Does it matter if you don't like the characters?

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Does it matter if you don't like the characters?<br>I cannot reconcile my heart to this unlikeable approach to literature

Henry Oliver<br>Jul 23, 2026

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In the Financial Times , the novelist Jem Calder (whose new book I am yet to read), has written about the question of whether it matters if we like the characters in novels.<br>I have to ask: what’s so important about likeability? What’s the problem with reading about fictional people who have done fictional bad things, or had problematic fictional thoughts?

He thinks that doing unlikable things is what gives a novel drama. What would Middlemarch be, he asks, if everyone were as pious as Dorothea? (Yes, he notes her own problematic thoughts.) He does avoid blaming social media and Goodreads for what he takes to be the trend of judging books based on whether you like the characters. (His 62-year-old mother thinks this way.) But he sees a professional/non-professional divide.<br>On the issue of likeability, non-professional online reviewers depart sharply from their professional counterparts published in mainstream literary publications. Even though professional reviews usually discuss characters’ actions while summarising a book’s plot, the judgments of likeable or not almost never feature.

Calder assumes this is because students are taught to approach literature as a “text” but falls into the familiar trap of wishing away critical complexity, saying:<br>the idea that fiction might just simply and entertainingly try to explore how other people live their lives and comport themselves under interesting ethical circumstances goes out the window in favour of an interrogative mode of reading that instead treats the novel primarily as an object of analysis.

No-one denies that we read for pleasure. But the idea that Austen, Eliot, Dickens, and James were “just simply and entertainingly try to explore how other people live their lives” is silly in its own right. However, that is beside the point Calder is making. (He cannot have it both ways!)<br>The distinction between liking the characters and judging the book critically does not need to be so sharp. If, as Calder claims, professional critics relegate their feelings about characters’ likeability to judgements of craft (oh that dreaded word), style, and its place in the canon, they are a modern exception to the general rule. It seems to me that if this is a critical predilection, while it surely does have something to do with the idea of books as texts and all that desiccated approach, it is also grounded more sensibly in the distinction between feeling and judgement. Critics who exclude their feelings about the characters are doing so out of a sense of the importance of proper judgement, but they are missing a trick nonetheless.<br>Critics used to write about liking and not liking characters all the time. Read the early reviews of the Brontes! It was common for readers in the nineteenth century to talk about knowing the characters and for that to be part of the pleasure of reading. And George Henry Lewes, who Carlyle called “the prince of journalists”, wasn’t above writing about his own deep feelings for Austen’s characters.<br>Miss Austen is like Shakespeare: she makes her very noodles inexhaustibly amusing, yet accurately real. We never tire of her characters. They become equal to actual experiences. They live with us, and form perpetual topics of comment. We have so personal a dislike to Mrs Elton and Mrs Norris, that it would gratify our savage feeling to hear of some calamity befalling them. We think of Mr Collins and John Thorpe with such a mixture of ludicrous enjoyment and angry contempt, that we alternately long and dread to make their personal acquaintance. The heroines—at least Elizabeth, Emma, and Catherine Morland—are truly lovable, flesh-and-blood young women…

Truly lovable! Ludicrous enjoyment! Lewes of course was a true man of letters, unworried by the possibility of being thought middlebrow. The closest thing we have to such a person today is A.N. Wilson, another great critic who is unafraid to weep and laugh on the page. Lewes was not imposing his feelings onto Austen. She wrote intentionally to provoke this sort of reaction. He was reading her as she ought to have been read. Likeability was part-and-parcel of judgement, for both critic and novelist.<br>Calder’s mother and all those readers on Goodreads are reacting in exactly the way they ought to—in exactly the way novelists like Austen and Eliot knew they would, as the scholar Debra Gettelman showed . Ana Kinsella wrote today about the way she wrote her recent novel (which I am also waiting to read). Rather than writing “with any idea that the novel might be read, nor that those readers might bring their own opinions about gender and art to the text”, she wrote about what interested her: a complicated man. This is quite different to the way the nineteenth century...