# A Man Could Stand Up— — Character guide

> Key figures in A Man Could Stand Up— by Ford Madox Ford.

- [Sylvia Tietjens](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/sylvia_tietjens.md): Sylvia moves through the war's home front as a force of elegant, patient malice, so thoroughly in command of gossip that even General Campion's judgment of her husband seems bent by her influence. She is estranged yet ne
- [Valentine Wannop](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/valentine_wannop.md): Valentine stands between two worlds on Armistice Day: the emptied school where she teaches and the seething city beyond, where she intends to find Tietjens and make a life with him. Her longing has refined her face and h
- [Christopher Tietjens](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/christopher_tietjens.md): Tietjens commands a ragtime battalion with the same exacting conscience he once brought to his estate and his marriage, watching a marksman fire into invisibility with a mathematician's calm while his own reputation is p
- [Edith Ethel Duchemin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/edith_ethel_duchemin.md): Edith Ethel has married her way into a title and now traffics in the social verdicts that decide who is respectable and who is finished. She is the source of the rumor that Tietjens and Valentine have had a years-long li
- [Nancy Truefitt](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/nancy_truefitt.md): Nancy moves through the novel's domestic and social spaces, close enough to Sylvia to see how the Tietjens marriage is managed from within. She is young, observant, and not yet hardened, which makes her a useful witness 
- [General Lord Edward Campion](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/general_lord_edward_campion.md): Campion is a superb regular soldier and a political force, the kind of man whose reorganisation of an army is impeccable and whose personal judgments are not. He dresses Tietjens down in a communication trench on what ma
- [Captain Mckechnie](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/captain_mckechnie.md): Mckechnie belongs to the battalion's officer world, the mess and dugout hierarchy where reputations are made by gossip as much as by competence. He is the source of the rumor that the Colonel hates Tietjens, yet the Colo
- [Miss Wanostrocht](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/miss_wanostrocht.md): Miss Wanostrocht runs the girls' school where Valentine teaches physical instruction, and she sits at the center of the small storm of gossip that follows Valentine's name. She once sat at the feet of Valentine's father 
- [Lieutenant Aranjuez](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/lieutenant_aranjuez.md): Aranjuez serves under Tietjens in the emptied, over-tidy trenches that feel to him like Pompeii — square-cut, silent, and dead. Frightened out of his life from the first, he has fastened onto Tietjens as a child clings t
- [Lady Macmaster](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/lady_macmaster.md): Lady Macmaster moves through the novel's drawing rooms and corridors as a woman who has married her way up and intends to keep climbing, trading in the currency of other people's reputations. It is she who tells Miss Wan
- [Sir Vincent Macmaster](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/sir_vincent_macmaster.md): Macmaster is the friend from before the war — the man of letters who has made his name, married Edith Ethel, and accepted the knighthood that Tietjens' world would find faintly absurd. He is one of the few names that com
- [Lance-Corporal Duckett](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/lance_corporal_duckett.md): A young soldier in Tietjens' battalion.
- [Lieutenant Constantine](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/lieutenant_constantine.md): A junior officer in the battalion.
- [Sergeant Cutts](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/sergeant_cutts.md): A non-commissioned officer in Tietjens' company.
- [Mrs. Wannop](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/mrs_wannop.md): Valentine's mother, a widow and intellectual.
- [Cockshott](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/cockshott.md): A minor character, possibly a soldier or servant.
- [Brother Mark](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/brother_mark.md): A religious figure, possibly a monk or brother.
- [Notting](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters/notting.md): A minor character, possibly a soldier.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_man_could_stand_up_se/characters