# Armed with Madness — Character guide

> Key figures in Armed with Madness by Mary Butts.

- [Dudley Carston](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/armed_with_madness_se/characters/dudley_carston.md): Carston arrives among Scylla, Picus, Felix, and their set as an outsider whose ordinary assumptions keep colliding with their talk of the Sanc-Grail, wells, and psychic birds. He is at once repelled and fascinated, disli
- [Scylla Taverner](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/armed_with_madness_se/characters/scylla_taverner.md): Scylla presides over the household at Tollerdown with an airy freedom that scandalizes her married friends Philip and Lydia, who arrive to lecture her about the men she keeps around her. Jealous Lydia once wanted Clarenc
- [Picus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/armed_with_madness_se/characters/picus.md): Picus brings Scylla to Gault Cliff, shows her the rarest woodpecker, and speaks of Zeus and Leda as if the old stories were simply true of them. He is tender, possessive, and shadowed by an untractable grief near to wick
- [Felix Taverner](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/armed_with_madness_se/characters/felix_taverner.md): In Paris, Felix watches a glittering party he cannot enter, nursing homesickness and the conviction that he could be happy nowhere. Back among the others he sobs in a chair while Ross listens, raging that they came looki
- [Clarence](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/armed_with_madness_se/characters/clarence.md): Clarence is entangled with the Carston family and with Scylla, who considers seducing him simply to shut his mouth before he bitches things further. He assumes a form from inside and makes the world fit it, a habit Scyll
- [Ross](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/armed_with_madness_se/characters/ross.md): Ross is the group's still center, a naturalist-trained painter who copies a plant exactly and plans to reinvent it tomorrow. When Felix collapses sobbing, Ross cannot control his own aversion to speak or to help, and he 
- [Lydia](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/armed_with_madness_se/characters/lydia.md): Lydia is the old friend Scylla seeks out for her learning and instinct for tradition, the woman who once sang troubadour songs in the wood and might have understood the story of the cup. Married now to Phil, she revels i
- [Phil](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/armed_with_madness_se/characters/phil.md): Phil is the man who took Scylla's friend away, who kisses her while calculating how to use Lydia's practical brain and unpractised love for his own ends. Afraid of his wife's old friends, he cuts conversation and interru
- [Boris](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/armed_with_madness_se/characters/boris.md): A character who appears in the narrative with a distinct role in the plot.
- [Nanna](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/armed_with_madness_se/characters/nanna.md): A maternal or nurturing figure mentioned in the story.
- [the doctor](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/armed_with_madness_se/characters/the_doctor.md): A medical professional who appears in a scene.

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