By Bill Gaither
On February 22, 2023, members gathered for a fascinating and fun presentation by Ms. Kim Guyer on “Personality Types in Jane Austen.” Kim is a project manager with the Steier Group, a capital campaign fundraising firm, and it was evident from a few of Kim’s examples that she also uses personality assessment in her workplace. Kim stressed that the purpose of personality assessment is not to pigeonhole people but to facilitate effective communication by adjusting one’s message to the personality type of the person with whom one is speaking.
After both teaching and using personality assessment for a number of years, Kim discovered Jane Austen and became interested in the personality types of Austen’s main characters. In this presentation Kim addressed the personality types of major characters in all six of Jane Austen’s novels. Kim’s approach was fascinating and fun, as she described each character, provided relevant quotations from the novels, asked the audience to vote on the character’s main personality type, and then revealed her own assessment. Kim also included a movie image for many of the characters overlaid with a comic and revealing caption.
True Colors
Kim uses the True Colors personality assessment model, which was developed by Don Lowry in 1978 and is based on the Please Understand Me temperament model (developed by David Keirsey) and the Myers-Briggs Type model. The True Colors model defines four personality types identified by the colors Blue, Gold, Green, and Orange. Kim prefers True Colors to Myers-Briggs as being easier to use (only 4 types versus 16 in Myers-Briggs), although not so precise. You can learn about the True Colors model and do a self-assessment at https://jasnanorthcarolina.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/PersonalityTypes.pdf, provided by Kim. For more information about the True Colors model, see True Colors.
In True Colors, no one color (personality type) is better than another, and everyone has a mixture of all four colors. Most people have one predominant color, and some people have two predominant colors. It is also possible for a person to have three predominant colors or to have the four colors equally balanced. Gold and Orange are opposites. Blue and Green are opposites. The table to the right summarizes the four types, listed in alphabetical order (blue, gold, green, orange). See the first link above for a fuller listing.
Kim classifies Jane Austen as primarily Green. Jane Austen preferred independence, was a risk-taker, planned and completed large projects, valued fairness and justice.
True Color Types in Jane Austen’s Novels
We had a grand time applying what we learned about the color types to Jane Austen’s novels, guessing which color (or colors) characters from each of the six novels were. As an example, the following table summarizes Kim’s analysis of Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility (1811):
Kim focused on the one or two primary colors of each character, even though the character may have had noticeable elements from other colors, to simplify things for analyzing the characters and guessing their types. For example, Edward Ferrars is primarily Gold (responsible), even though he is also noticeably Blue (values feelings). “Everyone has all four colors,” in life and in fiction, as Kim noted.
Up Next
Next month will be our Virtual Book Club, and we’re discussing poets familiar to Jane Austen! Check it out here to see who we’re reading and to sign up: February Meeting Information.
