One of my favourite questions to ask someone when I find they are also a reader of Jane Austen is ‘Elinor or Marianne?’ Perhaps because I am not 100 percent sure whom I associate myself with anymore and so find it an interesting question to discuss.
When reading a book I often associate myself with one of the characters. I imagine that this is pretty normal. But in my early twenties I was surprised to learn that not everyone associates with the same character. I always assumed that everyone picked the same character because I thought I always associated with the main character. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor; in Little Women, Jo; in The Famous Five, George. The last perhaps shows the fallacy in my thought as one would be hard put to prove George a main character while in the first two examples I think arguments could be made for Elinor and Jo’s point of view being the most strongly expressed.
In reality we are each the protagonist in our stories and it is good to remember that everyone has their own story which provides an invisible background for their actions.
Katherine Wansink Writes 