The Convert
Glossary
"
- "Pilgrimage Into the Underworld"
- Vida's own phrase for the night she spent disguised in shabby clothes among London's homeless women, seeking shelter and witnessing firsthand the desperation, exploitation, and casual cruelty they faced — an experience she says she "dare not tell about" in full even to close friends, and which grounds her charitable and political convictions in direct, embodied knowledge rather than secondhand report.
- Related: The Shelter for Homeless Women, Vida's Hidden Past
- "Votes for Women" / The Suffrage Campaign
- The militant campaign for women's enfranchisement in Edwardian Britain that forms the novel's political backdrop — depicted through chalked pavement slogans, organized street meetings, heckling crowds, deputations to the Prime Minister, and the strategic decision (voiced by Ernestine Blunt) to oppose whichever party holds power rather than trust any politician's election-time promises.
- Related: Ernestine Blunt, The Hyde Park Meeting, Vida Levering
D
- Dick Farnborough
- An ambitious young man angling for a secretaryship under Geoffrey Stonor, whose comic hero-worship of Stonor and transparent social climbing at Ulland House provide the novel's lighter satire of Edwardian political ambition, running alongside — and periodically colliding with — the more serious suffrage plot.
- Related: Geoffrey Stonor, Lady John
- Dutfield
- Geoffrey Stonor's parliamentary constituency, where his campaign for re-election runs through the novel as a political subplot — including his skipping a crucial election-eve meeting (to be with Jean instead), a lapse that alarms his ambitious young admirer Dick Farnborough and signals how the personal and political plots are entangled throughout the book.
- Related: Geoffrey Stonor, Dick Farnborough
E
- Elizabeth Robins (Author)
- The American-born actress and activist who wrote The Convert in 1907, drawing on her own firsthand experience marching, speaking, and organizing with Britain's militant suffragettes. Robins brings documentary knowledge of real tactics — street meetings, heckling crowds, chalked pavement notices, processions — into a novel that is both social comedy about Edwardian society and a serious account of what conversion to a cause actually costs.
- Related: Vida Levering, Ernestine Blunt
- Ernestine Blunt
- A young, fearless, self-possessed street-corner suffrage speaker whose public Hyde Park oratory — parrying hecklers, mocking politicians' broken promises, and cataloguing the exploited factory and sweatshop labor of "fragile" women — first draws Vida Levering into direct contact with the movement she had only read about. Ernestine's disarming combination of youth, wit, and unshakeable self-possession makes her, in the novel's own account, more persuasive to a hostile crowd than any of the older, more "ladylike" suffragists.
- Related: Vida Levering, The Hyde Park Meeting, Miss Claxton
G
- Geoffrey Stonor
- A rising Conservative politician, universally assumed to win re-election, whose engagement to Jean Dunbarton forces the novel's central collision: he is revealed to be the man from Vida Levering's past who ruined and abandoned her years earlier. The climax turns on whether Vida will expose him and destroy Jean's happiness, or use her leverage instead to press him toward publicly supporting the Suffrage cause.
- Related: Vida Levering, Jean Dunbarton, Vida's Hidden Past
J
- Jean Dunbarton
- Lady John's young, wealthy, radiantly happy niece, newly and secretly engaged to Geoffrey Stonor when she arrives at Ulland House — entirely unaware that her fiancé is the man who wronged Vida Levering, the family friend she admires. Her innocent joy sharpens the moral weight of Vida's choice: exposing Stonor would shatter Jean along with him.
- Related: Geoffrey Stonor, Lady John, Vida Levering
L
- Lady John (Ellen)
- Jean Dunbarton's aunt and Vida Levering's close friend and hostess at Ulland House, whose charitable project — a Shelter for Homeless Women funded partly through Vida's fundraising — gives Vida's growing social conscience a respectable outlet even before her direct involvement with the militant suffragettes becomes visible.
- Related: Jean Dunbarton, Vida Levering, The Shelter for Homeless Women
- Lord Borrodaile
- A dry, observant aristocrat who accompanies Vida to a Hyde Park suffrage meeting more out of amused detachment than sympathy, repeatedly needling her with the standard objection that so few women attend such meetings — giving Vida (and Robins) occasion to rebut the era's stock arguments against the movement's popular support.
- Related: Vida Levering, The Hyde Park Meeting
- Lord John
- Lady John's genial, mildly condescending husband, who voices the novel's satirized conventional wisdom about women — dismissing Vida Levering's philanthropy as "a form of restlessness" cured only by marriage — representing the polite, unthinking dismissal the novel's suffrage argument has to work against even among people who consider themselves perfectly friendly to women.
- Related: Lady John, The "New Antagonism"
M
- Miss Claxton
- A fellow suffrage speaker at the Hyde Park meeting who handles the crowd's hostile questions with brisk, unshakeable confidence, dismantling objections about "votes causing marital quarrels" and "unfair labor competition" with pointed logic — part of the novel's demonstration that the movement's public speakers were substantive debaters, not mere spectacle.
- Related: Ernestine Blunt, The Hyde Park Meeting
- Mrs. Heriot (Lydia)
- Lady John's sister and Jean's other aunt, a self-satisfied veteran of twenty years' conventional charity work who repeatedly clashes with Vida over the Shelter's priorities — dismissing Vida's firsthand accounts of homeless women's suffering as sensationalized and defending organizations that, as Vida points out, always arrive "after the train's gone."
- Related: Lady John, Vida Levering, The Shelter for Homeless Women
S
- St. John Greatorex
- An elderly, flirtatious Liberal guest at Ulland House who teases Vida for her interest in "drains" (public sanitation for the homeless) instead of more decorous topics, embodying the novel's portrait of a certain kind of charming, complacent male indifference that treats women's serious social concerns as an amusing eccentricity.
- Related: Vida Levering, The Shelter for Homeless Women
T
- The "New Antagonism"
- The novel's term for the friction the suffrage campaign provoked between men and women even within Vida's own social class — the polite, dismissive resistance she has to argue against among people, like Geoffrey Stonor, who insist "I am not an opponent" while doing nothing to advance the cause and treating any pressure to act as illegitimate "coercion."
- Related: Geoffrey Stonor, Lord John
- The Chalk-Writing Scene
- A small but symbolically loaded moment Ernestine Blunt reports approvingly to Vida: a new, "respectable" recruit to the movement, seeing suffragettes chalking meeting notices on the pavement at Finsbury Circus, asked for the chalk herself and wrote "Votes for Women!" across the stones — treated in the novel as a meaningful sign of a proper society woman crossing over into direct, public activism.
- Related: Ernestine Blunt, Votes for Women / The Suffrage Campaign
- The Hyde Park Meeting
- The set-piece street demonstration where Vida Levering first encounters Ernestine Blunt and the wider suffrage movement in action — a crowd of jeering, laughing, gradually won-over onlookers, hecklers, a sympathetic policeman, and speakers including Ernestine and the sharp-tongued Miss Claxton, staged with the documentary specificity of tactics Robins witnessed herself.
- Related: Ernestine Blunt, Miss Claxton, Vida Levering
- The Labour Party's Example
- A rhetorical touchstone Ernestine Blunt returns to repeatedly in her street oratory: pointing to how a small, independent, uncompromising Labour Party of only thirty MPs came to wield outsized influence in Parliament, as proof that the suffragettes' strategy of independence from both major parties — refusing to be taken for granted by anyone — could work for women's enfranchisement too.
- Related: Ernestine Blunt, The Hyde Park Meeting
- The Sapphire Necklace Scene
- The novel's opening image: Vida Levering, arriving late for a dinner party, stops first in the nursery to let the Tunbridge children play with her sapphire-and-diamond necklace before she must "fled downstairs" to join the adult world waiting for her — an early glimpse of the warmth and self-possession beneath Vida's polished, "supercilious" society surface that the rest of the novel will complicate and deepen.
- Related: Vida Levering
- The Shelter for Homeless Women
- Lady John's charitable project in Soho, which Vida helps fund and expand — including securing an £8,000 donation from a wealthy but socially awkward benefactor, Mr. Barlow — and which becomes a battleground between Vida's firsthand, unflinching knowledge of homeless women's actual conditions and Mrs. Heriot's more conventional, distanced approach to charity.
- Related: Lady John, Mrs. Heriot, Vida's Hidden Past
- The Telegram (Stonor's Political Bargain)
- The instrument of the novel's climactic negotiation: a draft telegram, already written but unsent, in which Geoffrey Stonor would publicly commit his political future to championing the Suffrage cause — leverage Vida holds over him once his past with her is exposed, and which she ultimately chooses not to force him to send by threat, instead appealing to whatever remains of his conscience.
- Related: Geoffrey Stonor, Vida Levering
U
- Ulland House
- Lord and Lady John's country house, the setting for the novel's central social scenes — the weekend party where Jean Dunbarton's engagement is revealed, where Vida works on the Shelter plans with Lady John and Mrs. Heriot, and where the novel's climactic confrontation between Vida and Stonor finally takes place.
- Related: Lady John, Lord John, Jean Dunbarton
V
- Vida Levering
- The novel's protagonist — a beautiful, self-possessed society woman first seen charming her friends' children before a dinner party, whose growing exposure to the militant suffrage movement pulls her from drawing-room spectator to committed convert to the Cause. Her transformation is inseparable from a hidden past: as a young woman she was cast out and ruined by an affair, losing a child, a wound the novel keeps concealed until its climax reveals Geoffrey Stonor as the man responsible.
- Related: Geoffrey Stonor, Ernestine Blunt, Vida's Hidden Past
- Vida's Hidden Past ("The Old Wrong")
- The secret at the novel's emotional center, disclosed only near its end: years before the novel opens, the young Vida Levering was cast out by her own family, reduced to poverty and near-starvation searching for work in London, and ultimately ruined by an affair with Geoffrey Stonor that cost her a child. Her "pilgrimage into the Underworld" investigating homeless women's lives is inseparable from this buried personal history, which finally surfaces to complicate her response to Stonor's engagement to Jean.
- Related: Vida Levering, Geoffrey Stonor, Pilgrimage Into the Underworld