John JarndyceĮsther, Ada's, and Richard's benefactor, as well as many other people's.

She is adored by everyone around her, especially Esther, Richard Carstone, and John Jarndyce, but she is not particularly intellectual. She never wavers in her devotion to Richard, and Dickens implies that if she might have been a little less supportive of him he might have not fallen into the morass of the Chancery suit, and therefore she might have saved him. She is loyal to a fault, and can be myopic in her views about those she loves. She is in love almost at once with her distant cousin, another ward of Chancery. The young woman that Esther Summerson has been assigned to be companion for. His fateful romance with Lady Dedlock, which produced their illegitimate daughter Esther, ruined his life. He has fallen upon very hard times, and he is a shadow of the man he was. NemoĬaptain Hawdon's pseudonym, now employed as a law writer. Throughout her narrative, we catch glimpses of her own personal desires for love, respect, and comfort for herself, but, not unsurprisingly, having been raised by a woman who considered it 'better if she had not ever been born', she has trouble allowing herself feelings of desire for her own well-being. This cousin is a young woman of 17 named Ada Clare.Įsther's main motivation throughout the novel appears to be adherence to duty. She is assigned by the Court of Chancery (which is roughly equivalent to family and probate court) to be a companion to a relative of John Jarndyce. Esther is the legal ward of John Jarndyce, a mysterious benefactor whom she has never met. She has been raised by a woman whom she thought her godmother, but learns after that woman's death that she was her aunt. An orphan of uncertain parentage, we meet Miss Summerson at the age of 20, having completed her schooling in the Greenleaf School in Winchester, England.

The bleak house