What's in a name?Visit Sarah Rayne's website.
A good deal is in a name, as many of the great writers of fiction have known. Names can indicate a considerable amount about a character. Would Ebenezer Scrooge have come across as the ultimate miser if he had been allotted a gentler, softer name? As it is, the harsh consonants strike a nicely disagreeable dissonance, and even the word Scrooge has passed into the English language as depicting a mean person. In Martin Chuzzlewit, the name of the dissolute midwife, Sairy Gamp for a time was synonymous with a colloquialism of the day for umbrella. Even now, I can remember my grandmother saying it looked like rain today, so she would take her gamp.
And Richard Brinsley Sheridan - no slouch when it came to bestowing colourful names - gave us Mrs Malaprop and the term malapropism for mispronunciations, and also the exuberant Sir Lucius O'Trigger, along with Sir Anthony Absolute, and Lydia Languish. They're names that instantly conjure up vivid mind pictures of the people in question.
I can't rival any of those in naming my characters, but the influence probably comes through here and there.
In The Murder Dance I created a parson called Humbert Marplot, a...[read on]
Writers Read: Sarah Rayne (November 2017).
The Page 69 Test: Chord of Evil.
The Page 69 Test: The Murder Dance.
Q&A with Sarah Rayne.
--Marshal Zeringue
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