Frances Wray, the protagonist of The Paying Guests, is a 26-year-old woman on the verge of spinsterhood living with her mother in a large house in Champion Hill, London, in 1922. Frances is intelligent and caring, putting others’ interests ahead of her own. Waters describes her as beautiful, though she does not take care of her appearance. Frances is a semi-closeted lesbian: though her mother knows of her past relationship with another woman, it has been swept under the rug, and at the time the novel begins, the two have a relationship founded upon never speaking of this side of Frances’s identity.

Frances had an intimate relationship with her friend Christina, a suffragette she met handing out fliers at a political rally. Frances gave up this relationship and the promise of a free, liberated life with Christina after her brothers, John Arthur and Noel, died during World War I. The war was a major event in Frances’s life: she, like many young women at the time, were morally opposed to the war. Her brothers’ deaths were a major blow to the family. Frances’s father did not survive the shock. Frances resents her father for mismanaging the family’s funds and leaving her and Mrs.