Top 10 Greatest Literary Characters Ever Created

Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet — witty, independent, self-aware, and unjustly prejudiced — is the most beloved female protagonist in the history of the English novel. In a society that offered women almost no legal or economic independence, she exercises moral and intellectual authority with such grace that she defined the template for the modern heroine. BBC's 1995 adaptation confirmed she remains as vivid and compelling as any contemporary character.

Don Quixote, the 50-year-old hidalgo who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and sets out to be a knight errant in a world of windmills and inn-keepers, is the first great character in the history of the European novel. His delusion — believing fiction more real than reality — has made him the symbol of idealism, madness, the power of narrative to shape perception, and the pathos of obsolescence.

Jay Gatsby — James Gatz of North Dakota who reinvented himself as a mysterious millionaire to win back the woman he loved — is the definitive American archetype: the self-made man whose dream is simultaneously beautiful and corrosive. His destruction by the careless rich who use and discard him makes him the most searching character study of the American Dream in literature.

Sherlock Holmes is the most adapted fictional character in the history of cinema and television, appearing in over 25,000 stage adaptations and 75,000 published works. His deductive method, his cocaine habit, his disdain for sentiment, and his relationship with Watson have made him one of the most analysed characters in literature — and the template for the brilliant but flawed detective figure that dominates crime fiction.

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina — an aristocratic woman who abandons her husband and son for Count Vronsky and pays for it with her social destruction and eventual suicide — has been interpreted as both a victim of social hypocrisy and a study in self-destruction. Her psychological complexity, captured through Tolstoy's pioneering interior monologue technique, makes her the finest female character in European literature. The opening sentence — "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" — is the most famous in world literature.

Atticus Finch — the small-town Alabama lawyer who defends a Black man falsely accused of rape in the Jim Crow South — was for decades the defining ideal of the American moral hero: principled, calm, courageous in the face of communal pressure. Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman (2015), revealing a later Atticus sympathetic to segregationists, provoked an extraordinary re-evaluation of whether any character can bear the moral weight readers impose on them.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov — a young St. Petersburg student who murders a pawnbroker and her sister to test his theory that extraordinary people are above conventional morality — is the greatest psychological study in world literature of guilt, rationalism, and the consequences of intellectual arrogance. His interior monologue, as he suffers and reasons and suffers again, invented techniques of psychological fiction that Freud himself acknowledged as anticipating psychoanalysis.

Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse — "handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition" — is the most self-satisfied and self-deluding of Austen's heroines, and the one whose education the author follows with the most amused affection. Her misguided matchmaking and her inability to recognise her own feelings for Knightley until she is in danger of losing him make her the funniest and most human of Austen's characters.

Winston Smith — the Ministry of Truth clerk who secretly rebels against Oceania's totalitarian regime and writes in an illegal diary — is the perfect vehicle for Orwell's exploration of how totalitarianism destroys not just individual freedom but individual consciousness itself. His defeat and re-education in Room 101, culminating in his genuine love for Big Brother, is one of literature's most devastatingly pessimistic endings and one of its most politically serious.

Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet — witty, independent, self-aware, and unjustly prejudiced — is the most beloved female protagonist in the history of the English novel. In a society that offered women almost no legal or economic independence, she exercises moral and intellectual authority with such grace that she defined the template for the modern heroine. BBC's 1995 adaptation confirmed she remains as vivid and compelling as any contemporary character.

Don Quixote, the 50-year-old hidalgo who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and sets out to be a knight errant in a world of windmills and inn-keepers, is the first great character in the history of the European novel. His delusion — believing fiction more real than reality — has made him the symbol of idealism, madness, the power of narrative to shape perception, and the pathos of obsolescence.

Jay Gatsby — James Gatz of North Dakota who reinvented himself as a mysterious millionaire to win back the woman he loved — is the definitive American archetype: the self-made man whose dream is simultaneously beautiful and corrosive. His destruction by the careless rich who use and discard him makes him the most searching character study of the American Dream in literature.

Sherlock Holmes is the most adapted fictional character in the history of cinema and television, appearing in over 25,000 stage adaptations and 75,000 published works. His deductive method, his cocaine habit, his disdain for sentiment, and his relationship with Watson have made him one of the most analysed characters in literature — and the template for the brilliant but flawed detective figure that dominates crime fiction.

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina — an aristocratic woman who abandons her husband and son for Count Vronsky and pays for it with her social destruction and eventual suicide — has been interpreted as both a victim of social hypocrisy and a study in self-destruction. Her psychological complexity, captured through Tolstoy's pioneering interior monologue technique, makes her the finest female character in European literature. The opening sentence — "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" — is the most famous in world literature.

Atticus Finch — the small-town Alabama lawyer who defends a Black man falsely accused of rape in the Jim Crow South — was for decades the defining ideal of the American moral hero: principled, calm, courageous in the face of communal pressure. Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman (2015), revealing a later Atticus sympathetic to segregationists, provoked an extraordinary re-evaluation of whether any character can bear the moral weight readers impose on them.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov — a young St. Petersburg student who murders a pawnbroker and her sister to test his theory that extraordinary people are above conventional morality — is the greatest psychological study in world literature of guilt, rationalism, and the consequences of intellectual arrogance. His interior monologue, as he suffers and reasons and suffers again, invented techniques of psychological fiction that Freud himself acknowledged as anticipating psychoanalysis.

Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse — "handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition" — is the most self-satisfied and self-deluding of Austen's heroines, and the one whose education the author follows with the most amused affection. Her misguided matchmaking and her inability to recognise her own feelings for Knightley until she is in danger of losing him make her the funniest and most human of Austen's characters.

Winston Smith — the Ministry of Truth clerk who secretly rebels against Oceania's totalitarian regime and writes in an illegal diary — is the perfect vehicle for Orwell's exploration of how totalitarianism destroys not just individual freedom but individual consciousness itself. His defeat and re-education in Room 101, culminating in his genuine love for Big Brother, is one of literature's most devastatingly pessimistic endings and one of its most politically serious.