Who is
Honor Harrington

Darned if I know. Well, actually, she's sort of a friend of mine, and as with most friends, it's very difficult to take her personality apart and analyze or describe it. Over the course of the novels and novellas, her character has grown up so naturally for me that it's become difficult for me now to sit down and sort out individual character traits. When I'm writing about her, it's more a case of thinking about a person I know so well that I "just know" how she'll respond to a given set of circumstances or a given challenge than it is of analyzing who or what she is.

She's a brilliant, charismatic combat commander who's always "where the fire's hottest." Born of yeoman stock, she is now a knight of the realm, a great noble in two separate star nations, a flag officer in two separate navies, a confidante of queens, a martial artist, a multi-billionaire, a woman, a daughter, an empath, and the human adoptee of a six-limbed Sphinxian treecat. She's lost an eye and an arm to wounds suffered in battle, and she's paid the price in sorrow and feelings of guilt for those who have died under her command in those same battles.

All of that I can rattle off without much effort, but it's more difficult to penetrate to the core of what makes her who she is.

If I had to pick the three characteristics which I think are most central to who Honor Harrington is and to the reason readers respond to her so positively, those characteristics would be responsibility, compassion, and loyalty. She is not a "safe" person. She has a ferocious temper which it is very dangerous to arouse, but that dangerous side of her personality is controlled and focused by her sense of compassion and her willingness to assume responsibility for fixing problems, whoever created them. It doesn't matter to Honor whether or not a problem is "her fault." What matters to her is that there is a problem which needs to be solved, and she digs in to do just that. And the thing which makes her so charismatic is the combination of that sense of responsibility with her absolute loyalty to the people she commands. Of course, that capacity for loyalty extends upward from her, as well, but it's the downward reach, the quality that communicates itself to the most junior person in her crew, that creates a matching sense of loyalty and devotion from those under her command.

Most of all, Honor Harrington is someone who knows who she is, whether I do or not. She is no more free of self-doubt than anyone else, but she knows what she believes in and where her responsibilities lie, and she is constitutionally incapable of doing one inch less than her sense of duty requires of her.

I like her. And I suppose I wish I were more like her.

—David Weber
September 20, 2002

More about David Weber in "BuShips" conference on Baen's Bar