# The Cords of Vanity — Character guide

> Key figures in The Cords of Vanity by James Branch Cabell.

- [Unknown Narrator](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/unknown_narrator.md): 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 cow
- [Stella Musgrave](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/stella_musgrave.md): 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
- [Bettie Hamlyn](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/bettie_hamlyn.md): 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 wi
- [Peter Blagden](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/peter_blagden.md): 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 feveri
- [John Charteris](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/john_charteris.md): 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
- [Rosalind Jemmett](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/rosalind_jemmett.md): 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'
- [Elena Barry-Smith](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/elena_barry_smith.md): 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 
- [Robin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/robin.md): 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 
- [Jasper Hardress](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/jasper_hardress.md): 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 
- [Marian Winwood](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/marian_winwood.md): 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 fri
- [Margaret Hugonin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/margaret_hugonin.md): 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
- [Robert Etheridge Townsend](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/robert_etheridge_townsend.md): 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. H
- [Avis Beechinor](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/avis_beechinor.md): 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 
- [Miss Montmorenci](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/miss_montmorenci.md): 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 glamorou
- [George Bulmer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/george_bulmer.md): 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 c
- [Lizzie Musgrave](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/lizzie_musgrave.md): 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 
- [Gillian Hardress](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/gillian_hardress.md): 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 whil
- [Mrs. Barry-Smith](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/mrs_barry_smith.md): Elena's mother, a formidable and scheming woman.
- [Gladys](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/gladys.md): A young woman, a friend of the narrator's sister.
- [Mrs. Hardress](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/mrs_hardress.md): Jasper Hardress's mother, an elderly matriarch.
- [Jaques](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/jaques.md): A servant at the narrator's home, a loyal and eccentric figure.
- [Mrs. Clement Dumby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/mrs_clement_dumby.md): A gossipy and meddlesome society matron.
- [Old Capulet](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/old_capulet.md): An elderly Italian woman, a former opera singer.
- [Helen](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/helen.md): A beautiful woman, an object of the narrator's youthful infatuation.
- [Anne Charteris](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/anne_charteris.md): John Charteris's wife, a quiet and supportive presence.
- [Ned Lethbury](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/ned_lethbury.md): A friend of the narrator, a young man about town.
- [Jack](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/jack.md): A friend of the narrator, part of his social circle.
- [Aunt Marcia](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/aunt_marcia.md): The narrator's aunt, a kind and conventional woman.
- [Mrs. Vokins](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/mrs_vokins.md): A housekeeper or servant in the narrator's household.
- [Amelia Van Orden](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/amelia_van_orden.md): A young woman, a friend of the narrator's family.
- [Mrs. Adrian Rabbet](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/mrs_adrian_rabbet.md): A society woman, a friend of the narrator's mother.
- [Nadine Neroni](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/nadine_neroni.md): A young woman, a friend of Bettie Hamlyn.
- [Alfred Van Orden](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/alfred_van_orden.md): Amelia's brother, a young man.
- [Fairhaven](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/fairhaven.md): A place, but personified as a character in the narrator's imagination.
- [Byam](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/byam.md): A friend of the narrator, a young man.
- [Billy Woods](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/billy_woods.md): A friend of the narrator, a young man.
- [Warwick Risby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/warwick_risby.md): A married couple, friends of the narrator's family.
- [Milo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/milo.md): A friend of the narrator, a young man.
- [Professor Hamlyn](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/professor_hamlyn.md): Bettie's father, a scholarly man.
- [Celia Reindan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/celia_reindan.md): A young woman, a friend of the narrator.
- [Claire Bulmer Townsend](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/claire_bulmer_townsend.md): Robert Townsend's wife, a friend of the narrator's family.
- [Alicia Wade](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/alicia_wade.md): A young woman, a friend of the narrator.
- [Colonel Snawley](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/colonel_snawley.md): A retired military man, a friend of the narrator's uncle.
- [Dr. Jeal](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/dr_jeal.md): A local doctor, a friend of the narrator's family.
- [Nannie Allsotts](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/nannie_allsotts.md): A servant in the narrator's household.
- [Colonel Grimshaw](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/colonel_grimshaw.md): A retired military man, a friend of the narrator's uncle.
- [Agnes Faroy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/agnes_faroy.md): A young woman, a friend of the narrator.
- [Dick Townsend](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/dick_townsend.md): Robert Townsend's brother, a young man.
- [Aurelia Minns](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/aurelia_minns.md): A woman from the narrator's past, a brief romantic interest.
- [Pauline Ashmeade](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/pauline_ashmeade.md): A young woman, a friend of the narrator.
- [Roderick King Hill](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/roderick_king_hill.md): A friend of the narrator, a young man.
- [Kittie Provis](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/kittie_provis.md): A young woman, a friend of the narrator.
- [Amelia Lethbury](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_cords_of_vanity_se/characters/amelia_lethbury.md): Ned Lethbury's sister, a young woman.

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