The Eustace Diamonds

Lizzie Eustace

Lizzie Eustace has married into Portray Castle and out of poverty, and now she means to keep both, whatever the Eustace lawyers and her discarded suitors say. Her genius is performance: she weeps, she veils, she stretches out her clasped hands, and magistrates and publics alike melt — even as she confesses to perjury. The necklace is the hinge on which her whole future turns, and her refusal to surrender it drags cousins, suitors, and attorneys into her orbit.

Lucy Morris

Lucy Morris is a treasure though no heroine — cataloguing libraries, planning flower-gardens, and lighting up Fawn Court with a face no one can resist. She loves Frank Greystock without fortune or prospect, and Lady Fawn's household quietly assumes he must marry money instead. Trollope calls her a simple entity, single and predictable, set at the opposite pole from Lizzie; the novel's early tension is whether such plain goodness can survive in a world that rewards Lizzie's kind of charm.

Frank Greystock

Frank Greystock is dual in character: on the banks of the Bob he tells himself the world lost for love would be well lost, and in Westminster he swears he will win the game whatever it costs his heart. He is in debt, in Parliament, and in love with a governess with no fortune — and he is also Lizzie's cousin, which makes him her champion when Lord Fawn and Mr. Camperdown close in. His divided nature is the novel's central question: whether a man of ambition can be true to himself and to Lucy at once.

Lord Fawn

Lord Fawn is prudent, diligent, and utterly without poetry — a Peer of Parliament who mastered an earlier disappointment by burying himself in blue-books. Engaged to Lizzie, he panics the moment the diamond scandal threatens his respectability, and his cowardly letters give her exactly the ammunition she needs to refuse him first and claim the moral victory. His fear of being thought a scoundrel is funnier and more damning than any actual vice.

Sir Griffin Tewett

Sir Griffin Tewett is the fool everyone allows to be a fool, yet he has wit enough to counterfeit wealth while his lawsuits multiply against his own family. He pursues Lucinda Roanoke under Mrs. Carbuncle's managing eye, and his arrival at Portray brings a whiff of menace into Lizzie's house-party. He matters because he shows what the marriage market produces when fortune-hunting runs to its violent, threadbare end.

Lady Fawn

Lady Fawn lives year-round at Richmond in a large old-fashioned house with a large old-fashioned garden, ruling a household of unattractive but good-natured daughters and one indispensable governess. She loves Lucy genuinely, yet she also understands that Lord Fawn must marry money, and she manages the delicate boundary between affection and propriety with a word here and a hint there. Her quiet diplomacy — and her feud with Lady Linlithgow — shapes the social weather in which Lucy's hopes and Lizzie's visits alike must survive.