She hides her emotional distress caused by her impending death and poor relationships with her family from Belinda through wit and charm.

Lady Delacour: A fashionable bel esprit (woman of wit), who Belinda at first considers "the most agreeable—no, that is too feeble an expression—the most fascinating person she had ever beheld".

Through Belinda's gentleness, Lady Delacour begins to be kinder to her husband, and grows warmer towards her daughter Helena.

Joyfully, she decides to cast aside her folly and dissipation, and uses her talents energetically to be a good wife, a fervent friend, and a kind mother, and she ends the book by saying laughingly, "Now, Lady Delacour, to show that she is reformed, comes forward to address the audience with a moral—a moral!—yes, Our tale contains a moral, and no doubt, You all have wit enough to find it out."

Her strong character and the very important part she plays in the novel make some critics[5] think the book should bear her name instead of Belinda's.

He is shown to have a warm heart, for he frankly asks Lady Delacour to make his peace with Belinda after he spoke rashly about her.

This almost ruins all hope of happiness; but Virginia reveals to him that she loves somebody else (or actually, to be more exact, the "figure" of Captain Sunderland – for she has never actually met him).

Literary critic George Saintsbury argued that Jane Austen's naturalistic female characters owed a debt to this society novel's spirited heroine.

When Austen was updating her early novel-draft Susan, which eventually appeared in print as Northanger Abbey, she added a reference to Belinda:[6]" 'Oh, it is only a novel.....It is only Cecilia or Camilla, or Belinda '; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed".Belinda was itself in the tradition of British society novels[7] by writers such as Frances Sheridan and Frances Burney, who also charted the travails of bright young women in search of a good marriage.

Perhaps Edgeworth's best courtship novel, Belinda replaces mercenary fortune-hunting with a deeper quest for marital compatibility, valorising irrationality and love over reason and duty in a way that prefigures Austen's treatments of the same theme.

[8] Aristocratic Lady Delacour in Belinda has been compared to Miss Milner in English novelist Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791).