Written in My Own Heart's Blood characters

Also known as Claire Beauchamp Randall

Appears from the start

A twentieth-century surgeon living in the eighteenth, in British-occupied Philadelphia in June 1778. She has just crossed the Atlantic believing her husband drowned, and has married his oldest friend, Lord John Grey, for the protection an English officer's name gives a rebel's widow. She is a competent field surgeon in a war with almost no surgery worth the name, and she is about to discover that her widowhood was premature.

Also known as Jamie

Appears from the start

A Highland Scot in his fifties, reported drowned on the crossing from Scotland and not drowned at all. He arrives in Philadelphia to find his wife married to Lord John Grey, his natural son a British officer who has just been told whose son he is, and the Continental army about to march. He has spent thirty years avoiding another war and is out of ways to avoid this one.

Also known as John Grey

Appears from the start

An English aristocrat and retired officer who married Claire Fraser to shield her, believing his friend dead. He raised William as his own and has kept the secret of the boy's parentage all his life. Civilised, wry and entirely out of his depth in the situation he has created, he is about to have a very bad week.

Also known as William Ransom, Ellesmere

First appears in chapter 2

A British lieutenant and, on paper, ninth Earl of Ellesmere, who has just learned that James Fraser is his natural father and that his title, his name and his upbringing all rest on a concealment. Furious with everyone who knew, including the stepfather he loves, he walks out of the house and into a city the British army is about to abandon.

Appears from the start

Jamie's nephew, scout and Continental courier, who lived for years as a Mohawk and now moves between the army, the Frasers and the Quaker household he wants to marry into. He has told Rachel Hunter what he is; what he cannot tell her is how a man of war and a woman of peace are supposed to live together.

First appears in chapter 5

A young Quaker woman, sister to an army surgeon and disowned along with him by her Meeting. Plain-spoken and stubborn in the Friends' fashion, she has accepted Young Ian's declaration and is working out what it will mean to marry a man who kills.

Also known as Denny

First appears in chapter 5

A Quaker physician serving as a surgeon with the Continental army, mild in manner and immovable in conviction. He is the only doctor on the field whose training Claire respects, and he is quietly courting a duke's daughter.

Also known as Dottie

First appears in chapter 10

Lord John's niece and the daughter of a duke, who has crossed the Atlantic, adopted plain dress and plain speech, and attached herself to the Continental army and to Denzell Hunter, to the horror of her family.

First appears in chapter 3

Jamie's sister, newly widowed and newly arrived in America, who has run Lallybroch for forty years and sees no reason to stop running things now. She and Claire have a long and complicated history and are obliged to make a household together.

First appears in chapter 3

Jamie's foster son, printer in Philadelphia, whose press and rebel sympathies make him a marked man as the British prepare to leave and the city changes hands.

First appears in chapter 3

Fergus's wife and Jamie's stepdaughter, holding a print shop and a houseful of children together in a city under occupation.

First appears in chapter 26

Jamie and Claire's daughter, alone in twentieth-century Scotland with her small daughter, her son abducted and her husband gone through the stones after him. An engineer by training, she goes after the man who took her son with the methodical rage of someone who has run out of other options.

First appears in chapter 26

Historian and minister, who followed his missing son through the stones and came out in the wrong century entirely, with no way to be sure the boy is anywhere in it. He is stranded in the Highlands of an earlier age with a travelling companion he has every reason to distrust.

Also known as Buck

First appears in chapter 26

A Highlander who came through the stones himself and is now stranded with Roger, to whom he is related in a way that does neither of them any good. Prickly, proud and useful, he knows the century they have landed in far better than Roger does.

First appears in chapter 30

A Highland man with a job at the hydroelectric scheme, a taste for Gaelic and a long-standing interest in the family at Lallybroch, who has taken Jem and disappeared with him.

Also known as Duke of Pardloe

First appears in chapter 50

Lord John's elder brother, Duke of Pardloe and colonel of his own regiment, an autocratic and asthmatic man who has come to America to find his missing children and does not intend to be told no by anyone, including an army.

First appears in chapter 60

A British officer engaged in intelligence work, who has repeatedly employed William as a courier on errands whose purpose William has never entirely understood.

First appears in chapter 111

A young woman who has run from a Philadelphia brothel with her younger sister and attached herself to the army's baggage train. Quick, watchful and fiercely protective of the girl, she has already decided what she is prepared to do to keep her.

Also known as Fanny

First appears in chapter 111

Jane's younger sister, a shy girl of about eleven with a speech difficulty, who has been sheltered by Jane from everything Jane could not avoid herself.