Character guide

Terry O. Nicholson

major

Also known as Terry, Poor Terry, Poor old Terry, T. O. Nicholson

Terry bankrolls the expedition with his yacht, motorboat, and collapsible biplane, and his jaw sets the moment he hears no man has returned from the woman country. He is drawn to Alima with a combustible attraction that neither of them can govern, and he chafes against a society with no vices, no distractions, and no submissiveness. His mounting friction with Herland's women drives the book's central collision between masculine entitlement and a world that never learned to yield.

Jeff Margrave

major

Also known as Jeff, Mr. Jeff Margrave, Dear old Jeff

Jeff arrives as the warm-hearted counterweight to Terry's bluster, quick to call Herland's peace and mutual affection the finest thing he has ever seen. When Terry sneers that the women are neuters and the place a perpetual Sunday school, Jeff retorts hotly; his marriage to Celis is quietly, uncomplicatedly happy. His easy adaptation makes him the story's proof that a man can meet this civilization without needing to dominate it.

Van

major

Also known as Van, Essa

Van chronicles the expedition and the country itself, moving between field notes and confession as he tries to explain his own civilization honestly to a woman who cannot feel its evils. He loves Ellador and dreads taking her back to a world of corruption, disease, and prisons she has only read about. His struggle to bridge the two cultures—and to reckon with Terry's fate—gives the novel its reflective, self-implicating voice.

Ellador

major

Ellador takes Van to see the children, the teachers, and the books, always seeming to know what he wants to understand; she is convinced that a world with two sexes must be richer than her own. When Van tries to warn her about his country's vices, she listens with starry hope, unable to feel what she has never seen. Her eagerness to leave paradise for the wider world forces the novel's hardest question: what happens when innocence meets a civilization that has none.

Alima

supporting

Alima interrogates the men about marriage and motherhood with a sharp, unembarrassed curiosity, triumphing when their evasions expose contradictions in their own society. She and Terry strike sparks from the start—madly drawn, constantly at war—and her refusal to submit is exactly what he cannot forgive. Their quarrel becomes the flashpoint that tests whether Herland's order can absorb a man who will not be taught.

Somel

supporting

Somel delivers the long lessons that explain how Herland came to be—its motherly theology, its ethics of patience and courtesy, its conviction that cleanliness, health, and beauty are themselves worship. She is practical rather than mystical, working out what conduct a Loving Power would expect and then living accordingly. Through her lectures the men, and the reader, receive the intellectual architecture of a civilization built without men.

Celis

supporting

Celis belongs to a civilization where religion is not ritual but conduct — cleanliness, order, and constant progress treated as outward expressions of an inner Loving Power. Her patience and courtesy embody that ethic, yet they collide with the assumptions her American husband brings to marriage, since no tradition of wifely submission exists to smooth the way. Her quiet determination to bear a child makes her the emotional test case for whether these two worlds can actually join.

Moadine

minor

A senior Herland leader who oversees the visitors' integration and discipline.

Zava

minor

A Herland woman who participates in discussions about religion and marriage.

Epictetus

minor

A historical philosopher referenced by the narrator in discussions of stoicism.