# Years of Grace — Character guide

> Key figures in Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes.

- [Jane Ward](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/jane_ward.md): Jane Ward sits at her family's Chicago breakfast table, caught between her mother's careful social calculations and her own private longings. She knows exactly why her mother disapproves of Agnes Johnson, and she knows w
- [Stephen Jane](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/stephen_jane.md): Stephen Jane has grown into the kind of man to whom time brings distinction rather than decline, a contrast Jane feels keenly on her fiftieth birthday. He is present, fond, and largely unexamined — a brother whose overco
- [Isabel](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/isabel.md): Isabel moves through the family as its most vehement moralist, certain that affairs are always the woman's fault and that parents must intervene. Yet her certainty cracks when Jane reminds her how it felt to be young and
- [André Duroy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/andre_duroy.md): André Duroy waits nonchalantly near the Water Works Tower for a fourteen-year-old girl who has arranged her whole morning around escaping her approved friends. He is the boy Jane cannot walk to school with if Flora and M
- [Cicily](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/cicily.md): Cicily is a young wife and mother of twins whose refusal to follow her engineer husband Jack to Boston becomes a family crisis, with Isabel pleading and Jane quietly disapproving. She likes Lakewood, she has made her pla
- [Stephen Carver](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/stephen_carver.md): Stephen Carver is the kind, unalarming young man Jane chooses when her dreadful indecision finally ends, the suitor whose family she gamely declares she likes and whose gentle kiss she finds peaceful. He is everything th
- [Jimmy Jane](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/jimmy_jane.md): Jane's younger brother, nicknamed Jimmy, whose casual silences and easy charm keep his sister guessing whether she matters to him at all.
- [Jimmy Trent](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/jimmy_trent.md): An amusing, unreliable charmer who boards Jane's train on impulse, promising talk and trouble in equal measure.
- [Agnes Johnson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/agnes_johnson.md): Jane's levelheaded friend from west of Lincoln Park, whose blunt loyalty keeps pressing Jane toward the life she actually wants.
- [Muriel Lester](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/muriel_lester.md): A dreamy, untidy society matron whose comfortable, gossipy household shows Jane a world both gayer and looser than her mother's.
- [Flora Furness](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/flora_furness.md): Jane's fashionable cousin, lovely and listless, gliding through luxury trains and ballrooms with a sapphire on her hand and nothing much to do.
- [Mr. Ward](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/mr_ward.md): Jane's cheerful, newspaper-buried father, the one parent who seems to like her exactly as she is and quietly believes in freedom.
- [Bert Lancaster](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/bert_lancaster.md): Bert Lancaster belongs to the older Chicago set that Jane and Isabel dissect over tea, invoked as a benchmark for the kind of rich, society-page suitor who might court their widowed sister. His long final illness gave Mu
- [Jenny](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/jenny.md): Jenny is one of the three grown Carver children whose futures occupy Jane on her fiftieth birthday, the middle child who does not care for dances, does not want any particular young man, and announces plans to lead her o
- [Minnie Carver](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/minnie_carver.md): Minnie has made herself so indispensable to old Mrs. Ward that the daughters cannot dislodge her, even as her sulking and her asthma dictate where the household can and cannot go. When Mr. Ward collapses with double pneu
- [Mrs. Lester](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/mrs_lester.md): Muriel's mother, a formidable society matron.
- [Mr. Carver](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/mr_carver.md): Stephen Carver's father, the elderly patriarch of the Carver family.
- [John Ward](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/john_ward.md): Mr. Ward presides over the breakfast table with the Tribune and an easy joke, the warm counterweight to his wife's careful proprieties, and he is the parent who most openly delights in Jane. His decision to stand barehea
- [Albert Lancaster](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/albert_lancaster.md): Bert's father, a stern and traditional gentleman.
- [Mumsy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/mumsy.md): Mumsy presides behind the coffee tray in her crisp white dressing-sack, correcting Jane's table manners and steering her toward the right friends, Flora and Muriel, and away from the unacceptable Agnes Johnson. Her snobb
- [Mamma](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/mamma.md): In the grey silk dinner dress she has not changed since the night before, her neck cords slack and her eyes ringed with brown, Mamma is the image of wifely endurance as Mr. Ward fights double pneumonia. She is caught bet
- [Mr. Furness](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/mr_furness.md): Flora's father, a wealthy and indulgent businessman.
- [Aunt Silly](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/aunt_silly.md): An eccentric elderly aunt of Jane's, known for her foolish chatter.
- [Miss Parrot](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/miss_parrot.md): The family's gossipy and nosy neighbor.
- [Uncle Alden](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/uncle_alden.md): Jane's uncle, a kindly but somewhat ineffectual man.
- [Mother](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/mother.md): She sits behind the coffee tray, her pretty, proud little head held high above the silver urn, her eyes wandering competently over the table — a woman who reads her household the way she reads a room. Her tranquil rebuke
- [Teddy Brown](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/teddy_brown.md): A young man from a neighboring family.
- [Marion Park](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/marion_park.md): A friend of Jane's from her college years.
- [Barbara Belmont](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/barbara_belmont.md): A glamorous and sophisticated friend of the family.
- [Father](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/father.md): Jane's father, a figure of authority and affection.
- [Jack Bridges](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/jack_bridges.md): A young man who becomes a friend of the family.
- [Robin Bridges](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/years_of_grace_se/characters/robin_bridges.md): Jack Bridges' brother, a friend of the family.

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