Eliza Touchet

Eliza Touchet, the novel's protagonist and primary perspective character, is a middle-aged woman whose spinster status has resigned her to life in the house of her cousin, William Ainsworth. Although Eliza maintains a thorny exterior—and is pejoratively known by several people as "The Targe" because of it—she is haunted and broken by the ways in which her status as a woman in 1800s England has prevented her from pursuing a life with any sense of autonomy. Furthermore, her buried love for William's first wife, Frances, inspires a lovelorn nostalgia in Eliza that increasingly causes her to ruminate on the early days of William's career and her residency in his household.

Although Eliza is possessed of what might anachronistically be called "feminist ideals," and fancies herself something of a people's advocate, she does harbor a number of class anxieties that alienate her from William's new wife...