List of Gemma Doyle Trilogy characters
The characters in the Gemma Doyle Trilogy[1] appear in a group of three fantasy novels by Libba Bray, set in late 19th-century England, and published between 2003 and 2007: A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, and The Sweet Far Thing.
Supernatural beings play an important role in the story—centaurs and forest people, a Gorgon, lost souls called "Winterland creatures" and "Trackers", and the skeletal "Poppy Warriors".
Gemma Doyle (born in Shropshire, June 21, 1879) is the heroine of Libba Bray's novels A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, and The Sweet Far Thing.
It is in the realms that she meets up with what she believes to be her dead mother, and the two devise a plan to defeat Circe, an evil member of the Order who wishes to take the power away from Gemma, and her ruthless assassins.
She discovers from a diary that Virginia Doyle is actually Mary Dowd, who, along with her best friend, Sarah Rees-Toome, became entangled in the power that the realms, the Winterlands, and the Order offered them.
Kartik, however, insists that he never would have done it and proves his honesty by helping Gemma escape the Rakshana when they imprison her, causing him to become one of their enemies and forcing him to turn his back on everything he has ever known.
After making her debut, Gemma decides to move to America to live independently and attend University, instead of continuing her season with the other young ladies her age.
She has strained relationships with her critical grandmother, her brother, whose interests lie mainly in appearances and social climbing, and her father, who tries to avoid painful memories of his wife, Gemma's mother.
Ann Bradshaw (born c. 1879), along with Gemma Doyle, Felicity Worthington, and Pippa Cross, is one of the lead characters of Libba Bray's novels A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, and The Sweet Far Thing.
She was sent to Spence as a "scholarship pupil" by her nouveau riche aunt and uncle who wish Ann to be well-learned; they can then employ her as an unpaid governess for their odious children.
Afraid that she would not be accepted as she was, she decides not to join the theatre after all, and asks for her horrible cousins to pick her up early from school and begin her life as a governess.
[7] Felicity "Fee" Mildrade Worthington (born c. 1878) is one of the main characters in Libba Bray's novels A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, and The Sweet Far Thing.
When, in The Sweet Far Thing, Felicity and Gemma encounter her, she is severely depressed and seems to be confused about the difference between her and her doll, who Admiral Worthington tells her is a wicked reflection of herself.
One of Felicity's most prominent characteristics is her bold sexual manner, which is mostly displayed in A Great and Terrible Beauty, brags to her friends about how many men she plans to have, and regularly meets Ithal, a gypsy boy, in the woods.
[16] She also is a fairly talented painter, once painting a castle from the Realms into the "pastoral scenes befitting a paradise" that are to be used as decoration at a ball.
In Rebel Angels, a new teacher, Miss McCleethy, introduces archery to the students; Felicity, of course, is the best of the girls and claims that this is "because she expects to win."
"[18] At the end of The Sweet Far Thing, however, Felicity plans on going to Paris with Polly, where she hopes to meet "others like her" and suspects that she will, in time, be able to fall in love again.
[20] Pippa "Pip" Cross (c. 1878- September 1895) is one of the main characters in A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, and The Sweet Far Thing, all by Libba Bray.
When Gemma, Felicity, and Ann are visiting the realms in The Sweet Far Thing, they find Pippa with a group of girls she claims to have been saved from entering the Winterlands.
In the first book as part of a hazing ritual, Gemma is sent to steal the communion wine but accidentally takes whiskey from the Reverend's private collection.
She is always kind to the girls, and is one of the sources for information that Gemma, Felicity, Ann, and Pippa require because of her knowledge of the school's past and other-worldly things like faeries and such.
This action sends Gemma to Spence Academy, where she learns the truth of her mother's history by reading the diary of a girl named Mary Dowd.
After a fire destroys the Eastern wing of Spence Academy, Mary adopts the name of Virginia and eventually marries John Doyle.
(Born in Bombay, November 10, 1878) In A Great and Terrible Beauty, Kartik is initially a member of the Rakshana and is given the task of watching Gemma Doyle and preventing her from entering the Realms.
When Gemma returns to the realms for the last time, she discovers that when the wind rustles the tree's branches, she can hear Kartik sigh her name, and the grass feels like his touch to her.
The nearly skeletal warriors wear chain mail and tattered knights' tunics painted with poppy flowers, and they make games of stealing and breaking souls from the human world and the realms.
Mother Elena- An elderly gypsy woman who went insane after the kidnapping and murder of her daughter, Carolina, by Mary Dowd and Sarah Rees-Toome.
At the end of The Sweet Far Thing he is diagnosed with tuberculosis and moves back to India, where he lived in the beginning of A Great and Terrible Beauty.
Materialistic and proper, Tom does not have a good relationship with Gemma in A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels, though this changes when he learns more about her in The Sweet Far Thing.
Lily Trimble: A famous American actress, who soon turns out to be Jewish and must hide that identity to avoid social disapproval.
