Charlotte Ashby

Charlotte Ashby, née Gorse, is the second wife of the former widower Kenneth Ashby. They married about a year ago. It’s Charlotte’s first marriage, and it is evidently a happy one as she seems to be sure of his love. Charlotte is fully convinced to inspire Kenneth with confidence after his two-year widowhood. Kenneth has always been devoted to her, a loving and caring husband.

Therefore, she really has the feeling of having taken the place of Kenneth's first wife, Elsie. She must have known the Ashbys long before her marriage to Kenneth because she visited them at least once. Back then she “looked about [Elsie Ashby] with an innocent envy, feeling it to be exactly the drawing-room she would have liked for herself”; now it is actually hers as well as Elsie’s entire former house, as she moved in after her marriage to Kenneth. Kenneth has given Charlotte plenty of scope to change the interior design of the house without consulting him. Thus, the “beginning of their new life in the old setting was so frank and unembarrassed” that Charlotte has felt comfortable from day one.

She also managed to remove doubts about her ability to take care of Elsie’s and Kenneth’s two children by “her good humour and the children’s obvious fondness of her”. Charlotte indeed seems to be a caring and conscientious stepmother as she goes over her stepchildren’s copybooks and takes the children to their classes.

There is no doubt that Charlotte loves her husband. She likes to be for herself – as long as Kenneth is at work – in order to “think over what he had said when they parted in the morning.” In doing so, she always looks forward to his coming home.

All those circumstances seem to please her needs “to feel herself the sovereign even of his past”. Probably because she wants to be the master even of his past, she has always tried to avoid to mention or to speak about Kenneth’s first wife Elsie as “it did not come naturally to her tongue”. Charlotte also feels uneasy because of Elsie’s portrait that hung in the library the first weeks. She imagined that the “coldly beautiful face […] followed her with guarded eyes” and she feels “more at ease and in confidence” now that the portrait was transferred into the children’s nursery. So there are some hints that Charlotte feels a slight jealousy of Elsie, although she would never admit it. But nevertheless the marriage to Kenneth is evidently a godsend for her.

But the arrival of the mysterious grey letters has cast a more and more somber shadow on their relationship, especially from Charlotte’s standpoint. The very idea she does neither know who the sender of the letter is nor what the content of the letters is disturbs Charlotte enough. But the fact that Kenneth seems to be disturbed and far away after reading the letters really startles her, especially because she knows that the writing on the envelope is a female one. Here, too, her jealousy increases step by step to the point where she “can’t stand it another day”. She feels “excluded, ignored, blotted out of his life” as Kenneth does not reveal the secret. She is deeply dazed by the fact that she detects an obscure side of her husband. On the other hand, Charlotte considers her husband needs her help – in a similar manner as she helped him to get out of the grief as a widower. As she realizes that Kenneth will not reveal any detail about the grey letters, she therefore tries to persuade him by all available means to go on a vacation as soon as possible. At least she prevails and Kenneth finally consents. The ostensible victory she gains makes her “feel young again” because she has “won the day, […] her husband was still hers” and her husband is now doing “what she wanted, not what the other woman exacted of him”.

The overall impression of Charlotte Ashby is that she is loving wife, but her jealousy can be easily kindled. She is quite touchy concerning her predecessor Elsie Ashby and it is obvious that her most awful nightmare can only be exceeded by the increasing inkling – and at the end indeed certainty – that the letters are from Elsie or, technically speaking, Elsie’s ghost.

Key phrases:

- She is the second wife of Kenneth Ashby

- She really loves Kenneth and feels loved by him

- She has no children on her own but takes care of Kenneth’s children of the first marriage

- She is on very good terms with Kenneth’s mother, old Mrs. Ashby

- She feels as the mistress of the household

- Despite the obvious happy marriage to Kenneth she still feels a slight jealousy of Elsie Ashby, Kenneth’s first wife

- She is startled by the mysterious grey letters and bothers her head about them, especially because Kenneth does not utter a word about the letters

- She is not only appalled by the letters but she feels that she needs to help her husband because he is always withdrawn into himself after reading the grey letters

- She does her utmost to ascertain the writer of the letters