The Painted Veil

Kitty Fane

Kitty enters the story as a society girl whose mother has grown impatient to marry her off, and she accepts Walter Fane less from affection than from a wish to escape. In Hong Kong she is charming, shallow, and hungry for admiration, and her affair with Charles Townsend exposes how little she has examined her own heart. When circumstances force her into Mei-tan-fu, the convent, the epidemic, and the nuns' quiet discipline begin to unsettle the self she thought she knew.

Walter Fane

Walter meets Kitty at London dances, courts her without flourish, and marries her before returning to his post in the East. He is reserved, intelligent, and morally severe, a man whose reticence Kitty reads as dullness until events reveal its weight. His decision to take her into a cholera-stricken city turns the marriage into a crucible, and his character becomes the measure against which Kitty must reckon her own.

Charles Townsend

Townsend is the Assistant Colonial Secretary in Hong Kong, a married man with a reputation for ability and a taste for flirtations that never quite cost him anything. He is vain, indolent beneath the polish, and careful above all to protect his career and his comfortable marriage. His affair with Kitty gives the novel its first crisis, and his willingness to let her bear the consequences exposes the hollowness beneath his charm.

Waddington

Waddington has lived in China long enough to have gone native in his habits and his humor, and he serves as Kitty's escort and interpreter in the cholera-stricken city. He is a talker, fond of a drink and a scandal, but his offhand remarks about Townsend and about the nuns carry a moral edge Kitty cannot ignore. His companionship gives her the only unguarded friendship she has, and his observations quietly shape her reassessment of her husband and herself.

Mother Superior

The Mother Superior runs the convent and its orphanage with a discipline that is both tender and absolute, and her presence makes Kitty feel like an awkward schoolgirl. She is a woman of deep faith and human tolerance, capable of a grave smile at Waddington's nonsense, yet she holds even those she likes at a certain distance. Her example of self-forgetful service becomes the standard against which Kitty measures her own smallness during the epidemic.

Mrs. Garstin

Mrs. Garstin presides over a London household organized around getting her daughters suitably settled, and her disappointment in Kitty is a pressure Kitty has felt since girlhood. She is shrewd, domineering, and unsentimental, and her heavy silences speak louder than her words. Her ambition is the engine behind Kitty's hasty marriage to Walter, and the memory of her judgment shadows Kitty's choices long after she has left England.