What is the opposite of Mary Sue?
While away last week one of the books I read was Kipps by H. G. Wells - I thought I might have read it once many years ago, but I don't think I did (I think it must have been The History of Mr Polly), in spite of the Folkestone setting (not just places like the Leas, but even some of the shops mentioned were still around in my childhood - Plummer Roddis department store!). But it led me to think about books written by people who became successful writers about characters who could be taken to be them, or very similar in situation, etc, but without the success.
And in Arthur Kipps's case, there's not just a 'there but for the grace of God' failure to achieve success, not just not the drive that took Wells out of his class, but no particular intelligence, none of the intellectual curiosity that fired Wells's own journey. It's not quite as if Dickens had thought 'suppose I leave David Copperfield in the blacking factory', because Kipps is rescued by a stroke of blind luck from the hell of the drapery store, but certainly as if he had left DC in the Micawber milieu rather than running away to be rescued and embourgeoisified by Betsy Trotwood. Wells is quite harsh on the aspirations of the very slightly socially superior people Kipps gets involved with - in spite of their desires for self-improvement they're shown as snobbish and narrow. The good end for Kipps is doing well in a very slightly improved version of the station to which he had been called, with a little bit of money, a nice wife, etc.
Compare (it's the obvious analogy perhaps) Arnold Bennett's Edwin Clayhanger. Clayhanger lacks the get up and git that got Bennett out of the Potteries and provincial life, but he's shown as intelligent, enquiring, interested in culture, even though denied Bennett's own trajectory.
I can think of other versions of this (the most famous example probably being why didn't George Eliot ever write about a woman who lived the kind of life she did?) - e.g 'Mark Rutherford' (William Hale White). Hale White actually became a successful civil servant, and a respected figure in literary circles, but Rutherford is a depressed clerk with a horrible life (the Rutherford books make George Gissing seem like Pollyanna).
Is there a word or a concept for this writing the lesser, rather than the inflated, version of the self?
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In other news, the central heating has gone on the blink. The engineer is coming tomorrow morning (I hope).