austen tantalisingly offers that question though does not answer it.

Fanny Price

With her unswerving moral conscience, which often borders on insufferable priggishiness, Fanny has never been one of Austen’s best-loved heroines. But she’s also arguably her most misunderstood. Her childhood is tough: she’s a quivering 10-year-old wrenched from her family home and brought up with well-meaning but loveless tolerance by her much wealthier uncle and aunt. Only the second eldest son, Edmund, refuses to ram home her social inferiority and poorer education, and she spends much of her teenage years desperately lonely and unhappy.

Northanger Abbey

Catherine Morland

“Thin, awkward” and book-loving Catherine Morland is tricky to parse, since Northanger Abbey is a gothic send-up and depends on her character behaving precisely how a gothic heroine might. But who could fail to be enamoured of a woman who we learn as a child “greatly preferred cricket to dolls” and who cuts such a wide-eyed, sweetly oblivious 17-year-old amid the world of high-society Bath? Catherine’s only real mistake is to believe the world resembles an Ann Radcliffe novel and her guilelessness is refreshing compared to the snobbery of General Tilney and Isabella Thorpe. As her romantic delusions fall from her eyes, Catherine unexpectedly becomes Austen’s most ordinary heroine.