Lucy Barton is the 63-year-old protagonist of Oh William! and the novel’s first-person narrator. Lucy does not physically describe herself as she does other people, enabling her to pose as a type of everywoman by softening the boundary between her and the reader. However, Lucy is of white, Puritan heritage and likely short and fair, as she is the opposite of William’s mistress Joanne, who is tall and dark.

Lucy grew up in poverty in a tiny house in the middle of a soybean field in Illinois. Her parents, who could be physically and emotionally abusive, did not make her feel loved and she grew up with a sense of extreme and inescapable isolation. Although she was the only one of her three siblings to thrive at school, go to college, enter middle class life, and even become a renowned author, Lucy retains the childhood trauma of feeling invisible. The desolate and downtrodden Maine landscape she traverses with William brings her into direct conflict with these repressed feelings and she realizes such vestiges of her post-traumatic stress disorder will continue to revisit her and form part of who she is. As the trip unveils the truth about Catherine’s life, Lucy considers that Catherine managed to remove the trace of her origins and establish herself as middle class, more successfully and totally than Lucy did.