# The Old Wives’ Tale — Character guide

> Key figures in The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett.

- [Sophia Baines](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/sophia_baines.md): Sophia chafes against the decorum of her mother's house, where even a wagonette departure becomes a public ceremony and daughters are managed like stock. Quick, proud, and secretly contemptuous of the settled futures lai
- [Constance Baines](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/constance_baines.md): Constance bends her head over the baby and the ledgers alike, the steady centre of a household that has lost its matriarch and its runaway daughter at once. Her love for Samuel Povey is real but decorous, conducted in wh
- [Gerald Scales](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/gerald_scales.md): Gerald Scales arrives in Bursley as a bright smile and a lively gesture, the sort of man a shopgirl is warned against and a proud daughter cannot resist. He is irreclaimably a fool and a prodigy of irresponsibleness, res
- [Mrs. Baines](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/mrs_baines.md): Mrs. Baines presides over the Square with the correctness of a woman who has buried a husband and intends to bury the old order on her own terms. She manages Constance's romance by silence and Sophia's by vigilance, and 
- [Samuel Povey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/samuel_povey.md): Samuel Povey rises from assistant to son-in-law to proprietor, a man of small body and large, easily wounded vanity, capable of black and terrible furies when jealous. He loves Constance with a sensitive, tyrannic consci
- [Mr. Critchlow](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/mr_critchlow.md): Mr. Critchlow has watched the Baineses through births, deaths, and elopements, dispensing pills and unwelcome opinions from behind his counter with equal indifference. He is the town's memory and its acid, a man who teas
- [Cyril Povey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/cyril_povey.md): Cyril grows up as the only child of the drapery, the heir everyone assumes will inherit the counter and the Square's good opinion. But he is his own person — gifted, self-possessed, and inclined to take his mother's devo
- [Dick Povey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/dick_povey.md): Dick arrives in the Baines orbit with more dash and appetite than the shop's sober world quite knows what to do with. He is affectionate, impulsive, and prone to schemes that outrun his means, a contrast to his cautious 
- [Maggie Hollins](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/maggie_hollins.md): Maggie has been an organism in the Baines house rather than a person — over forty, gawky, worn thin by service, her own wishes never consulted. When she tells Constance she is leaving to marry the fish-hawker she was eng
- [Fossette](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/fossette.md): Fossette is old, infirm, and thoroughly spoiled, sighing with the insincere, pity-seeking air of a pet who knows exactly how to work her mistresses. She and the jealous Spot turn the parlour into a small theatre of canin
- [Monsieur Chirac](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/chirac.md): Chirac is the sincere, comfortingly gentle Frenchman in Gerald's bohemian circle, forever pronouncing his adjectives with enthusiasm and proposing that one attend a guillotining to observe oneself. He moves through Paris
- [Madame Foucault](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/madame_foucault.md): Madame Foucault is disfigured by time and habit, half prostrate before Sophia in gratitude when the younger woman proposes they share the boarding-house and its profits. She is sincere, impractical, and doomed to be the 
- [Amy Bates](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/amy_bates.md): A servant in the Baines household; loyal and hardworking.
- [Lily Holl](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/lily_holl.md): A young woman who works in the Baines shop and later marries.
- [Miss Insull](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/miss_insull.md): A shop assistant at Baines's; prim and efficient.
- [Daniel Povey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/daniel_povey.md): Samuel Povey's brother; a successful businessman in London.
- [Aunt Harriet](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/aunt_harriet.md): Sister of Mrs. Baines; a kind, conventional woman.
- [Mr. Boldero](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/mr_boldero.md): An elderly friend of the Baines family; a solicitor.
- [Madame Laurence](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/laurence.md): A Frenchwoman who runs a pension in Paris.
- [Fan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/fan.md): A young woman briefly involved with Dick Povey.
- [William Clews Mericarp](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/william_clews_mericarp.md): A deceased local notable mentioned in the story.
- [Mr. Peel-Swynnerton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_old_wives_tale_se/characters/mr_peel_swynnerton.md): A young artist and friend of Cyril Povey.

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