When she is under stress, Charlotte still coughs and occasionally breaks a blood vessel in her lungs, coughing up blood. A pregnancy resulted, and when Clement left for Italy Charlotte retreated to the Georgia countryside for a year purportedly to recover from the same lung disease that had affected her father. Moreover, she was lonely and sad, and fell in love with another lonely, sad, financially strapped young man named Clement Spender who had just been rejected by Charlotte's cousin Delia. So, despite her genteel connections Charlotte has little money of her own. Her back-story is intriguing: her father died at age thirty of what the narrator calls 'lung-fever', leaving slender provision for his large family.

The eponymous heroine of the novel, Charlotte is in her late twenties at the beginning of the novel. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.