This guide maps the lives that pass through a single house in the western Massachusetts woods, where centuries of arrivals and departures stitch a continuous story into one place. As each era leaves its mark—love affairs, orchards, canvases, illnesses, and hauntings—the land becomes both witness and archive. For a full sweep of the plot across time, see the Full Book Summary (/books/north-woods/full-book-summary).
Main Characters
The First Woman
Bold, stubborn, and ultimately at one with the wilderness, the First Woman is the land’s first European resident and the figure who sets the novel’s rhythms of sanctuary and survival in motion. Fleeing a Puritan colony with her lover, she remains after his death, learning from local Native peoples and carving out a life that is practical, unsentimental, and morally complex—including the ruthless act of killing three English scouts to avert greater violence. In old age she shelters a terrified captive who will later bury her and record their story, rooting both women into the soil and memory of the place. Her presence establishes the enduring pattern of Sanctuary and Escape (/books/north-woods/sanctuary-and-escape) and anchors the land’s origin tale (Chapter 1-2 Summary (/books/north-woods/chapter-1-2-summary)).
The Anonymous Captive
A young Puritan woman seized in a raid, the captive becomes the house’s earliest archivist, leaving behind the “Nightmaids” letter that preserves a fragile truth in a violent world. Rigidly pious and traumatized, she nevertheless learns to endure under the First Woman’s rough protection, then defends herself and her infant by killing the final English scout and burying the dead before she flees. Her act of writing—hidden in the wall—ensures that her experience and her hostess’s life reenter history rather than vanish into rumor. Through her, the novel crystallizes The Persistence of History and Memory (/books/north-woods/the-persistence-of-history-and-memory) (Chapter 1-2 Summary (/books/north-woods/chapter-1-2-summary)).
Charles Osgood
A retired British Major turned visionary orchardist, Charles Osgood founds the first enduring homestead and cultivates a mythic apple—the “Osgood Wonder”—from a tree sprung near an old grave. His exuberant “pomomania” reshapes the land into an American Arcadia, even as his theatrical self-mythologizing masks a stubborn, exacting temperament. As father to twins Alice and Mary, he bequeaths both a legacy and a fault line: his subtle preference for one daughter sows a rivalry that will outlive him. His life embodies the tension between cultivation and wildness, and his fatal return to war leaves the sisters to inherit not only an orchard, but a destiny (Chapter 3-4 Summary (/books/north-woods/chapter-3-4-summary)).
Alice Osgood
A romantic, musical soul yearning for love and a wider life, Alice grows up composing ballads in the woods and dreaming beyond the orchard’s borders. Her gentleness and passivity make her susceptible to the gravitational pull of her twin, Mary, whose possessive devotion collides with Alice’s desire for marriage and children. When a late-life courtship rekindles possibility, the sisters’ long-simmering resentments erupt, ending in Alice’s murder and transforming her into one of the house’s most persistent, tender ghosts. Her arc distills Love, Loneliness, and Connection (/books/north-woods/love-loneliness-and-connection) into a tragedy that will echo through later generations (Chapter 5-6 Summary (/books/north-woods/chapter-5-6-summary)).
Mary Osgood
Pragmatic, tireless, and fiercely territorial, Mary is both the orchard’s engine and its sentinel, determined to keep intact the life she and her sister built. Haunted by a lifetime of perceived slights and convinced the world favors Alice, Mary channels love into control—sabotaging suitors, clearing beloved groves for profit, and finally refusing to yield when Alice chooses another path. Her crime binds the sisters forever: Mary entombs herself with Alice beneath the pantry floor, sealing devotion and guilt into the house’s foundation. She is the novel’s starkest study of love turned destructive, a will that refuses to release what it cannot bear to lose (Chapter 5-6 Summary (/books/north-woods/chapter-5-6-summary)).
William Henry Teale
A celebrated Hudson River School painter seeking honesty over spectacle, Teale retreats to the house to dissolve the self in nature and paint the forest as it sees itself. In letters to the poet Erasmus Nash (/books/north-woods/characters#erasmus-nash-en), he articulates a philosophy of art and a forbidden love that become his lifelines as the commercial art world and domestic expectations close in. After his wife discovers the affair, Teale is abandoned to solitude; he stops exhibiting, yet compulsively continues to paint the woods he adores, leaving behind an unseen, devotional record. His life traces the theme of Sanctuary and Escape (/books/north-woods/sanctuary-and-escape) through art, eros, and the solace of unpeopled places (Chapter 7-8 Summary (/books/north-woods/chapter-7-8-summary)).
Robert S.
A mid-20th-century resident living with schizophrenia, Robert inhabits a world where the woods speak through “Soul Heirs,” a malign “Harrow” hunts him, and ritual “Stitchings” keep a cosmic rupture at bay. Brilliant and tormented, he writes and later films to prove his vision to his sister, while his mother struggles between protection and desperation within a medical system poised to harm him. The forest is his sanctuary and collaborator, the only place where his perceptions feel coherent and necessary rather than pathological. His archive—recovered after his death—turns a private affliction into a final act of witness and love, reframing Mental Illness and Perception (/books/north-woods/mental-illness-and-perception) as a portal to the land’s deeper truths (Chapter 9-10 Summary (/books/north-woods/chapter-9-10-summary)).
Supporting Characters
Erasmus Nash (E.N.)
A renowned poet and Teale’s intimate confidant, Nash offers the intellectual and emotional companionship Teale cannot find in public life. Their passionate, letter-bound love sustains Teale’s art and spirit until exposure shatters Teale’s family and isolates him (Chapter 7-8 Summary (/books/north-woods/chapter-7-8-summary)).
Lillian S.
Robert and Helen’s mother bears the crushing weight of caregiving, navigating stigma, predatory systems, and her own exhaustion as she contemplates drastic measures to “save” her son. Her correspondence reveals aching loneliness, which a con man exploits; in the end, her devotion isolates her as completely as any rural winter (Chapter 11-12 Summary (/books/north-woods/chapter-11-12-summary)).
Helen S.
Robert’s younger sister grows up in the shadow of his illness and escapes into academic rigor and distance. Returning late in life, she becomes the keeper of his films and the fragile bridge between his visionary world and the one that failed him (Chapter 11-12 Summary (/books/north-woods/chapter-11-12-summary)).
Anastasia Rossi
A gifted, performative spiritualist hired by the Farnsworths to banish the house’s ghosts, Anastasia blends shrewd psychology with stagecraft—until a séance brushes genuine mystery. Her affair with Mr. Farnsworth and her startling channeling of an older resident entwine fraud and faith in unsettling ways (Chapter 9-10 Summary (/books/north-woods/chapter-9-10-summary)).
Morris Lakeman
A widowed metal detectorist with a historian’s doggedness, Morris traces the “Nightmaids” letter to the house and digs for its final, missing body. His comic, tender quest ends in a heart attack and a greeting from a gentle ghost, a coda that turns obsession into communion (Chapter 11-12 Summary (/books/north-woods/chapter-11-12-summary)).
Nora
A postdoctoral botanist of forest succession, Nora crashes near the property and is welcomed by a kindly apparition. Her scientific eye and openhearted curiosity make her a natural “Soul Heir,” a last witness poised between the forest’s long memory and the future’s uncertainty (Chapter 11-12 Summary (/books/north-woods/chapter-11-12-summary)).
Minor Characters
- Bold The First Man: The First Woman’s idealistic lover whose romantic vision of the “Realm” collapses with his early death, leaving her to become the land’s true heir.
- Bold The Farnsworths (Karl and Emily): Gilded-age owners who turn the house into a hunting lodge; his boorish bravado and her haunted sensitivities collide with voices and visitations they cannot control.
- Bold George Carter Jr.: A childhood friend returned as an old man and late suitor to Alice, whose courtship inadvertently triggers the sisters’ fatal reckoning.
- Bold Harlan Kane: A career criminal who cons Lillian by posing as her long-lost son and dies in the woods before reaching the house, undone by the very wild he sought to exploit.
- Bold The Ghosts: A chorus of past inhabitants—Osgoods, artists, wanderers—whose lingering presence embodies The Persistence of History and Memory (/books/north-woods/the-persistence-of-history-and-memory).
Character Relationships & Dynamics
The house binds strangers into a single lineage, turning private lives into chapters of one long story. The Osgoods form the central family constellation: Charles’s orchard imposes order on the wild, while his subtle favoritism fissures the twin bond; Alice yearns outward toward suitors and a broader life, whereas Mary fixes inward, guarding the orchard and their dyad until love curdles into possession and violence. Earlier, the First Man and First Woman rewrite the land as a refuge, and the First Woman’s fraught mentorship of the captive passes on survival skills, suspicion, and a duty to remember—an emotional inheritance as potent as any deed.
Another axis is the artist circle: Teale and Nash’s secret romance creates a sanctuary of letters that sustains them spiritually but, once exposed, exiles Teale to the forest’s austere grace. In the 20th century, the S. family becomes a study in care and fracture—Lillian’s devotion and fear, Helen’s escape and return, and Robert’s desperate attempts to communicate his cosmic obligations—each orbiting a house that offers asylum even as it intensifies their isolation. Around them spin visitors and interlopers—the Farnsworths with their spectacles, Anastasia with her staged miracles that slip into the real, Morris with his shovel and yearning, Nora with her botanist’s patience—who either exploit the land or let it remake them.
Across eras, alliances form between people and place more than person to person: lovers seek shelter and find it compromised; twins cling and rupture; caretakers protect and are consumed. The ghosts blur past and present, sometimes as antagonists, sometimes as companions, always as reminders that to live here is to join a conversation already underway.
Character Themes
- Sanctuary and Escape: From the First Woman’s flight and Charles Osgood’s pastoral experiment to Teale’s retreat and Robert’s “Stitchings,” characters come seeking safety, authenticity, or absolution; the house offers shelter but also demands transformation (/books/north-woods/sanctuary-and-escape).
- Love, Loneliness, and Connection: Romantic ecstasies (the First Woman; Teale), possessive devotion (Mary), and burdened familial love (Lillian) coexist with profound solitude, driving quests like Morris’s and shaping who listens for footsteps in the hall (/books/north-woods/love-loneliness-and-connection).
- The Persistence of History and Memory: The captive’s letter, the orchard’s grafts, Teale’s hidden canvases, Robert’s films, and the ghosts themselves create overlapping archives that prevent the past from eroding entirely (/books/north-woods/the-persistence-of-history-and-memory).
- Human Impact on the Environment: Lives move from adapting to shaping to exploiting to studying the woods—the First Woman’s subsistence, Osgood’s cultivation, the Farnsworths’ sport, Teale’s reverence, Robert’s mysticism, Nora’s science—together charting America’s evolving relationship to nature.
- Mental Illness and Perception: Through Robert, the novel reframes schizophrenia not as a simple deficit but as a radical mode of seeing that, within the book’s magical-realist frame, opens into genuine knowledge of the land’s layered spirit-world (/books/north-woods/mental-illness-and-perception).