63 pages • 2 hours read
Kate MortonThe Lake House
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Eleanor Edevane
Eleanor is the novel’s tragic character. She was much like her daughter Alice as a child. She was a dreamer who loved to be outdoors. She meets her husband Anthony in London when he saves her from an oncoming bus. They fall quickly and deeply in love. She is a loving and care-free mother before Anthony returns home from World War I. From then on she assumes the “Mother” role as a serious, punctilious killjoy. She must balance her love for her children and the promise she made to Anthony to keep his problem of shell shock a secret from their children and everyone else.
At times this promise to Anthony forces her to remove the girls from his presence. During one of these excursions she meets Benjamin Munro, with whom she falls in love. The theme of love is explored through Eleanor, specifically polyamory, because even though she loves and has a child with Ben, she never stops loving or being loyal to Anthony. In fact, her love for her children and her love for Anthony and Ben come into direct confrontation when baby Theo’s cries trigger Anthony’s shell shock syndrome. Eleanor feels driven to protect Theo from Anthony, and the only way she believes she can do that is to have Ben take Theo and place him in the care of others. Eleanor loses both Ben and her son this way, and she alone bears the knowledge and responsibility of Theo’s disappearance until Sadie uncovers the secret many years later.
Eleanor is the main protagonist and most dynamic character. She represents the princess in the high-mimetic fairy-tale tragedy that this novel parallels (e.g., she is from a wealthy, aristocratic family; her mother is evil [she murders Daffyd Llewellyn] and her birth is only spoken of in Daffyd’s story of the Tiger and the Pearl [cf. Chapter 7, Pages 86-87]). With regard to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, loose parallels can be drawn between Eleanor and Tatiana (in that Oberon wants Tatiana to give up her Indian changeling) as well as Hermia, who loves Lysander but is betrothed to Demetrius
Alice Cecelia Edevane
Alice is a 16-year-old girl in the 1930s and an octogenarian in 2003. As a young girl she is full of energy and loves adventure. She adores books and writing. She writes her very first novel when she is 16, but because of her unrequited feelings for Ben Munro (arguably her muse), she buries it in the woods on her family’s property, Loeanneth. When she’s older, she becomes A. C. Edevane, the popular and successful detective novelist who has lost her dreams and sense of adventure. The book opens with her burying the aforementioned book, and many of the events concerning Theo’s disappearance revolve around her and her memories. Since her brother’s disappearance, Alice has felt that she always knew what happened to Theo, though she never wanted to admit it to anyone. However, with Sadie investigating her family’s case, Alice is forced to face her past and realizes just how little she knew back then.
Alice shares many characteristics and similarities with real-life mystery novelist Agatha Christie. Her role in the Eleanor-Ben-Alice love triangle loosely parallels Helena’s situation in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She is also the major metafictional element in the novel (i.e., the detective-novel author present in a detective story). She is the link between the past and the present plotlines. She parallels her mother Eleanor and Sadie Sparrow in many ways, both as a child and as an adult. In fact, the Sadie in many ways personifies Alice’s most famous detective character, Diggory Brent.
Sadie Sparrow
Sadie is a relatively young detective with the London Metropolitan Police (the Met). She is so hard-working that her dedication to work sometimes borders on obsessive. She is plagued by a certain memory from her teenage years. When she was younger, she became pregnant with a daughter, which brought her into irreparable difficulties with her parents. Sadie gave birth to a daughter and was forced to give her up for adoption. She was also sent away to live with her grandparents, Ruth and Bertie.
Because of her past, she struggles with the Bailey case, which involves the abandonment of a young girl and the disappearance of the girl’s mother. When the Met closes that case after concluding Maggie simply abandoned her child, Sadie (with the support of Maggie’s mother Nancy, who believes something uncouth happened to Maggie) leaks to the press that the Met handled the case poorly. This act causes problems with her partner Donald and forces her to visit Bertie in Cornwall. It is on this leave of absence that Sadie discovers the Edevane case. Sadie becomes the driving force behind solving the cold case, which has remained unsolved for more 70 years.
Since the reader discovers the truth of the case before Sadie does, her main purpose is to play the detective role in the detective-story aspect of the novel. At times she is used as a reflective device for the Alice and Eleanor characters. She shares many of their qualities and can empathize with Eleanor, who also had to surrender a child.
Anthony Edevane
Anthony comes from a very wealthy family. He inherits his family’s vast wealth after his parents and brothers are all killed when the Titanic sinks. Because of his newfound wealth, he is able to rescue Loeanneth for Eleanor. He is highly intelligent and is training to become a surgeon before war breaks out in the summer of 1914. During the war he is unable to help his best friend Howard desert, and he is unable to prevent Howard’s subsequent execution, which causes Anthony a great deal of trauma.
After returning home, Anthony exhibits classic signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, referred to at the time and in the novel as shell shock. Because of these problems, he is unable to finish school and become a surgeon. While he is a very loving and doting father, the shell shock makes him unstable and his behavior unpredictable. This instability causes Eleanor to have Ben take Theo away to protect him from Anthony.
Benjamin Munro
Ben is an itinerant worker. He is the son of archeologists, from whom he inherited his adventurous spirit. He is in an attractive, 26-year-old who meets and falls in love with Eleanor, becoming her secret lover. He is Theo’s biological father, and it is through him that Eleanor arranges Theo’s disappearance. He is killed in France in World War II.
Theo Edevane (aka Bertie)
Theo, Ben and Eleanor’s love child, represents the main “crime” in the novel. It is later revealed that he is Sadie’s grandfather; he was given the name Bertie after Ben placed him in the care of his friend Flo. Bertie married a woman named Ruth, who is deceased at the time of narration. He provided a home for Sadie after her parents disowned her, and he provides Sadie with the love and support she needs to grow as a character in the novel.
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