# The Good Soldier — Character guide

> Key figures in The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.

- [Edward Ashburnham](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/edward_ashburnham.md): Edward Ashburnham looks like the ideal English gentleman: well-built, temperate, punctual, admired by his regiment and his wife. Yet his real life runs on a private current of romantic pity — he cannot resist a woman who
- [Leonora Ashburnham](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/leonora_ashburnham.md): Leonora enters the marriage as a convent girl handed over like a patient medieval virgin, adoring Edward and expecting to obey. Within a few years she is running Branshaw's finances, watching his largesse and his mistres
- [Florence Dowell](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/florence_dowell.md): Florence marries John Dowell after a whirlwind courtship that scandalizes her aunts, and settles into a European life of spas, social evenings, and carefully arranged appearances. Beneath the charm lies something harder:
- [John Dowell](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/john_dowell.md): John Dowell drifts through the Ashburnhams' world of Nauheim and Branshaw as a courteous, well-meaning outsider, married to Florence and oddly at home in other people's marriages. He confesses himself an unreliable witne
- [Nancy Rufford](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/nancy_rufford.md): Nancy arrives at Branshaw as a child abandoned by a drinking mother and an absent soldier father, and grows up cheerful, fragile, and utterly trusting of Edward and Leonora. By eighteen she is startlingly beautiful — 'li
- [Maisie Maidan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/maisie_maidan.md): Maisie Maidan is barely twenty-three, married to a boy husband in Chitral, and so gentle that even Dowell remembers her as something wrapped in lavender. Edward's pursuit of her — sincere, he insists — becomes the scanda
- [La Dolciquita](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/la_dolciquita.md): A Spanish courtesan with whom Edward has a brief, expensive affair in Monte Carlo.
- [Mrs. Maidan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/mrs_maidan.md): Maisie Maidan's mother, who accompanies her daughter to India.
- [Mr. Hurlbird](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/mr_hurlbird.md): Florence's wealthy, eccentric uncle from whom she inherits a fortune.
- [Mrs. Ashburnham](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/mrs_ashburnham_senior.md): Edward's mother, who lives at the family estate Branshaw Teleragh.
- [Mrs. Basil](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/mrs_basil.md): A friend of the Ashburnhams, mentioned in social contexts.
- [Jimmy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/jimmy.md): A young man who accompanies Florence on a trip to Europe before her marriage.
- [Colonel Powys](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/colonel_powys.md): A military friend of Edward's, part of the social circle in India.
- [Rodney Bayham](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/rodney_bayham.md): A man who eventually marries Nancy Rufford after the novel's events.
- [Bagshawe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/bagshawe.md): A man who exposes Florence's past indiscretions to Leonora.
- [Mrs. Powys](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_good_soldier_se/characters/mrs_powys.md): Wife of Colonel Powys, part of the social circle in India.

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