The Friendly Persuasion - Characters

Characters

Birdwell household

• Jess - Husband and father, Jess is a nurseryman originally from Germantown, Pennsylvania. He is a "birthright Quaker" whose Irish family have been of the faith for 200 years. While "Quaker through and through," the large, sturdy red-haired Jess has a love of music and fast horses. Completely devoted to his wife, he nevertheless asserts his authority as head of the household when she demands rather than asks for adherence to her views.
• Eliza - The mother of seven (one of whom died young), Eliza is the strong-willed Quaker minister of the Grove Meeting House who has on the whole been sheltered from the harsher realities of life. "Work-brickel and good-looking as female preachers are apt to be," she is small, dark haired with soft black eyes and runs her household with a firm but gentle touch.
• Joshua (Josh) - The eldest Birdwell child, Josh is fastidious, conscientious and earnest. He has his mother's small slender stature, fine fark hair parted down the middle, and her black eyes "flecked with green." A young adolescent at the novel's outset, he worries that the contentment and peace that he observes in his parents is not the normal fruit of becoming an adult.
• Laban (Labe) - Three years younger than Josh, Labe is a husky, unkempt, but good-natured boy with blond curly hair and a love for the outdoors. A natural athlete, he is the antithesis of Josh, "just plain dirty and messy and everybody loved him." Labe conscientiously avoids all forms of violence because he sees in himself a love of it.
• Martha Truth (Mattie) - The older and for many years only Birdwell daughter, Mattie shares her father's love of music and while an adolescent, a girl's romanticism, rebelliousness against her parents, and intense, mercurial emotions. Josh sees his sister as an inveterate drama queen. West created Mattie with her own mother in mind, imagining what she was like as a youth.
• Little Jess - Freckled, red-haired,and all boy, Little Jess imagines himself an explorer of exotic locales as he plays.
• Jane - The youngest Birdwell daughter, she is fifteen in the vignette in which she plays a role, when Jess is 62. Both Jane and her brother Stephen appear only in the second half of the narrative, and apparently are later life children born well after after Josh, Labe, and Mattie. Jane is marked by gray eyes and an adolescent's sensitivity about her looks.
• Stephen (Steve) - Stephen Birdwell has only one vignette in which he is a major character. He is his mother's youngest child and clear favorite, even-tempered and contented with his life.
• Elspeth Bent - Jess and Eliza's young grand-daughter, Elspeth is Mattie's child from her marriage to Gard Bent. Stephen is very fond of Elspeth, calling her "Aunt Jetty."
• Enoch - The Birdwell's hired man during all or most of their married life in Indiana, Enoch is green-eyed and blond-haired. He is an expert on horse flesh and his own interpretation of the Bible, but was hired as much for his conversational abilities as his work.
• Emanuela - The family's hired woman, very dark-skinned and mannish, Emanuela has been in service with the Birdwells for 20 years when she makes her first appearance in the novel. Like many non-Birdwell characters, Emanuela is odd, speaking only in rhyme and therefore only speaking when she can think one.

Other characters

• Gardiner Bent (Gard) - Gard is the oldest son of the peculiar Bents, Jud and Lavony, a handsome boy with black hair and light brown eyes on the edge of manhood when he first appears as Mattie's future beau. Gard is a learned reader like his father, has finished schooling, and is trying for a teacher's position at the nearby Rush Branch school. Gard and Mattie are immediately comfortable in each other's presence.
• Reverend Marcus Augustus Godley - The minister of the Bethel Church is a big, corpulent and florid man from Kentucky, bombastic and haughty by nature, and given to full-voiced preaching in his discourse.