Where Angels Fear to Tread Characters

The RebelEver since Lilia married Charles Herriton, her mother-in-law Mrs. Herriton bossed her around non-stop: on what to say and how to say it, who to socialize with and who to avoid, how to act,...

Playing It SafeWhen we first meet Miss Caroline Abbott, there's nothing remarkable about her. She's traveling with Lilia during her tour of Italy, and the narrator describes Miss Abbott as: […] g...

Mr. Know-It-AllPhilip Herriton, Lilia's 24-year-old brother-in-law, is in many ways a walking contradiction. On the one hand, he's a mamma's boy: he does everything Mrs. Herriton orders him to do a...

Gino Carella makes a terrible husband, but an awesome daddy. When he's married to Lilia, we kind of hate him—he has a bad temper; he forbids Lilia to take walks on her own; he even cheats on her...

Mrs. Herriton wears the pants, er, corset, in the Herriton family. She calls all the shots. She's hell-bent on preserving the family's core Edwardian value systems (read: be proper and miserable) a...

Like mother, like daughter. Harriet is the spitting image of Mrs. Herriton—she follows the same code of conduct, and guards the family name as if it were treasure. And Forster takes full adv...

We find it really sad that Lilia's baby doesn't have a name in the novel. But his lack of name seems to be particularly fitting when we consider how the baby has absolutely no say over his own life...

Irma is Lilia and Charles' only daughter. We really wish Irma was given more screen time—she seems like a smart kid and we want to see more of her, but Forster only gives us small peeks into her...

Perfetta is Gino's widowed cousin and has, according to the narrator, no "social aspirations," so she helps out around the house as "factotum" (that's someone who does all kinds of work). She is pa...

Spiridione is a close friend of Gino's and works at the customs house in Chiasso. He only makes a brief appearance in the novel for a handful of pages, after Gino's marriage to Lilia. When he hears...

Mrs. Theobold is Lilia's biological mother, but she has no influence on her daughter's life. We meet Mrs. Theobold once, very briefly, at the opening of the novel when she goes to the station to bi...

Mr. Kingcroft is a clergyman and only appears in person at the beginning of the novel to accompany Mrs. Theobold to the train station. He is the reason that the Herritons are sending Lilia off to I...