Lissy

Lissy is Emma Corrigan’s oldest friend and flatmate, and one of the people closest to her. She offers Emma practical companionship, candid advice, and a promise of mutual honesty; when Emma’s private life is exposed, however, their friendship faces a crisis that makes the difference between affection and complete knowledge newly visible. Lissy’s eventual appearance as a dancer adds a final surprise: even after more than twenty years, Emma has not seen every part of her friend.

Identity and Background

Emma describes Lissy as her oldest friend, someone she has known for over twenty years and, later, for twenty-one. She is also Emma’s flatmate. The narrator presents her as exceptionally intelligent and exceptionally kind, describing her mind in extravagant terms and calling her the sweetest person she knows. The details establish not only long acquaintance but also Emma’s high regard for her: Lissy is a trusted point of reference in the everyday life they share.

Lissy has tufty dark hair. The impression of her intelligence and diligence is reinforced in a domestic scene in Islington, where Emma finds her on the sofa surrounded by papers and concentrating on work. When Emma guesses that she is working on a fraud case, Lissy corrects her: she is occupied with an article about a magazine’s claims that beauty can be measured scientifically. Emma notices that Lissy works hard, perhaps too hard. The scene gives her a life of her own beyond the role of confidante, while its subject also places questions of appearance and measurement in the background of Emma’s social world.

Friendship and Everyday Support

Lissy is often the person Emma turns to when she needs to talk. After Emma reports that a business trip has gone badly, Lissy calls to ask how it went and whether she secured the deal. The exchange is brief, but it shows a friendship attentive to the ordinary stakes of Emma’s life: career setbacks matter enough to be asked about as soon as she gets home.

Their closeness also has room for uncertainty and teasing. At one point, Emma turns to Lissy for an honest judgment about whether she is behaving irrationally. Lissy’s hesitant reassurance does not convince Emma, who immediately suspects her friend thinks otherwise. The scene presents intimacy without making it frictionless: Emma wants candour, yet also resists what she imagines that candour might be. Lissy’s responses are part of a friendship in which familiarity permits both reassurance and playful suspicion.

Before Emma leaves for an important meeting, Lissy takes her hands, tells her not to heed Jemima’s remarks, and urges her to enjoy herself. She hugs Emma and asks her to call if she gets the chance. This small send-off is a clear instance of Lissy’s support: she responds to Emma’s nerves with physical comfort and encouragement, rather than turning the moment into an argument about what Emma should do.

Honesty, Privacy, and Strain

The friends explicitly try to make their closeness more reciprocal. When Lissy earnestly says she wishes Emma had confided in her more, she proposes that they tell each other everything from then on and keep no secrets. Emma accepts, feels a sudden rush of warmth, and hugs her. She reflects that they have known each other for over twenty years and should be able to share what is happening in their lives. Yet the scene contains an important qualification: Emma has just recognized that her own claim not to have told anyone was not quite true. She has withheld something from Lissy, and the promise of openness is made before that concealment is resolved.

The strain becomes acute after Jack Harper reveals Emma’s secrets on television. As Emma approaches home, she worries specifically about facing Lissy, believing the exposure to be more humiliating than earlier embarrassing incidents between them. When they meet, Lissy confirms that she saw the broadcast. After an uncomfortable pause, she offers to move out if Emma wants her to. Emma interprets this as the end of their friendship after twenty-one years and, trying not to cry, says that she will move out herself. The exchange turns a broad promise of honesty into a painful test: neither woman immediately knows how to bridge the gap between what has been disclosed in public and what they can say to each other in private.

That moment is not the last evidence of their connection. Lissy continues to share parts of her life with Emma, including an activity Emma did not know she pursued. Their later scenes complicate the idea that one disclosure, or one painful silence, can fully define a friendship. The evidence shows strain and renewed proximity, but does not make their private reconciliation into a neatly explained conclusion.

A Hidden Side and a Public Entrance

Lissy’s dancing first appears as a surprise in an ordinary conversation. Emma discovers her wearing a flesh-coloured leotard and assumes she has walked in on something else; Lissy explains, embarrassed, that she and another person were dancing. She immediately questions Emma in turn about where Emma had been the previous night. Emma admits she had been with Jack, and Lissy’s response makes clear that she had suspected as much. The moment is humorous, but it also balances their positions: Emma has misread Lissy’s activity, while Lissy has been trying to read Emma’s concealed romantic life.

The performance brings that hidden activity into full view. Emma arrives at an auditorium and waits as the drumming grows louder; when the lights come up, a dancer in a black, glittering costume appears onstage. Emma recognizes Lissy and is held in astonishment, unable to look away. She remembers that the two of them did some ballet and tap together, but had never known Lissy could dance like this. The contrast between Lissy’s self-deprecating claim that she is no good and the skill Emma sees onstage makes the revelation especially striking. The performance does not simply add a new accomplishment to Lissy’s character: it shows the limits of Emma’s knowledge, even within a friendship she has long considered intimate.

Narrative Role

Lissy serves as Emma’s closest witness in domestic life, a source of comfort and an occasional check on Emma’s assumptions. Her scenes draw together the book’s recurring tension between keeping secrets and being known. Emma’s determination that best friends should tell each other everything sits uneasily beside her own omissions; Lissy’s offer to leave after the television exposure makes the cost of that mismatch concrete. At the same time, Lissy is not only a measure of Emma’s honesty. Her work, opinions, and previously unsuspected dancing give her independent dimensions that Emma has not fully grasped. The final stage appearance therefore carries both delight and a quiet correction: closeness can survive incomplete knowledge, but it does not abolish it.