Dempster, Mrs. Janet

The lawyer's unhappy wife; a woman of noble beauty, marked by traces of suffering. "Her grandly-cut features, pale with the natural paleness of a brunette, have premature lines about them telling that the years have been lengthened by sorrow, and the delicately-curved nostril, which seems made to quiver, with the proud consciousness of power and beauty, must have quivered to the heart-piercing griefs which have given that worn look to the corners of the mouth." "No other woman in Milby has those searching black eyes, that tall graceful unconstrained figure, set off by her simple mualin dress and black lace shawl, that massy black hair now so neatly braided in glossy contrast with the white satin ribbons of her modest cap and bonnet. No other woman has that sweet speaking smile." She had married Mr. Dempster for love buy, after much illtreatment, had yielded to the temptation to dull her suffering by drinking. As a climax to her unhappiness, her husband turns her out of the house in her nightgown at midnight. To please her husband she had joined in his persecution of Mr. Tryan, but in desperation she turns to that clergyman and his influence rescues her from her self-despair and gives her faith and strength to reform and lead a noble life. The original of Janet Dempster was a Mrs. Buchanan (Nancy Wallington) whose story, similar to Janet's as far as the treatment by her husband was concerned, was well known in Nuneaton when George Eliot lived there. Her grave and those of her husband and mother can still be seen at Nuneaton. (See references under Dempster, Robert.)

<em>Janet's Repentance</em>

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