Flora Poste

Flora Poste is modeled after heroines of fiction, particularly of Jane Austen, who Flora compares herself to. She is nineteen and her parents have just died when the novel begins. Rather than work, she wants to find relatives she can live with. As she doesn't like things to be untidy, her goal is to tidy up any family messes she might find. Flora was not close to her parents and barely knows any of her relatives as she spent her childhood at boarding schools and most of her holidays with the family of her friend, Mary Smiling. She was forced to endure sports at school as it was her father's passion, but she did not care for them at all. She mentions she doesn't much care for people in general, yet over the course of the novel she expresses a lot of compassion for the Starkadder clan...