Generations of Russians have — at least so Russians believe — been ‘in love with’ Natasha Rostova, the vivacious, honest, sensitive, passionate heroine of War and Peace. Such characters take on a semi-autonomous life in their readers’ memory and imaginations (assisted, as the case may be, by stage, film and television adaptations).

In this extra-textual life, the characters do things even when the narrative eye is not upon them, and they might choose to behave otherwise than they seem to do (this is what the genre of realism asks us to believe, in any case). Were the reader to somehow enter the fictional universe, therefore, they might elicit the character’s love; or, if they are characters (assisted, as the case may be, by paintings, posters and figurines) who imaginatively exist outside of not only the words, but the universes of their literary works, then such a relationship might be managed — is indeed managed — in an imaginary version of the reader’s present.

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"Iris Murdoch argued that: ‘love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real’." 

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Given that one of the functions of art is to render reality comprehensible, fictional characters may be more loveable by virtue of their greater predictability and comprehensibility. Love for characters such as Natasha, whose dominant qualities may be generally accepted as deserving of love, can serve the same function as that form of eros which Phaedrus praises in Plato’s Symposium: stimulating good deeds. In this case, this may be by ethical imitation - if not of Natasha directly, then of the first man whom she loves, and who deserves that love, Prince Andrei. Alternatively, readers may feel that a given character is a soulmate, knowledge of whom brings them to a more developed state of being, rather as Aristophanes in the Symposium argued that love reunited the two parts of split souls that were originally one.

But other features of love for real people are likely to be absent. A willingness to sacrifice directly to the fictional other will be present only in rare, deluded cases when all sense of that fictionality has been lost.

Iris Murdoch argued that: ‘love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real’; on this definition, love for fictional characters questionably deserves the name.