Mrs. Amwell

Quick Facts

• Role: Wealthy mistress in the 18th-century timeline; catalyst for the historical plot
• First appearance: Chapter 7
• Key relationships: Mistress and mentor to Eliza Fanning; wife of Mr. Thompson Amwell; client connected to Nella Clavinger
• Defining motif: A worsening hand tremor that signals both fear and a loss of agency

Who She Is

Boldly drawn in small gestures rather than grand speeches, Mrs. Amwell is a woman trapped in a marriage warped by cruelty and threat. Her decision to seek poison from Nella’s hidden apothecary is less a villain’s turn than a last resort in a world that offers no legal refuge. Through her, the novel binds the themes of Revenge and Justice to Female Solidarity and Empowerment: she commits a morally fraught act to reclaim safety for herself and the girl in her care, and in doing so forges a covert alliance among women who share danger and secrets.

Personality & Traits

Mrs. Amwell’s gentleness coexists with a steely resolve. The text shows us kindness in her tutoring and tenderness, but also the meticulous secrecy and escalating anxiety of someone living under constant threat. Her body keeps score: the tremor that spoils her handwriting is the same tremor that forces her to delegate violence to another.

• Kind and maternal: She takes an “instant liking” to Eliza, teaches her to read and write, and later soothes her with calm, practical care during a moment of panic (Chapter 11). The mentorship is sincere, even as it becomes entangled with darker needs.
• Desperate yet resolute: Choosing murder is not impulsive; it is a carefully measured response to an escalating danger within her household. Once the plan begins, she does not turn back, even while fear visibly overtakes her (Chapter 9).
• Secretive: She conceals the abuse she suffers and her husband’s predation. Her earlier, private visits to Nella for Indian hemp (Chapter 15) reveal a longstanding pattern of seeking hidden remedies and help beyond the law.
• Anxious and visibly strained: Physical cues—flushed collarbone, red and splotchy skin, trembling hands—translate inner terror into outward signs, especially during the breakfast poisoning (Chapter 9).
• Classed exterior, subversive interior: Introduced in a “pink satin gown” and lace cap (Chapter 7), she appears the model of genteel domesticity, even as she plots to upend the patriarchal order that costume represents.

Character Journey

Eliza’s eyes first cast Mrs. Amwell as a benefactress: genteel, attentive, and unexpectedly maternal. Gradually, private tremors and hushed requests expose a different core—an intelligent woman calculating survival in a house that has become a site of danger. Her arc is not a moral transformation so much as a revelation: the mask of the fragile mistress falls away to reveal a strategist who weaponizes the limited tools available to her—secrecy, female networks, and poison. By recruiting Eliza, she complicates their power dynamic, folding care into coercion. After the murder, her role turns consoling and instructive, reframing bodily fear and shame into knowledge and calm, and reminding the reader that her violence emerged from protection as much as from rage.

Key Relationships

• Eliza Fanning: What begins as a mistress–servant bond quickly evolves into mentorship and quasi-motherhood. Mrs. Amwell’s tutoring grants Eliza literacy and confidence, but her enlistment of the girl as the poison’s courier reveals the dangerous elasticity of care—protection becomes indistinguishable from exploitation. Their shared secrecy binds them in complicity, deepening trust even as it burdens Eliza with adult guilt.
• Mr. Thompson Amwell: His presence generates the novel’s threat; his predatory interest in Eliza and cruelty toward his wife make him the embodiment of household tyranny and Betrayal. Mrs. Amwell’s choice to kill him is both a radical claim to self-defense and a condemnation of a society that leaves her no lawful recourse.
• Nella Clavinger: Even at a distance, their bond is intimate because it is transactional and clandestine. Mrs. Amwell’s prior use of Nella’s remedies (Indian hemp) and later request for poison fold her into the apothecary’s lineage of women who solve unspeakable problems outside men’s courts, linking her fate to Nella’s secret world.

Defining Moments

Mrs. Amwell’s story is marked by quiet scenes charged with peril—each moment tightening the knot between necessity and conscience.

• Hiring Eliza at the registry (Chapter 7)
  • What happens: She selects Eliza while her trembling hand betrays her inner instability.
  • Why it matters: Establishes her class status and maternal instinct, while foreshadowing the tremor that will force her to delegate the fatal task.
• Revealing the murder plan (Chapter 9)
  • What happens: She sends Eliza to the apothecary to procure poison for Mr. Amwell.
  • Why it matters: Crosses a moral threshold; transforms their relationship into a conspiracy and engages the hidden female network that will define the plot.
• The poisoning breakfast (Chapter 9)
  • What happens: As Eliza serves the fatal meal, Mrs. Amwell’s nerves flare—flushed skin, shaking, darkened eyes.
  • Why it matters: Her fear humanizes the act and shows the emotional cost of reclaiming agency through violence.
• Comforting Eliza after the death (Chapter 11)
  • What happens: Eliza, terrified by her first menses, is steadied by Mrs. Amwell’s calm explanation.
  • Why it matters: Reasserts her maternal role and reframes blood—from murder to menstruation—as natural and survivable, modeling female knowledge as antidote to fear.
• Earlier secret visits for Indian hemp (Chapter 15)
  • What happens: She had sought remedies for her tremor from Nella long before the murder.
  • Why it matters: Reveals a history of concealed suffering and a preexisting reliance on clandestine female aid.

Essential Quotes

“pink satin gown and a cap bordered with lace” (Chapter 7)
This elegant costume introduces Mrs. Amwell as genteel and respectable, the perfect wife within a carefully arranged domestic tableau. The image heightens the later shock: beneath society’s silks, she is plotting an act that rejects the very order those clothes perform.

“[Her hand] shook badly as she wrote, and it seemed a great effort to keep the nib of the pen steady” (Chapter 7)
The tremor literalizes how fear and stress have colonized her body. It also drives the plot mechanics—necessitating Eliza’s help—and symbolizes a loss of control she will reclaim, however darkly, through the poisoning.

“She seemed jittery, even though I carried the tray of poisonous eggs, and this annoyed me somewhat. She had been too scared to retrieve the eggs herself, and now she seemed unable to calm her nerves” (Chapter 9)
Filtered through Eliza’s irritation, Mrs. Amwell appears weak at the very moment she is most resolute. The contrast underscores the moral cost of outsourcing violence and the asymmetry of risk between mistress and maid.

“Her eyes were ‘sad and dark, as dim as the maroon rosettes on the papered wall behind her’” (Chapter 9)
Domestic décor becomes a backdrop for despair, turning the breakfast room into a stage for grief and dread. The simile links her inner state to the house itself, a place beautified to mask, not heal, harm.

“No tears over this, my mistress had whispered, for this is as natural as the moon moving across the sky.” (Chapter 11)
In the chaos after the murder, Mrs. Amwell centers Eliza with knowledge, not superstition. Reframing menstruation as cosmic and ordinary, she models a nurturing authority that contrasts sharply with the violent, secretive authority she exercised at the table.