Rose, with her hint of a Jane Austen dilemma (if she follows her bliss and goes off with Jack, it will leave her family in ruins), is the young feminist who now has the peril, as well as pleasure, of choice.
Auden and his poet-boyfriend, Chester Kallman, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Jane and Paul Bowles, Oliver Smith, Marc Blitzstein, Richard Wright, and Gypsy Rose Lee.