A Bride of a Summer’s Day

Juliet Culvers

Juliet moves through the Culvers family drama with a satirical tongue and a talent for needling her elders, whether teasing Clive about his jealousy or sparring with Mrs. Glynde over Arthur's African ambitions. Beneath her flippancy lies genuine loyalty: when Ida disappears on her wedding day, Juliet bombards Clive with desperate pleas to involve the police and refuses to let the matter be quietly hushed. Her engagement to Clive, half-serious and half-performative, gives the early chapters their romantic friction and makes her a pivotal voice pressing the family toward the truth.

Clive Redway

Clive belongs to the Redway dynasty of financiers, yet his classical good looks and restless energy set him apart from his moneygrubbing forebears. He is caught between his engagement to the teasing Juliet and a barely concealed jealousy of Sefton Culvers, the charming cousin who married Ida instead. When Ida vanishes on her wedding day, Clive becomes the family's reluctant detective, chasing clues from Hastings to Paris and refusing to accept Lord Culvers's complacent hope that everything will simply resolve itself.

Ida Culvers

Ida is the bride whose disappearance on her wedding day detonates the novel's central mystery, turning a society marriage into a desperate search across England and France. Her fortune and the clause in her marriage settlement that would pass it to Sefton if she died childless make her vulnerable to a husband rumored to be deep in debt and surrounded by shady creditors. Whether she is a victim, a fugitive, or something more complicated, Ida's silence drives every theory the family constructs, and the found brooch in Paris only deepens the dread that she is being kept from those who love her.

Captain Sefton Culvers

Sefton enters the story as the charming cousin everyone expected Ida to adore, but his white, crestfallen face after the wedding-day fiasco betrays something other than heartbreak. He agrees too readily to Lord Culvers's scheme of hiding in Paris to keep up appearances, and Juliet watches him with narrowed, disbelieving eyes. His creditors, his interest in the advertisements, and the mysterious ring with the rose device all point to a man whose motives are far darker than his polished manners suggest, making him the novel's most unsettling presence.

Lord Culvers

Lord Culvers is a man of comfortable habits and mild temper, utterly unsuited to the crises that descend on him when Ida disappears on her wedding day. He clings to optimistic explanations, suggesting Ida will simply write in a day or two, and proposes that Sefton hide in Paris to keep up appearances, a scheme that reveals both his desire for peace and his weakness for evasion. Yet he is not without dignity: he crosses to Paris himself, endures the strain of the search, and becomes the reluctant patriarch at the center of a family unraveling under scandal.

Arthur Glynde

Arthur Glynde is the hapless suitor whose devotion to Juliet has reduced him to declaring that he has lost heart and hope, and who now proposes to bury his sorrows in a perilous expedition into the African interior. His mother, Mrs. Glynde, canvasses Juliet on his behalf with comic desperation, only to be met with Juliet's merciless teasing about cannibals and cuckoos. Arthur never quite steps into the foreground, but his plight sharpens the portrait of Juliet's capricious engagement and adds a note of pathos to the social world surrounding the Culvers mystery.