The Magnificent Ambersons

George Amberson Minafer

George Amberson Minafer is the town's most envied young man, groomed by a family that spoiled him terribly and let him grow up expecting the world to arrange itself around him. His uncle tells him plainly that he has always been fond of him but not always liked him, and that there were times he thought George ought to be hanged — a fair measure of the charm and the arrogance he carries. His courtship of Lucy Morgan and his contempt for her father's automobile business set him squarely against the changing world, and his refusal to bend is what makes his slow education the novel's central drama.

Lucy Morgan

Lucy Morgan arrives in town as Eugene's daughter, educated, graceful, and unimpressed by the Amberson name in a way George has never encountered. She matches his arrogance with teasing composure, refusing to be won simply because he expects to win, and her loyalty to her father complicates every step of their courtship. Her clear-eyed judgments about George — and about the world he refuses to see — make her the story's quiet conscience and the measure of what he stands to lose.

Eugene Morgan

Eugene Morgan was young Isabel's suitor before she married Wilbur Minafer, and he returns years later as a widower, an inventor, and a believer in the noisy, smelly machines everyone else mocks. He speaks of faith as what carves the fewest lines into a face, and his serene confidence in the future quietly indicts the Ambersons' faith in their own name. His rekindled feeling for Isabel and his daughter Lucy's entanglement with George place him at the exact hinge where the old order and the new one collide.

Isabel Amberson

Isabel Amberson Minafer is the beauty neither time nor trouble seems to have touched, adored by her father, her brother, and Eugene Morgan, who never quite stopped loving her. She married the dull Wilbur Minafer instead of Eugene, and now channels her whole life into George, defending him, indulging him, and shrinking from any conflict that might wound him. Her tenderness is genuine and her blindness is real, and the tension between her old suitor's return and her son's jealous possessiveness is the emotional engine of the novel's middle stretch.

Fanny Minafer

Fanny Minafer lives on the family's fringe, counting columns of figures for her electric headlight investment and dreading the poverty that is quietly closing in. She is in love with Eugene Morgan and knows it is hopeless, and her nervous, self-pitying devotion to George makes her both pitiable and exasperating. When the household finally breaks up, her despair at being left in the lurch exposes how little the Amberson women were ever taught to stand on their own.

Major Amberson

Major Amberson made the family's money and the family's name, and for most of the novel he presides over both with the easy authority of a man who has never had to imagine them ending. After Isabel's death he sits staring into the fire, and those around him mistake his absorption for dazed reminiscence when he is in fact planning how to enter a country where he is not even sure of being recognized as an Amberson. His decline is the story's clearest signal that the fortune and the mansion were never as permanent as the family assumed.