On-line quizzes claiming to align your personality with that of a literary character are hardly a new phenomenon. (For example, click here to find out if you’re more Emma Woodhouse or Anne Elliot. Or here, to uncover your inner Edmund Bertram or Fitzwilliam Darcy).
The quiz currently making the rounds on Facebook is sponsored by the Scottish Book Trust in honor of Book Week Scotland (which, incidentally, ended on December 1. But never mind). Reportedly, a million people worldwide have answered these dozen questions, which gauge users’ sociability and approach to problem-solving.
Unlike the Austen quizzes, this one casts its net more widely: you may discover you’re the flighty Holly Golightly, the suave James Bond, or the cerebral Hercule Poirot. On line, quiz-takers have reported being paired with people from A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, To Kill a Mockingbird, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Hunger Games, Les Miserables, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, The Lord of the Rings, On the Road, The Life of Pi, One Day, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as the Batman and Spiderman comics. I seem to be Clarice Starling, the intrepid investigator in Silence of the Lambs.
But my husband is. . . Mr. Darcy.
Or so he claims: I took the quiz again, entering all the answers he insists he chose the first time round, and could produce only George Smiley, John Le Carré’s rumpled, stubbornly honorable spy. A good man in his way, but no Mr. Darcy.
2 comments
Dec 10 2013 12:59AM by Jessie W
I tried the quiz and it told me I was Mary Jane from the Spiderman comics! I was hoping for an Emma or a Ms. Moneypenny...
Dec 10 2013 02:02AM by Deborah Yaffe
I think basically no one's happy unless they get Elizabeth Bennet.