[Brian Watson]

When reading a novel with a sufficiently large and complex cast, I'll often chart the network of relationships among the characters, to keep track of who's who. The diagram is essentially a family tree, with the addition of friendships, business partnerships, animosities, etc. It may take several tries to get a sensibly organized and legible map. That may sound like overkill, but for e.g. The Age of Innocence, Richard III, or almost any Russian novel, I'm lost without some such diagram.

It occurs to me that there might be a piece of software out there that does what I want. Perhaps a program for drawing family trees, or an application for an equivalent problem arising from an entirely different context. Any ideas?

[Shaun J. Russell]

This isn't much help to you, but I must say that I've never thought of doing that...but it strikes me as a darn good idea. Victorian prose, with all the various titles and stations, probably most lends itself to such an endeavor.

[Esther Murer]

19th-century Russian novels are easily the worst because there are so many variants on each character's name - Feodor Ivanovich, Kosygin, Fedya, Fedushka, etc etc, etc.

If that wasn't enough, in my teens I started reading War and Peace at home and then went away for the summer and continued reading it in an different translation - Peter instead of Pierre, etc.

Some editions of novels do have lists of characters, some even have family trees.

[Roger Slater]

Ten seconds with Google uncovered this, but I'm sure there are tons of other programs and apps that do similar things.

[Roger Slater]

And for famous works, you'll easily find family trees on the internet. Here, for example, is one that covers Shakespeare. And here is a family tree for Anna Karenina. There's a whole internet out beyond the walls of Eratosphere!

[Brian Watson]

I don't see why I shouldn't post my question here. It has to do with literature, so there's a reasonable chance it might be of interest to others, and if not, nobody need read or respond.

My question isn't quite as googleable as you pretend. The network of inter-relationships among the characters in a novel is a web, not a tree, and isn't always primarily based on kinship. Googling professional genealogy software doesn't of itself answer whether such software is readily adapted to that, nor does it tell me if there isn't some simple chart drawing tool available, intended for some other purpose altogether, that might be more suitable. It seems perfectly reasonable to ask Spherians if they've ever used a program to do this sort of thing.

[Roger Slater]

No, Brian, there's no need to thank me for trying to point you in the direction of a program that could meet your needs or directing you to other resources that seemed possibly to be the kind of thing you were asking about. It would only embarrass me.