The books blog has been hosting a series of posts on readers’ favourite villains in literature. It strikes me that a list of virtuous characters would be a far more challenging proposition. It’s almost a critical commonplace that Lovelace in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa is fascinating despite his crimes and misdemeanours, but the eponymous Sir Charles Grandison in the novel which followed it almost unspeakably dull in his goodness. Satan is thrilling in Paradise Lost, Jesus is a bit of a prig in Paradise Regained. “Good” characters are often despicable in their moral certainty: the hypocritical Chadbands, Jellybys and Pecksniffs in Dickens; Tietjens in Parade’s End, the sanctimoniously liberal family at the heart of AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book.

How can a writer make goodness interesting? George Eliot tried with to do so by examining redemption in Silas Marner. The only problem is that the narrative jumps ahead, giving us the miserly misanthrope before and the radiant saint after he adopts a lost child, with no charting of the gradual change between the two. Naivety has often been used, whether in the “holy fool” Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot or the hero of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (or, further down the literary scale, Forrest Gump). There are the suicidal gallants, in love with someone they know loves another, best exemplified by Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities (it helps if they have a louche past that can be redeemed).

But where are the unheroic, sane, consistent, quiet goodnesses? As literature thrives on conflict, the idea of a sequestered, sanguine goodness might seem impossible. As Milton says in Areopagitica, “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat”. Iris Murdoch frequently attempted to incarnate moral exemplars in her novels – The Nice and the Good, Nuns and Soldiers and especially Tallis Browne in A Fairly Honourable Defeat show Murdoch at her most morally sophisticated.

Perhaps Marilynne Robinson’s trilogy – Gilead, Home and Lila – comes closest to a satisfying attempt to understand virtue and goodness in literature. Even the kindly Rev John Ames, in Gilead, has his virtue tested – can he forgive Jack Boughton? Jack himself, as prodigal son and repentant thief, has a redemptive arc in the second book. Tellingly, doing the right thing does not necessarily mean you will be happy, or make other people happy. And Lila in final volume is a kind of sceptical, tough-minded Mary Magdalene, who has known prostitution and violence, who dreams of stealing a baby as she herself was stolen, yet who has never closed her soul to the possibility of both happiness and goodness, being loved and even loving.

So who do you think makes goodness interesting?