THE CHARACTERS
Juliet Ashton Juliet is the main character of the The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, the one whose point on view on the other characters is the most given and whose point of view we hence adopt. She is 32 years old; she has curly chestnut hair and hazel eyes. She is slim but not very tall (To Isola, 20th April, p.103). She lives in Chelsea, London artistic and literary district (cf. pp. 14-15 and p. 103 for physical description). She wrote humorous columns for the Spectator (a British weekly, the oldest in Britain, founded in 1828) during the war under the "nom-de-plume" Izzy Bickerstaff. (A pseudonym modelled on Joseph Addison's, Isaac Bickerstaff. Addison (1672-1719) was an English man of letters who founded the daily newspaper The Spectator in 1711 with his friend Richard Steel). These articles have been published under the title Izzy Bickerstaff Goes to War by her old friend Sidney Stark, a publisher. Contrary to a biography of Anne Brontë she had written before, her book is quite a success and, at the beginning of the novel, Juliet is starting a tour to present it at "literary luncheons" and in bookshops all over England. Juliet has a twofold personality. At first sight, she appears as a sharp-witted humorous woman who enjoys eating oysters, drinking Champagne and dancing with handsome Markham Reynolds, trying to forget the grimness of the war years. Her writing style is charming, clever and entertaining. In the first part of the novel, she might be compared to the whimsical heroin of some American comedies, like the one played by Katherine Hepburn in Bringing up baby, for example. (cf. the scene in which she throws a teapot at Gilly Gilbert's head. Suzan to Sidney, 25th Dec. p. 16) However, she is not as easy-going and self-assured as she looks at first sight. At the beginning of the novel, she is reluctant to meet her readers and she feels very shy when about to meet the member of the GLPPS: “… I realised that my