However, there are also literary characters who refuse to eat the food that is set before them, deliberately starving themselves and making themselves ill. In Jane Austen's Emma, Jane Fairfax, orphaned niece of the impoverished Miss Bates, has a poor appetite which Miss Bates comments on at any opportunity: ‘they had to listen to the description of exactly how little bread and butter [Jane] ate for breakfast, and how small a slice of mutton for dinner’ (ch. 20).
Jane Fairfax at the picnic at Box Hill (from the 2009 BBC dramatization)