For a long time in my childhood, I believed that I was the only reader of all the books that I had read. I wrote down their names in a notebook and lovingly watched their numbers grow. It didn’t even occur to me that there might be others who had also read them. So, being their sole reader, I “owned” all the characters that peopled the books – Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince, Scheherazade of The Arabian Nights, Anne from Anne of Green Gables, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, the ragdoll from Galldora, whose name was an anagram, the five “Find-Outers” from Enid Blyton, the list went on.
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Their voices spoke only to me, for it was inside my head that they lived. It was something of a shock when I discovered that there were others who’d read them before I had, that these voices had “spoken” to them before they spoke to me.
Distressing though the revelation was, it was not entirely without merit. I became aware that all these characters had voices I had been listening to, and it was because of their voices that I knew them, for I had never encountered them in the flesh, so to speak. It was the first time I articulated...