# The Painted Veil — Character guide

> Key figures in The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham.

- [Kitty Fane](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_painted_veil_se/characters/kitty_fane.md): 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 fo
- [Walter Fane](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_painted_veil_se/characters/walter_fane.md): 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 u
- [Charles Townsend](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_painted_veil_se/characters/charles_townsend.md): 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 
- [Waddington](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_painted_veil_se/characters/waddington.md): 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 
- [Mother Superior](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_painted_veil_se/characters/mother_superior.md): 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, c
- [Mrs. Garstin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_painted_veil_se/characters/mrs_garstin.md): 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 unsentim
- [Dorothy Townsend](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_painted_veil_se/characters/dorothy_townsend.md): Dorothy Townsend occupies the securest seat in colonial Hong Kong: wife of the Assistant Colonial Secretary, hostess of impeccable dinners, a woman whose reputation is as smooth as lacquer. The irony is that her husband'
- [Doris](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_painted_veil_se/characters/doris.md): Kitty's younger sister, who marries a baronet and is favored by their mother.
- [Bernard Garstin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_painted_veil_se/characters/bernard_garstin.md): Kitty's father, a lawyer who is overshadowed by his wife.
- [Colonel Yü](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_painted_veil_se/characters/colonel_yu.md): A Chinese military officer who assists in the cholera epidemic in Mei-tan-fu.
- [Sister St. Joseph](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_painted_veil_se/characters/sister_st_joseph.md): A cheerful nun at the convent in Mei-tan-fu who works with Kitty.
- [Geoffrey Dennison](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_painted_veil_se/characters/geoffrey_dennison.md): A young man who flirts with Kitty at a party in Hong Kong.
- [Mei-tan-fu](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_painted_veil_se/characters/mei_tan_fu.md): The plague-stricken Chinese city where Walter and Kitty relocate.

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