The novel’s first-person narrator, Elena, has a “face taken up by my glasses” and is short and bosomy. She has light hair that goes blonde in the summer sun (59). She is, for the most part, “a very brilliant student” who excels in essay writing and manages (against the odds) to leave her impoverished Neapolitan neighborhood of her birth and study at the Pisa Normale (396). However, Elena feels that the secret of her writerly success comes from Lila, who writes in her notebooks with an immediacy and clarity that Elena at first envies, then absorbs as a style that is both Lila’s and her own.

As an impoverished high school student in shabby clothes, Elena sometimes envies the luxury Lila has attained by marrying Stefano. However, during her own self-improvement, in school, and through her contact with Professor Galiani, she imagines the ideal of what she wants to become: a middle class young woman like Professor Galiani’s daughter and Nino’s one-time girlfriend Nadia, whose “every gesture or movement had gracefulness” (69). Elena, who comes across this type of well-bred person in Pisa, fears that her working class origins will betray her and keep her from achieving her ideals, regardless of how she excels in her studies.