The Enchanted April

Mrs. Fisher

Mrs. Fisher arrives at San Salvatore as the eldest and most formidable of the four women, armed with a lifetime of literary connections and an unshakable conviction that her way is the only way. Her refusal to be charmed by Italy, or by her companions, sets her in comic opposition to Lotty's effusiveness and Rose's quiet longing. Yet the castle's beauty works on her imperceptibly, and her gradual thaw — glimpsed in small surrenders — becomes one of the novel's most satisfying transformations.

Mrs. Wilkins

Lotty Wilkins is the engine of the plot: it is her sudden, rapturous idea to rent San Salvatore that gathers the four women under one roof. Married to the pompous Mellersh, she has learned to read people with startling accuracy and to speak truths others avoid — she tells Mr. Wilkins plainly that Mrs. Fisher 'hasn't got love.' Her openness is both her gift and her vulnerability, and her instinct that Italy can remake a person drives the book's central wager.

Mrs. Arbuthnot

Rose Arbuthnot is Lotty's friend and fellow adventurer, a woman of strict conscience and hidden hunger whose Hampstead house is cold and whose husband Frederick is mostly absent. At San Salvatore she is stirred but not consoled: she wants to be 'privately important' to someone, and the ache of that wish makes her restless, vain, and irritable in ways she barely recognizes. Her longing for a telegram from Frederick anchors the novel's meditation on marriage and worth.

Scrap

Lady Caroline Dester — 'Scrap' — is the youngest and most dazzling of the four, accustomed to being stared at and courted and thoroughly bored by both. San Salvatore unsettles her: almost at once she feels accused of being 'tawdry,' and she dreads that Lotty's friendliness will trap her into four weeks of being grabbed at. Her beauty is a shield she is beginning to find unbearable, and her struggle to think honestly about herself gives the middle of the book its sharpest inner drama.

Mr. Wilkins

Mellersh Wilkins is a solicitor whose pomposity Lotty has endured for years, and whose unannounced visit to Italy threatens to reassert the domestic order she fled. He is not a villain so much as a man incapable of seeing anyone but himself, and his habit of buttonholing solitary ladies — Rose, Mrs. Fisher — with his opinions makes him both comic and quietly menacing. His presence forces Lotty, and the reader, to ask whether the transformation Italy promises can survive contact with home.

Frederick

A mysterious figure often referenced as a past love or memory.