WHAT DO YOU DO?
Do your characters have the jobs that suit them, or do their roles reflect their personality? Margaret James gives some professional consideration
FICTION FOCUS
Margaret James
It must be quite a while since characters in fiction didn’t invariably need to have professions that defined them in some way, and I’ve sometimes wondered what the landed gentlemen in various classic novels – Mr Darcy, Mr Rochester and Mr Knightley, for example – actually did all day.
They had servants and stewards and land agents and housekeepers to do most of the tedious, routine stuff. So they had plenty of leisure time to devote to important things like riding around their estates and falling in love. As for the women – until relatively recently in European culture, any woman who didn’t need to work in order to eat seems to have been actively discouraged from doing anything whatsoever.