Penelope is a protagonist of the novel, one of the two romantic leads, and one of the point-of-view characters. When the story opens, she is a young woman, not quite 16. She lives in London with her widowed mother, Portia; two older sisters, Prudence and Philippa; and a younger sister, Felicity. She has brown hair with a tint of red to it, big brown eyes, and a peaches-and-cream complexion. Her figure does not conform to the slender ideal that is the fashion, and she struggles to lose weight when she debuts. To Colin, however, she is “soft, curvy, and lush, just as he’d always thought a woman should be” (136).

As a teenager, Penelope does not conform to expectations in other ways as well: She tends to be shy, awkward with strangers, and easily embarrassed, especially by the mean remarks of Cressida Twombley. She is also less physically admirable because her mother insists on choosing her clothing and tends to put her in unflattering colors, which is why Penelope makes fun of herself by having Lady Whistledown compare her to an overripe citrus fruit. This barb is multivalent: Penelope refers to it several times with comedic self-deprecation, cleverly deflecting any suspicion that she could be Lady Whistledown by making herself the subject of her alter ego’s criticisms, but it also reveals the insecurity about appearance that she genuinely feels.