# Ann — Confessions of an English Opium-Eater character guide

> Ann in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey.

**Role:** supporting

**Also known as:** Ann, Mary

**First appearance:** 0002-preliminary-confessions

## Snapshot

A friendless girl of the London streets whose brief kindness to a starving scholar becomes one of the book's most haunting and unrecoverable losses.

## Who they are

She moves through the narrator's London exile as a companion in destitution, sharing what little she has with a young man who has nothing. The bond is tender and precarious, shadowed by the knowledge that such figures vanish easily from the city's records and from memory. Her disappearance lodges in the narrator's conscience and later resurfaces in his opium dreams, making her the emotional counterweight to his philosophical self-possession.

## In the story

### [Preliminary Confessions](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/confessions_of_an_english_opium_eater_se/chapters/preliminary-confessions)

A dear companion from his London days, with whom he shared tender moments and from whom he was suddenly and critically separated forever.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/confessions_of_an_english_opium_eater_se/characters/ann
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/confessions_of_an_english_opium_eater_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/confessions_of_an_english_opium_eater_se/characters