Elizabeth

Elizabeth, known for her beauty and charm, is Emma Harte’s daughter and Robin Harte’s twin. Her story moves between vivid personal ambition and instability: she leaves the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to nurse during the war, becomes a mother in a series of changing family circumstances, and ultimately joins the siblings who scheme against Emma’s business empire. Though Emma sees considerable intelligence in her, Elizabeth seldom applies it consistently, and the confidence her appearance commands does not bring her lasting happiness.

Identity and Early Character

Elizabeth grows up among Emma’s children and is especially close to her twin, Robin. To Emma, she carries striking family resemblances: at times her face recalls Emma’s mother, while at other moments it brings back Olivia Wainright, whose resemblance to Emma’s mother had once astonished her. Elizabeth is described as the family’s great beauty, with a graceful figure, dark hair, and a face that seems almost translucent. Charm is one of her natural gifts, but it exists alongside traits that trouble Emma: a violent temper, flightiness, and a tendency to resist control. Emma and Paul McGill hope that boarding school will steady her without suppressing her spirit.

As an adult, Elizabeth’s intelligence remains an unevenly used quality. Emma judges her twin to be, in some respects, shrewder than Robin, but says she rarely makes use of that capacity. Her choices are instead repeatedly governed by the pursuit of pleasure. At forty-seven, she remains strikingly beautiful, yet Emma sees her as brittle and immature, and regards her as profoundly unhappy. The contrast between her polished appearance and her unsettled private life becomes increasingly pronounced as the family gathers around Emma.

Ambition and Wartime Service

In the summer of 1939, Elizabeth is enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, pursuing her dream of becoming a famous actress. During the Christmas holidays she marries Tony Barkstone, a Cambridge friend of Robin’s and a pilot in the Royal Air Force. Elizabeth is eighteen, and Emma considers her too flighty for marriage, but gives her blessing because she believes people must seize happiness amid the uncertainty of war. The wartime wedding briefly reunites much of the family, though Edwina remains estranged from Emma and Kit cannot obtain leave.

Elizabeth soon changes direction. In January 1940 she leaves the Academy and becomes a Red Cross nurse, explaining to Emma that she wants to take part in the war effort. Emma is surprised by the decision but comes to admire the seriousness and commitment Elizabeth brings to nursing. She begins to hope that marriage will give her daughter the steadiness she had previously lacked. Elizabeth later gives up the small flat she had taken during her Academy years and returns to live at home. During air raids, she sometimes joins Emma at the bedroom window, and the two stand together watching aircraft pass overhead. When Elizabeth becomes distressed about the danger to Tony, Robin, Bryan O’Neill, and the other pilots, Emma comforts her and the pair spend the night together. These scenes reveal a more vulnerable intimacy between mother and daughter than Elizabeth’s social charm alone suggests.

Marriages and Children

Elizabeth and Tony have two children, Alexander and Emily. In January 1944, Elizabeth gives birth to Alexander; wanting to be near Tony, she later moves with the baby to a small cottage near his airfield. Her marriage to Tony eventually ends in divorce. Elizabeth then marries Michael Villiers and Derek Linde, with whom she has twins, Amanda and Francesca. Emma recounts these successive relationships with a mixture of concern and dry disapproval, describing her daughter’s later turn toward partners from increasingly exotic backgrounds, including a Polish prince and an Italian count.

The accumulation of marriages and changing attachments shapes Emma’s later assessment of Elizabeth. By forty-seven, Emma sees her as still captivating but emotionally brittle, immature, and unhappy. Elizabeth’s beauty remains a defining feature in the family’s eyes, but it is not evidence of security or contentment. Her story thus contrasts the public impression made by her appearance with the unsettled course of her relationships and her continued difficulty in finding lasting satisfaction.

Conflict with Emma and the Family

At the later family gathering around Emma’s will, Elizabeth is among the four children implicated in a conspiracy against their mother’s control of the family empire. The conspirators carefully avoid one another during the evening, and Elizabeth, although still close to Robin, keeps her distance from him. Instead, she attends closely to Blackie O’Neill, flattering him. Emma watches these movements and understands them against the history of her children’s competing weaknesses and ambitions. Her assessment of Elizabeth is not simply that she lacks intelligence: it is that she seldom puts her intelligence to work, while the pursuit of pleasure distracts her from other claims.

The family conflict becomes explicit when Robin protests that Emma has excluded the four plotters from her will and threatens to contest it. Emma identifies their attempted takeover as the reason for her decision and says she has anticipated a legal challenge. She nevertheless offers the conspirators a settlement, preserving the trust funds already established for them while proposing a million pounds in exchange for contracts. Elizabeth is the first to recover enough composure to ask for a pen; she avoids Robin’s angry gaze, signs the documents, and accepts her cheque. Kit signs last, unable to meet Emma’s eyes. Elizabeth’s signature makes her participation in the scheme consequential, but also marks her withdrawal from it on Emma’s terms.

Narrative Role and Significance

Elizabeth’s arc places the family’s private disappointments beside its public displays of wealth and loyalty. As a young woman, she is defined by beauty, temper, and an acting ambition; wartime nursing briefly demonstrates discipline and service. Later, the succession crisis reveals how readily family affection can coexist with self-interest: she remains connected to Robin and to the wider family, yet takes part in a plot against Emma before accepting the settlement that ends the confrontation. Emma’s view of her holds these contradictions together. Elizabeth is neither merely frivolous nor simply calculating; she is perceptive but inconsistent, admired for her appearance yet judged unhappy, and capable of serious commitment without sustaining it across every part of her life.