I was thinking more about my endless post on Lorna Doone, and it occurred to me that it doesn't really take account of character growth or change. That's pretty silly, because often character change is the story, or at least what drives it.
When I say that characters ought to be "consistent," I don't think I mean that they ought to be static. But they ought to be...whole, somehow. One being, not a cipher to do whatever you need them to do in a story.
Characters I can think of off the top of my head who undergo change but remain whole/consistent/real: Harold Crick in Stranger Than Fiction; King Lear; Ebenezer Scrooge; Pip from Great Expectations; the Beast in Beauty and the Beast; Frodo in Lord of the Rings; Cassandra in I Capture the Castle; Karenin (Anna's husband) in Anna Karenina (I adore the very human unreliability of his character!)
There are probably more, but it's late and I'm trying not to write an endless post!
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