Character guide

Unknown Narrator

major

Also known as me, I, you

He narrates his own comedy of shirking from inside: a would-be novelist who flees the unhappiness of real attachment into the safer pleasures of observation, flirtation, and style. His charm is genuine, and so is the cowardice beneath it — he prefers Bettie's company to the woman he claims to adore, and prefers a book's needs to a person's feelings. Watching him rationalize his way out of love is the novel's central, rueful pleasure.

Stella Musgrave

major

Also known as Stella, Stella Blagden, little Stella, the Musgrave

Stella drifts through drawing rooms and afternoon drives with a tiger at her back and roses everywhere, an anachronism the narrator can't quite stop adoring. She is married — twice over, by the second wedding anniversary the flowers commemorate — yet her charm lies precisely in how lightly she wears her obligations. Her presence gives the early chapters their shimmer and their ache: she is the thing the narrator wants and the thing he will never quite deserve.

Bettie Hamlyn

major

Also known as Elizabeth Hamlyn, Lizzie, Lizzie d'Arlanges

Bettie spars with the narrator in drawing rooms and over cigarettes, puncturing his self-portraits with a yawn and a Schumann étude in nine flats. She loves him, and knows he has recovered from loving her, and says so with a crispness that is its own kind of wound. Her honesty — voicing her real opinion as if joking — makes her the moral counterweight to his evasions, and the relationship the novel keeps circling back to.

Peter Blagden

major

Also known as Mr. Blagden, Mr. Peter Blagden

Blagden enters the social world as Stella's eventual husband, a man of money and settled disillusion who treats sentiment as a slightly embarrassing hobby of the young. His sardonic composure throws the narrator's feverish self-dramatizing into relief, and his marriage to Stella turns the narrator's longing into something more complicated than courtship. He matters because he represents the future the narrator's temperament is drifting toward — comfortable, ironic, and quietly hollow.

John Charteris

major

Also known as Charteris, Mr. Charteris

Charteris is the novel's presiding literary presence, invoked as the hero of Cabell's Beyond Life and as the model against whom the narrator measures his own divided self. He embodies the book's central proposition: that personal life may be bereft of the virtues — distinction, clarity, tenderness, truth — that the art nonetheless achieves. For the narrator, he is both encouragement and indictment, a reminder that shirking can be transmuted into beauty, and that this is not quite the same as being good.

Rosalind Jemmett

supporting

Also known as Rosalind

Rosalind is the narrator's first love, revisited — and promptly found unsuitable, because she knows too much of the world to serve as raw material for the rustic dawn he means to write. Her dismissal is one of the novel's cleanest illustrations of how the narrator treats people as drafts. She matters less for what she does than for what she exposes: the cold-bloodedness that hides beneath his charming literary ambitions.

Elena Barry-Smith

supporting

Also known as Elena, Barry, Lena, Smith

Elena Barry-Smith is the woman every man in Lichfield loves and no one, least of all her suitor Robert Townsend, can claim to know. Her beauty is a discipline and a career: seven hours of sleep, five miles of walking, a diet that treats candy as prussic acid, leaving barely two hours a day for being a person. She is variously rich, widowed, and profoundly mutable, and her slow decision to marry Townsend sets the whole comedy of his shirking in motion.

Robin

supporting

Also known as Rob, Bobbie, Bob, Mr. Bob

Robin is the narrator's old friend and, by his own account, the man who sailed half the world to propose marriage to a girl who turns him down flat. Lichfield tolerates him as a Townsend, credits him with seductions and arsons on unimpeachable authority, and lets him reopen the family house while he talks to every woman as though she were the only one in the room. His bruised vanity and his habit of leaving towns at the first sting of discomfort make him the mirror in which the novel's hero sees his own evasions.

Jasper Hardress

supporting

Also known as Hardress, fat Jasper Hardress

Jasper Hardress is the portly, pompous husband whose presence at Nice keeps his wife's admirers in a state of comic despair. He once claimed consumption in the family to encourage his marriage, a fiction his rude health has since thoroughly refuted, and he welcomes guests with the complacency of a man who has no idea he is the obstacle in someone else's romance. His solid, unkillable body is the joke on which the narrator's hopes of a convenient bereavement founder.

Marian Winwood

supporting

Also known as Marian, Winwood

Marian Winwood belongs to the Lichfield set that receives Robert Townsend back with acquiescence rather than open arms, part of the texture of drawing rooms and tentative invitations through which he drifts. She is a friend, a familiar face, one of the women he talks to as though she were the solitary specimen of femininity in the room. Her place in the early arc is atmospheric and social: she helps establish the world of eligible young women against which his evasions and infatuations are measured.

Margaret Hugonin

supporting

Also known as Margaret, Hugonin, Margaret Elizabeth Anstruther Hugonin

Margaret Hugonin is a figure from the narrator's past, a childhood sweetheart whose memory belongs to the long backward glance that frames the novel. She is less a presence in the present action than a measure of it: the kind of early, uncomplicated devotion that Robert Townsend's temperament has since learned to shirk whenever it threatens discomfort. Her name carries the weight of what he has outgrown and abandoned, and it helps establish the pattern of romantic evasion that the book goes on to dissect.

Robert Etheridge Townsend

supporting

Also known as Townsend, Mr. Townsend, Robert Townsend, Robert

Robert Etheridge Townsend is the novel's central consciousness, a young man of a prominent Lichfield family whose personal life is a comedy of shirking: he flees any responsibility that entails or threatens discomfort. His weakness as a man is bound up with his strength as an artist, for the auctorial virtues of clarity, beauty, and tenderness flourish in his work precisely because they are absent from his conduct. His growth from wastrel toward potential creator of beauty is the arc the book traces, and his evasions are the cords of vanity that bind him.

Avis Beechinor

supporting

Also known as Avis, dear Avis, Avis M. Beechinor

Avis moves through Selwoode's social set as the woman Townsend has formally chosen, though Mrs. Beechinor has wrung from him only the barest concession of a private engagement. Against the chatter of livelier women like Margaret Hugonin, Avis remains a still, almost withheld figure, and the reader is left to wonder whether Townsend's happiness is genuine or merely another of his self-flattering postures. Her quiet claim on him becomes the early measure of how badly he keeps the promises he makes.

Miss Montmorenci

supporting

Also known as Miss Annabelle Alys Montmorenci

She first appears to Townsend as a village performer, half-compromised in Lichfield's eyes, yet moving through the world's gutter with a strange serenity he likens to the Lady in Comus. Reencountering her as the glamorous Neroni, he must reckon with the Lichfield traditions he cannot shed, which insist she is now Von Anspach's harlot. Her rise shadows his own choice to make the most of youth, forcing him to ask whether her pragmatism and his are really the same thing.

George Bulmer

supporting

Also known as Mr. George Bulmer, Mr. Bulmer, Uncle George

As Townsend's uncle, George Bulmer belongs to the older, steadier generation against which the narrator's shirking is silently judged. His gruff kindness offers the hero a model of ordinary responsibility that Townsend can neither embrace nor entirely dismiss. Though he stands at the edge of the social comedy, his steadiness sharpens the portrait of a young man who consistently flees every obligation that threatens discomfort.

Lizzie Musgrave

supporting

Also known as Lizzie

Lizzie Musgrave occupies the quieter margins of the Musgrave household, watching her sister Stella and the visiting Townsend with the patience of someone accustomed to going unremarked. Her reticence makes her a foil to the novel's talkative, self-dramatizing women, and her observations carry a weight the narrator rarely grants them. She matters as a still point against which Townsend's restless performance of charm and evasion becomes visible.

Gillian Hardress

supporting

Also known as Hardress, the Hardress

Gillian Hardress presides over the Hardress household with a wit Townsend never quite fathoms, having learned early that she rarely tells him the truth about anything. Her husband, who dotes on their daughter Gladys while privately grieving the lack of a son, never suspects Townsend, seeing him only as an amusing boy of twenty-two. Her jealousy of John Charteris's influence over Townsend, and her loathing of the novelist, quietly shape the hero's drift through a year of sponging and self-indulgence.

Mrs. Barry-Smith

minor

Also known as Smith

Elena's mother, a formidable and scheming woman.

Gladys

minor

Also known as Miss Gladys

A young woman, a friend of the narrator's sister.

Mrs. Hardress

minor

Jasper Hardress's mother, an elderly matriarch.

Jaques

minor

Also known as good Jaques

A servant at the narrator's home, a loyal and eccentric figure.

Mrs. Clement Dumby

minor

Also known as Mrs. Dumby

A gossipy and meddlesome society matron.

Old Capulet

minor

Also known as Signorina Capulet, Signorina

An elderly Italian woman, a former opera singer.

Helen

minor

Also known as Queen Helen

A beautiful woman, an object of the narrator's youthful infatuation.

Anne Charteris

minor

Also known as Anne, Charteris

John Charteris's wife, a quiet and supportive presence.

Ned Lethbury

minor

Also known as Lethbury, Teddy

A friend of the narrator, a young man about town.

Jack

minor

A friend of the narrator, part of his social circle.

Aunt Marcia

minor

The narrator's aunt, a kind and conventional woman.

Mrs. Vokins

minor

A housekeeper or servant in the narrator's household.

Amelia Van Orden

minor

Also known as young Amelia Van Orden

A young woman, a friend of the narrator's family.

Mrs. Adrian Rabbet

minor

Also known as Mrs. Rabbet, Adrian

A society woman, a friend of the narrator's mother.

Nadine Neroni

minor

Also known as the Neroni, Miss Nadine Neroni

A young woman, a friend of Bettie Hamlyn.

Alfred Van Orden

minor

Also known as Alfred

Amelia's brother, a young man.

Fairhaven

minor

A place, but personified as a character in the narrator's imagination.

Byam

minor

A friend of the narrator, a young man.

Billy Woods

minor

Also known as Billy, Mrs. William Woods

A friend of the narrator, a young man.

Warwick Risby

minor

Also known as Mrs. Risby, Mrs. Warwick Risby

A married couple, friends of the narrator's family.

Milo

minor

Also known as Miles Forman, Forman, Justus Miles Forman

A friend of the narrator, a young man.

Professor Hamlyn

minor

Bettie's father, a scholarly man.

Celia Reindan

minor

Also known as Celia

A young woman, a friend of the narrator.

Claire Bulmer Townsend

minor

Also known as Claire

Robert Townsend's wife, a friend of the narrator's family.

Alicia Wade

minor

Also known as Wade, Alice

A young woman, a friend of the narrator.

Colonel Snawley

minor

A retired military man, a friend of the narrator's uncle.

Dr. Jeal

minor

A local doctor, a friend of the narrator's family.

Nannie Allsotts

minor

Also known as Nannie

A servant in the narrator's household.

Colonel Grimshaw

minor

A retired military man, a friend of the narrator's uncle.

Agnes Faroy

minor

Also known as Agnes

A young woman, a friend of the narrator.

Dick Townsend

minor

Also known as Townsend

Robert Townsend's brother, a young man.

Aurelia Minns

minor

Also known as the once Aurelia Minns

A woman from the narrator's past, a brief romantic interest.

Pauline Ashmeade

minor

A young woman, a friend of the narrator.

Roderick King Hill

minor

Also known as King

A friend of the narrator, a young man.

Kittie Provis

minor

Also known as Kittie

A young woman, a friend of the narrator.

Amelia Lethbury

minor

Ned Lethbury's sister, a young woman.

Jill

minor

A young woman, a friend of the narrator.

Setebos

minor

A mythological figure, referenced as a symbol of raw nature.

Guendolen

minor

A woman from the narrator's past, a brief romantic interest.

Mrs. Gracchus

minor

Also known as Gracchus

A society matron, a friend of the narrator's mother.

Clarriker

minor

Also known as Josiah Clarriker

A friend of the narrator, a young man.

Arthur

minor

A friend of the narrator, a young man.

Mrs. Lethbury

minor

Ned Lethbury's mother, a society matron.

Jimmy Travis

minor

Also known as Jimmy

A friend of the narrator, a young man.

Armitage

minor

Also known as Mr. Armitage

A friend of the narrator, a young man.

Mrs. Beechinor

minor

Avis Beechinor's mother, a society matron.

Kathleen Eppes

minor

A young woman, a friend of the narrator.

Mr. Rabbet

minor

Mrs. Adrian Rabbet's husband, a quiet man.

Councillor von Hollwig

minor

Also known as the Councillor von Hollwig

A German diplomat, a friend of the narrator's family.

Mr. Havemeyer

minor

A friend of the narrator's uncle, a businessman.

Madame d'Arlanges

minor

Also known as Madame la Marquise

A French noblewoman, Bettie's aunt.

Mrs. Blagden

minor

Peter Blagden's mother, an elderly woman.

Mrs. Charteris

minor

John Charteris's mother, an elderly woman.

Tom Gelwix

minor

Also known as Tom

A friend of the narrator, a young man.

Little Adey

minor

A young child, a relative of the narrator.

Francine

minor

A young woman, a friend of the narrator.

Judge Willoughby

minor

A local judge, a friend of the narrator's uncle.

Uncle Larry

minor

Also known as Larry

The narrator's uncle, a jovial man.

Mamie Taylors

minor

Also known as Polly

A young woman, a friend of the narrator.

Miss Jemmett

minor

Rosalind Jemmett's mother, a society matron.

Theodore Passerat

minor

A friend of the narrator, a young man.

Mr. Clarriker

minor

Josiah Clarriker's father, a businessman.