# The Rainbow — Character guide

> Key figures in The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence.

- [Ursula Brangwen](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/ursula_brangwen.md): Ursula grows up between the Marsh and the colliery town, first as Anna's watchful eldest child, then as a schoolteacher and student hungry for a life larger than marriage and housekeeping. Her affair with the soldier Skr
- [Tom Brangwen](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/tom_brangwen.md): Tom inherits the Marsh and its rhythms of cattle, corn, and church-tower on the horizon, a Brangwen who works by instinct and feels the land as a pulse in his own blood. His marriage to Lydia Lensky brings a foreign, gri
- [Anna Brangwen](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/anna_brangwen.md): Anna Lensky arrives at the Marsh as a Polish child and grows into a proud, theatrical young woman who signs her name with a flourish and perches on graveyard walls like a white peacock. Her marriage to Will Brangwen begi
- [Will Brangwen](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/will_brangwen.md): Will enters the Brangwen family as a slender, solemn young man with a gift for carving and a mystical attachment to the church at Cossethay. Married to Anna, he swings between adoring her and resenting her, between the e
- [Anton Skrebensky](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/anton_skrebensky.md): Skrebensky arrives in Ursula's world as the son of the Baron she admired as a child, a lieutenant with an easy manner and a settled sense of how a man and woman ought to live. His affair with Ursula is tender and physica
- [Lydia Brangwen](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/lydia_brangwen.md): Lydia Lensky arrives in Cossethay with her small daughter Anna and a past she does not explain, having lost a Polish husband and a whole world of aristocratic life. Her marriage to Tom is quiet, deep, and partly unreacha
- [Alfred Brangwen](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/alfred_brangwen.md): Alfred belongs to the Brangwen generation that measures itself against the Marsh's ample, unhurried life, and finds his own portion wanting. Where Tom drifts and dreams, Alfred hardens — a father of several children, sha
- [Tilly](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/tilly.md): Tilly keeps the Marsh running while the family it shelters stumbles through courtships, marriages, and estrangements. Quick to indignation and quicker to forgive, she is the household's practical conscience — the one who
- [Winifred Inger](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/winifred_inger.md): Miss Inger arrives in Ursula's life as a figure of startling independence — educated, athletic, unimpressed by the small pieties of provincial girlhood. She draws Ursula into a world of ideas and physical confidence, and
- [Maggie Schofield](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/maggie_schofield.md): Maggie shares Ursula's classroom world of chalk dust, difficult children, and a headmaster's petty tyranny, and meets it with a gentleness Ursula cannot always muster. She is the friend who listens without demanding, who
- [Mr. Harby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/mr_harby.md): Harby rules his school through inspection, fear, and the relentless machinery of routine, treating teachers and children alike as instruments of order. He is the embodiment of the institutional world Ursula enters as a y
- [Gudrun](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/gudrun.md): Ursula's younger sister, artistic and independent, appears briefly.
- [Fred Brangwen](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/fred_brangwen.md): Tom's younger brother, a cheerful and simple farmer.
- [Frank Brangwen](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/frank_brangwen.md): A Brangwen relative, a butcher with a grievance against the world.
- [Tom Cooper](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/tom_cooper.md): A young man who courts Ursula briefly, a farmer's son.
- [Baron Skrebensky](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/baron_skrebensky.md): Anton's father, a Polish aristocrat living in England.
- [Dorothy Russell](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/dorothy_russell.md): Ursula's friend from college, intellectual and free-spirited.
- [Billy Pillins](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/billy_pillins.md): A young man who works at the Marsh, fond of Ursula.
- [Effie](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/effie.md): A servant girl at the Marsh, later leaves the household.
- [Mr. Brunt](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/mr_brunt.md): A teacher at the school, colleague of Ursula.
- [Mrs. Hardy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/mrs_hardy.md): A neighbor of the Brangwens, a widow.
- [Paul Lensky](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/paul_lensky.md): Lydia's son from her first marriage, dies young.
- [Clem Phillips](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rainbow_se/characters/clem_phillips.md): A young man who visits the Brangwens, a friend of the family.

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