Angeline Ames

Daughter of narrator John Ames and his first wife, Louisa, baby Angeline, named by Robert Boughton and baptized by him, died shortly after her birth. The narrator, who refers to her as Rebecca, the name he would have given her, had a moment in which to hold the baby. She opened her eyes and looked at him shortly before she died. Her loss, along with her mother's death in childbirth, is a grief that hounds the narrator, one to which he returns in his letter to his son.

Edward Ames

Ten years older than the narrator and his brother, Edward Ames left Gilead as a young man to study philosophy in Germany where his own beliefs were shaped by the work of Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804-1872), a materialist who challenged orthodox religion, for example attacking the Christian belief in immortality. Feuerbach believed that the idea of God...