From Lord of the Rings and Star Wars to Harry Potter and 50 Shades of Grey, the most popular narratives often feature a mentor figure offering advice and guidance. But the mentor reaches far back to classical times, and is a narrative device most commonly deployed during a time of dilemma. Mentors are the flint-spark at the heart of a story.

The genesis of my novel The Offing lies in the repeated assertion by female actors of more mature years that there are very few roles for them, coupled with an awareness that the combination of older woman/younger man is a literary pairing rarely read. Yet the tedious mature-man-has-affair-with-ingenue plot still endures. Only the brilliantly morbid 1971 film Harold and Maude subverted the notion that sex must be the defining factor in an unlikely age-gap friendship.

So I decided to created my own bold female lead, an older women who is a bohemian with impressive social connections and knowledge to share. I named her Dulcie, and her role is that of mentor to a young lad from a County Durham mining backwater. Dulcie’s gentle schooling of Robert in all manner of subjects – from food, poetry and swearing to the importance of always rebelling against the “chinless middle managers who run England” – takes place over a bucolic summer following the second world war. As mentor she is the key to unlock his imagination.

Here is a selection of other literary mentors, some of very different persuasions.

1. Mentor/Athena in Homer’s Odyssey

Mentor first appeared in the Odyssey when, late in life, he was placed in charge of Odysseus’s son Telemachus when the legendary king of Ithaca left to fight in the Trojan war. Yet it was only when Athena, the goddess of warfare, disguised herself as Mentor to encourage Telemachus to seek out his father that the role become defined as “one who imparts wisdom and practical advice to someone of lesser experience”. The concept was later popularised in the 1699 French novel, The Adventures of Telemachus by François Fénelon.

2. Lord Henry Wotton in A Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Opinionated and hedonistic Lord Wotton becomes mentor to the young Dorian, whom he encourages to pursue beauty and sensuality above all else. Eighteen years of subsequent vice and debauchery leave a trail of destruction, including the murder of artist Basil Hallward, painter of the infamous portrait that continues to age while Dorian stays forever young. An aristocratic libertine, Wotton has an almost psychopathic indifference to the consequences of his guidance.

3. The Schlegels and the Wilcoxes in Howards End by EM Forster

Few writers examined hypocrisy and social codes among the upper middle classes quite as adroitly as Forster, and class mentorship defines his most masterful novel. The Anglo-Germanic Schlegel siblings – intellectual members of the Bloomsbury-esque bourgeoisie – become mentors to humble clerk Leonard Bast and wife Jacky, “a fallen woman”. However, their career/financial advice backfires. Meanwhile Ruth Wilcox, matriarch of a wealthy capitalist family, mentors Margaret Schlegel, bequeathing to her the idyllic country house after which this multilayered novel of matrons, patrons and redemption is named.

4. M in the James Bond series by Ian Fleming

Described variously as brutal, cold, curt and gruff, and the starting point for the younger spy’s adventures, M schools Bond in the ways of espionage, martinis and maintaining a detached sense of Englishness at all times. Only in his 13th novel, The Man With The Golden Gun, is he named as Sir Miles Messervy, while later post-Fleming novels (and screen adaptations) have depicted M as a female mentor.

5. Miss Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Such is the influence of junior school teacher Jean Brodie over her pupils at an Edinburgh school in the 1930s that six of them – an elite group known as ‘the Brodie set’ – become enmeshed in her complicated life long after they have moved on to secondary school. Brodie is a commanding and subversive figure, who promotes love, art, travel, sex and fascism, and considers herself as transcending morality. A mentor who encourages her girls to defy convention, though not necessarily to positive effect.

Charles Aitken (left) as Joe Buck and Con O’Neill as ‘Ratso’ Rizzo in ScreenStage’s adaptation of Midnight Cowboy. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/the Guardian

6. Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy

No one said mentors have to be entirely magnanimous. Ailing conman Rico “Ratso” Rizzo is a New York street hustler who initially sees in Joe Buck – fresh off the Greyhound bus from Texas – an opportunity. A symbiotic friendship soon forms, with Rizzo teaching the handsome cowboy how to survive in a cynical city while earning them money as a male prostitute. Ultimately the mentor is repaid in kindness as Buck assumes the role of protector in the heartbreaking conclusion to this wonderfully flea-bitten and unflinching novel. (Sidenote: Herlihy was himself mentored in his writing career by Tennessee Williams.)

7. Earl Copen in The Animal Factory by Edward Bunker

The mentor is a recurring figure in crime and prison fiction, though few are as archetypal as that created by Bunker, himself once San Quentin’s youngest ever inmate. Copen is what every young inmate might hope for: an elder there to protect and guide them through a hellscape of predators, racial tension and prison etiquette.

8. Sando in Breath by Tim Winton

Two semi-feral adolescents in small town Australia, Pikelet and Loonie bond over a shared intoxication with the sea after witnessing the “huge, bearded, coiled-up presence” of veteran surfer Sando in action. Mentor and guru, he first inspires and then exploits their infatuation with both him and the sea, instilling a heady combination of fear and not-quite-freedom. Reviewing the novel in the Guardian, Patrick Ness remarked upon one of the downsides of such mentorship: “Pikelet is forever condemned to be Salieri to Sando’s Mozart: just talented enough to know how much more talented the real geniuses are.”

9. Cardinal Wolsey in Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Sharing weighty intellect and lowborn status that mark them out in the court of Henry VIII, Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell make for a classic mentor/protege coupling. Long after the cardinal’s death, Cromwell still defers to his advice. In time, he too adopts the role of mentor by nurturing all manner of disadvantaged orphans and urchins in whom he sees potential.

10. Teddy Prince in Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

An inventive subversion of the music biography-as-oral-history, the Fleetwood Mac-like band’s story here covers all the rock pitfalls during their rise and fall in heady 1970s LA – complete with a mentor figure in Teddy Price. In fact, the oversized British CEO of Runner Records may be a Svengali figure – the more insidious sibling of the mentor – but as the line between the two is so often blurred he warrants inclusion, if only as a reminder that behind every successful performer, whether real or imagined, there is usually a mentor; some entirely altruistic, others less so.

• The Offing by Benjamin Myers is published by Bloomsbury on 5 March. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free p&p on orders over £15.