Although Louise Brooks did travel to New York with a chaperone, Cora’s character, her story, and most other characters in The Chaperone are fictional. Cora is the novel’s protagonist, rather than the more dazzling Louise, and this focus gives the novel an emphasis on Cora’s personal awakening as she enters mid-life. At the beginning of the novel, Cora is conventional, restrained, and conscientious. The book’s non-chronological timeline—which mostly integrates flashbacks to Cora’s past into the 1922 story—allows Moriarty to show how Cora’s life changes and how she becomes disillusioned with many of society’s ideals. She transforms from a guarded, cautious young girl and woman to a more self-assured woman who makes choices that were considered bold at the time.

In the beginning of the book, Cora is motivated to go to New York to find out about her birth family. There’s a void in her life without this knowledge, and she connects learning about her birth parents to her own happiness. Over the course of her time in New York, she comes to believe that instead of that knowledge making her happy—her meeting with Mary O’Dell dispels this illusion—her happiness depends on her own decisions about her future.