# New Grub Street — Character guide

> Key figures in New Grub Street by George Gissing.

- [Jasper Milvain](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/jasper_milvain.md): Jasper Milvain moves through London's literary world with a young man's energy and an old man's eye for advantage, editing, reviewing, and cultivating exactly the right people. He is drawn to Marian Yule but cannot decid
- [Marian Yule](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/marian_yule.md): Marian Yule spends her days in the Museum Reading-room, grinding out index and summary work for her blind-tempered father Alfred, her own intelligence buried under other people's books. She loves Jasper Milvain with a ho
- [Edwin Reardon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/edwin_reardon.md): Edwin Reardon once seemed the answer to Amy Yule's dreams of marrying a man of distinction, but his fine, slow novels have failed to sell and his pride will not let him write what the market wants. He retreats into his s
- [Amy Reardon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/amy_reardon.md): Amy Reardon married Edwin believing he would be a great man, and she has spent years watching that belief shrink into something she can no longer say aloud. She withdraws from friends like the Carters rather than endure 
- [Dora Milvain](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/dora_milvain.md): Dora Milvain comes to London with her sister Maud after their mother's death, and her lodgings become a quiet meeting place for Marian Yule and a testing ground for Jasper's schemes. She loves her brother without being b
- [Harold Biffen](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/harold_biffen.md): Harold Biffen lodges in Goodge Street and labors over a novel of absolute, unsparing realism that no publisher will touch, sustained by a conviction that art must not flatter. He adores Amy Reardon from a distance, dress
- [Alfred Yule](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/alfred_yule.md): Alfred Yule inhabits the shabby-genteel fringes of London journalism, a scholar whose learning earns him respect but never the income or recognition he feels owed. His pride curdles into a possessive anxiety over Marian,
- [Mrs. Edmund Yule](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/mrs_edmund_yule.md): Presiding over a comfortable drawing-room in Westbourne Park, Mrs. Edmund Yule receives callers and dispenses news with a tact that smooths every awkward fact into respectable vagueness. When her son-in-law Reardon abrup
- [John Yule](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/john_yule.md): John Yule sits in his mother's drawing-room offering sardonic corrections to her delicately phrased anxieties, insisting that Reardon's strange behavior may simply be illness rather than madness. His willingness to name 
- [Whelpdale](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/whelpdale.md): Whelpdale begins as a struggling hack whom Jasper Milvain dismisses as borné, yet his persistence in courtship and commerce eventually wins him Dora's hand and a prosperous publishing house. His tearful exultation on the
- [Maud Milvain](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/maud_milvain.md): Maud shares two rented rooms with her sister Dora, having exchanged a comfortable country home for the cramped economy of lodgers' London, and her face wears discontent more readily than sorrow. When Amy Reardon calls, M
- [Edith Carter](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/edith_carter.md): Edith Carter has made herself Amy Reardon's closest friend, receiving her in a tiny boudoir crowded with affordable ornaments and treating her husband Albert as an authority on domestic taste. When Amy airs her radical v
- [Mr. Carter](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/mr_carter.md): Edith's father, a cheerful and sociable gentleman.
- [Jedwood](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/jedwood.md): A publisher who deals with several of the writers.
- [Mrs. Milvain](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/mrs_milvain.md): Jasper's mother, living with her daughters in the country.
- [Mr. Hinks](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/mr_hinks.md): A struggling writer and acquaintance of the literary circle.
- [Willie](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/willie.md): The young son of the Reardons, a sickly child.
- [Clement Fadge](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/clement_fadge.md): A critic and relative of the editor Fadge.
- [Sykes](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/sykes.md): A minor literary figure and acquaintance.
- [Mrs. Whelpdale](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/mrs_whelpdale.md): Whelpdale's mother, mentioned in passing.
- [Mrs. Jedwood](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/new_grub_street_se/characters/mrs_jedwood.md): Wife of the publisher Jedwood.

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