Esther Summerson

Esther Summerson is an orphan raised without knowledge of her parents, taken in as a young woman by the kindly John Jarndyce and made companion to his ward Ada. She is modest, dutiful and endlessly self-effacing, narrating her own story with a hesitant apology for even telling it, while quietly noticing everything around her.

Dickens gave her a strange, self-doubting narrative voice, and Anna Maxwell Martin plays the gap between it and what Esther actually perceives with real precision — you sense a sharper, sadder woman underneath the modesty. It's a performance built on restraint that keeps hinting at how much restraint is costing her.