Beryl Markham
A character shaped very clearly by frustration and some of the worst of life's frustrations. Beryl's mother leaves her and her father and escapes their home in Kenya to go back home. That leaves Beryl with her father. They are the only English people in the Kenyan village, so Beryl's life is already complicated by that. Eventually, the tribe realizes that her father is largely neglectful and absent, and they adopt her. She becomes a highly adaptive and resilient person, but with serious social troubles.
Markham's father
Markham's father is a poor example for young Beryl. She puts up with his way of life for as long as she can, but to make matters worse, the father is not skillful as a father. He simply dominates her her whole life forcing her by fear to compel with his will. When she was a child, that was especially intimidating, but even as an adult, she willingly chooses to marry someone she does not love nor has any intention to even try to love, just to get our from under his thumb.
The neighbor
The neighbor she picks is perhaps a worse fate for Beryl than her father was. The neighbor is a chronic drunk who does nothing productive. He is usually too drunk to have sex, if that gives any indication of his true alcoholism. He is also abusive and violent towards women. Before long, she realizes that if she stays with this man, he is going to kill her in a violent drunken stupor. He is prone to blackout rampages of panic and violence.
Finch Hatton
A vine settler in the area. Once, when Beryl was younger, he drugged her and raped her. Now, Beryl knows that he is a serial rapist; he has raped most of the village's women, in fact. Later in her life, Beryl develops an attachment to Finch. She believes that she could fall in love with him or seduce him or something, and she gets the idea that Finch and she are secretly a match made in heaven. She literally returns to Kenya to try and find him, after deciding to lay low in England where she may or may not have slept with Prince Harry.
