Mrs Shaw

Mrs Shaw is Margaret Hale's aunt, a comfortable, well-to-do widow presiding over a fashionable London household. Mother to the pampered Edith, she is fond, fretful and a little scatty, forever anxious about draughts, weddings and appearances, and entirely unprepared for the grittier world Margaret is about to be thrown into.

Jane Booker plays her as gentle comic relief without turning her into a joke, all fluttering solicitude and mild self-absorption. She's a useful hinge in the story, embodying the soft southern gentility Margaret leaves behind, so that everything Margaret later encounters in the industrial north lands with sharper contrast.