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Lady Brett Ashley

This character best encapsulates the beauty of being "lost." She represents the dead aristocracy and constantly fends off the long-dead notions of romance best captured in the melancholy of Robert Cohn. Yet she also represents the future and the new feminism of the 1920s; she is an amoral socialite who lost her first love and husband to dysentery in the War, divorced her second because he was abusive but gave her a title, and is working on a third. She is the interesting woman of intelligence from the nineteenth century that Henry James would want to make into a portrait. Lastly, she is an inspiration to otherwise impotent writers because she "was damned good-looking [and] built like the hull of a racing yacht." Consequent to all these ingredients and the fact that she is in love with Jake, she is the moving force of the...

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