Miss Mole

Miss Hannah Mole

Hannah Mole arrives at the Corders' as a paid outsider who quickly becomes the quiet center of the house, reading everyone while guarding a ten-year-old happiness she cannot afford to have exposed. She is funny, watchful, and morally nimble, willing to lie to protect the one frail treasure she has left, even as her own integrity protests. Her presence unsettles Robert Corder's tidy authority and gives the younger Corders a mirror they did not know they needed.

Ruth

Ruth is the youngest Corder, a self-described egotist whose curiosity about Miss Mole is mostly a love of hearing stories, yet whose loneliness makes her unexpectedly receptive to Hannah's confession that middle-aged people can suffer too. She moves between childish radiance over an uncle's visit and a precocious need to be taken seriously. Her growing fascination with Miss Mole quietly raises the stakes of Hannah's performance inside the house.

Robert Corder

Robert Corder rules his family with the bland confidence of a man who has never doubted his own rightness, noticing the household only when it intrudes on his study or his schedule. He is irritated by Miss Mole's quick, even step and unsettled by Ethel's unfeminine looks, yet he cannot name what troubles him. His inability to see his children as separate people, or his housekeeper as a woman with a past, makes him the quiet obstacle against which Hannah's drama unfolds.

Ethel Corder

Ethel is a good girl with fits of passion, grateful for Miss Mole's competence yet wounded by Wilfrid's habit of watching the housekeeper instead of her. She pities and envies Hannah by turns, believing forty means desire is over, while her own desires are very much alive and unacknowledged. Her raw, unguarded reactions to Wilfrid's flattery make her the household's most vulnerable barometer of the tensions Hannah has walked into.

Mr. Blenkinsop

Mr. Blenkinsop is the neighbor whose warm, open-doored room Hannah peeps into with acid humor, envying a comfort she pretends to scorn. He is a man with, apparently, no past he need fear, and his placid evenings throw Hannah's own threatened history into relief. His kindness and ordinariness give the novel a quiet counterweight to the Corders' rigidity and to the shadow Mr. Pilgrim casts over Hannah's precarious peace.

Lilla

Lilla is the practical relative who placed Hannah with the Corders and now resents her cousin's unsolicited hints about how to behave, greeting Hannah's loud affection with a look for a retreat. She represents the family's claim on Hannah's discretion, a claim Hannah both honors and evades. Their tense, tea-shop encounters expose the cost of Hannah's evasions, since it is to Lilla that she tells a lie that wounds her own peculiar integrity.