Baby Names from Books: Authors’ Picks
Recently, the London newspaper The Independent published the results of a survey they did asking one hundred British literary figures–including such leading lights as Maeve Binchy, Tracy Chevalier, Cynthia Ozick, David Lodge, AS Byatt and Ken Follett— to name their favorite fictional characters, “the characters who gave them the greatest reading pleasure.”
It was pretty interesting to see how the source books correlated with the choosers’ own works—probably no surprise that Ken Follett found early inspiration from James Bond, and Michael Connelly was influenced by Philip Marlowe. (To check out the full story, including which writers picked which characters, visit the website of The Independent.)
Here are some of the noteworthy character names that they came up with:
Antonia Shimerdas, My Antonia by Willa Cather
Arturo Gerace, Arturo’s Island by Elsa Morante
Bathsheba Everdene, Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Ebenezer le Page, The Book of Ebenezer le Page by G. B. Edwards
Elinor Dashwood, Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Flora Poste, Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Godwin Peak, Born in Exile by George Gissing
Haroun, Haroun and the Sea Stories by Salman Rushdie
Harriet M. Welsch, Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
Horatia Winwood, The Convenient Marriage by Georgette Heyer
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
Joachim Ziemssen, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Julien Sorel, The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Leopold Bloom, Ulysses by James Joyce
Lorelei Lee, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
Louisa Pollett, The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
Lyra Silvertongue, His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman
Maisie Farange, What Maisie Knew by Henry James
Milo Minderbender, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Molly Bloom, Ulysses by James Joyce
Nigel Molesworth, series by Geoffrey Willans
Oskar Schell, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer; Oskar Matzerath, The Tin Drum by Günther Grass
Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler detective
Rhett Butler, Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Rupert Campbell–Black, Riders by Jilly Cooper; Rupert Psmith, the Jeeves books by P.G. Wodehouse
Zazie, Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau
Zeno Cosino, Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
What’s your favorite name of a literary character?