Miss Harriss

Submitted by sfr on Tue, 2019-04-30 15:11
Character Key Number: 
269
Display Name: 
Miss Harriss
Sort Name: 
Harriss, Miss
Parent Character Key: 
Harriss
Melisandre Backus Stevens
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?: 
Yes
Biography: 

Like her mother, the 20-year-old daughter of "Mrs. Harriss" never gets a first name in "Knight's Gambit," the only text in which she has a significant presence. In other respects too she takes after her mother: "looking not wan so much as delicate and fragile and not even fragile so much as cold, evanescent, like one of the stalked white early spring flowers bloomed ahead of its time into the snow and the ice and doomed before your eyes without even knowing that it was dying, feeling not even any pain" (190–91). Unlike her mother but very like her brother, Max, Miss Harriss has been spoiled. Not unwilling to fight her rival, Miss Cayley, Miss Harriss eventually gets her man in Sebastian Gualdres. When Gavin Stevens marries the widowed Mrs. Harriss, Mrs. Gualdres becomes one of Steven’s "stepchildren" (238). Although readers never see her in that role, she is mentioned, but again not named, in The Mansion.

Linked Characters