As the moral center of a moral fable, a narrative designed to teach rather than entertain, Belinda Portman can seem to a contemporary audience at best admirable, at worst cold and even unbelievable. Because she is conceived as a teaching tool, a model for how a young woman could be, even ought to be, Belinda Portman lacks traits contemporary readers expect in a fictional character: psychological depth, motivational complexity, and emotional growth.

Belinda, at 17, begins and ends the novel the same: She is a resourceful, independent, spirited, sagacious young woman with a generous and forgiving heart that is open to the experience of others. As her friendship with Lady Delacour and her brief engagement to Vincent reveals, she willingly listens to the joys and sorrows of others and hesitates to judge their flaws. She is quick to forgive slights in an upper-class society where grudges are routinely sustained for years. Her efforts to reform the morally bankrupt life of Lady Delacour, and to restore the woman to both her husband and her surviving child, reveals Belinda’s moral nature and her commitment to fixing Lady Delacour’s lifestyle. That she succeeds is a measure of her determination and her dedication. More importantly, from the standpoint of the novel as a period piece, Belinda’s determination is a radical affirmation of a woman’s strength and moral power.

The challenge for Belinda’s development as a character, then, is how she will engage the society into which she is dispatched. That society is uncertain over what to do with an independent woman with such a generous and open spirit. Within the claustrophobic confines of Lady Delacour’s social circle, Belinda, as an accomplished, articulate, and comely young woman, is not even expected to think for herself. Rather, she is expected to be satisfied being arranged into a conventional marriage that will maintain her social position and provide her husband with children.

Thus, the narrative is not a traditional coming-of-age story. Belinda’s character really does not evolve. As a courtship novel, however, it tracks Belinda’s sterling character as it is tested principally in her evolving relationship with Clarence Hervey. With great sense and sensibility, Belinda initially resists giving in to the sway of her heart. She engages Hervey in conversation. They test mutual areas of interest in the arts. Together they work to save Lady Delacour. When rumors reach Belinda about the unsavory nature of Hervey’s relationship with the mysterious Virginia, Belinda weighs the evidence and, in the end, judges for herself the character of the man. As a character, Belinda is hardly the template of an ideal woman (the subplot of Hervey and Virginia exposes the irony of that ideal as a lame element of popular novels). Rather, Belinda is the template of a strong, capable, moral woman able to weigh options and make choices that are emotionally satisfying and morally upright.

Because Lady Delacour begins the novel with a set of assumptions about her life, most of them erroneous, and then undergoes a series of difficult emotional trials that gift her with an entirely different set of assumptions, she, rather than Belinda, functions better as the novel’s primary character. Lady Delacour is both a product of and a victim of the society into which Belinda moves.

When Belinda first meets Lady Delacour, the girl is taken by the woman’s grace, wit, charm, and accomplished. Quickly, however, Lady Delacour reveals a sadness and loneliness that she masks through a life of choreographed manners and carefully scripted appearances. Lady Delacour reveals the traumas of her emotional life to Belinda: She fell in love with a man she could not have, married a man whose only virtue was his weak character, subsequently buried two children, and now lives estranged from her only surviving child. Her husband shares little with her, burning their ever-dwindling family fortune through a life of careless dissipation. The friends within her social circle are constant sources of agitation, anxiety, and outright animosity. She jumps to the darkest conclusions about her husband, her friends, and even Belinda. Her splendid life of social convention and upper-class propriety have left her paranoid, suspicious, jealous, gloomy, calculating, angry, lonely, and uninterested in any genuine expression of her heart. Only in her mid-30s, she is by her own estimation already beyond redemption.

Lady Delacour’s breast wound is critical to understanding her character development. The result of a foolish duel with one of the frenemies in her social circle, the errant pistol shot is delivered to her breast, a traditional symbol of both maternal and romantic love (her name is French for “of the heart). The wound was never treated correctly and festered, and now Lady Delacour believes she is dying, in effect, from a wounded, neglected heart. Symbolically, Belinda understands that Lady Delacour’s wounded heart needs only to be treated, that her heart needs to be addressed and not ignored. The physician she enlists to help Lady Delacour reassures the woman her wound is not fatal. As Belinda engineers Lady Delacour’s reunion with her estranged daughter and helps her affect a new level of trust and intimacy with her husband, who abandons his dissolute lifestyle, Lady Delacour finds her way to a new life of openness, honesty, and emotional vigor. She affirms the joy of family and the love of others. Her wounded heart has been healed. It is the redeemed Lady Delacour who closes the novel, sharing directly with the reader that she is in effect the living moral of Belinda’s story.