Framley Parsonage

Lucy Robarts

Lucy lives at Framley parsonage as a dependent sister, poor enough that even the pony-carriage must be sold, yet she spends her own dwindling money to keep a promise about the Crawley children. When Lady Lufton's note arrives, her hand trembles and she reads omens in the handwriting before she can bring herself to open it — she is a woman whose whole future may hinge on a single letter, and she knows it. Her habit of putting other people's crises ahead of her own heart is exactly what makes her dangerous to the social order Lady Lufton has so carefully arranged.

Mark Robarts

At twenty-five Mark Robarts has everything a clergyman could want: a living at Framley, a loving wife with a few thousand pounds, and Lady Lufton's formidable protection. Trollope is careful to say he is neither cherub nor devil — merely a man whose training has left him agreeable, ambitious, and insufficiently braced against flattery. When grander company than his own beckons, his desire to be liked by fashionable men becomes the crack through which real trouble enters the parsonage.

Lady Lufton

Lady Lufton holds Framley Court for life while her son roams Scotland and Leicestershire, and she fills the vacuum with good works: schools, a new church, and a vicar she chose and polished herself. Her kindness is genuine and her control is total, which makes her a benevolent force and an immovable obstacle at once. When her protégé's interests and her own plans for her son begin to diverge, her disapproval becomes the weather that everyone in the parish must live under.

Nathaniel Sowerby

Sowerby of Chaldicotes moves through the world by borrowing against expectations and smiling his way past consequences, with his devoted sister Harriet as the only ally who never abandons him. He is courting Miss Dunstable less from love than from arithmetic, and his campaign to win her is conducted with the same cheerful calculation he applies to everything. To Mark Robarts he offers the glamour of a wider world — and the bills that come with it, which is precisely how Trollope lets a country vicar's troubles begin.

Lord Lufton

Young Lord Lufton owns Framley but lives with his mother only when it suits him, keeping a shooting-lodge, London rooms, and a string of horses while the local gentry mutter about his truant ways. He is good-natured, energetic, and unbothered by the expectations that weigh on everyone around him, including the mother who would like to see far more of him. His friendship with Mark Robarts and his eventual romantic choices set the household at Framley Court against itself in ways his easy temper never anticipates.

Fanny Robarts

Fanny Monsell came to the vicarage with a few thousand pounds, enough to furnish it in proper clerical comfort and insure her husband's life, and she has been its practical anchor ever since. She is the sister-in-law Lucy confides in, the wife who sees Mark's weaknesses more clearly than she will admit, and the woman whose quiet competence Lady Lufton's grander schemes tend to overlook. As Mark's obligations multiply, Fanny's steadiness becomes the measure of what he stands to lose.