Ellen Greene is the housekeeper for Emily and her father. She is peevish, often complaining about her various ailments and Mr. Starr’s parenting decisions. She scolds Emily frequently for her free-spirited behavior and doesn’t understand Emily or her father and their dreamy, whimsical personalities. She frequently says Emily is “wicked” for saying shocking things, such as wishing she’d die soon so that she could be with her parents. After Douglas Starr dies, Ellen Greene moves out of the house and takes one of Emily’s cats, Mike, with her. She occasionally writes to Emily after she goes to New Moon, but Emily is disappointed that her letters mostly contain complaints about her rheumatism and not updates about Mike.

Douglas Starr is Emily’s father, who raises her independently from age 4 until 12. He was a journalist and never made a lot of money. His wife, Juliet’s, family disapproved of him, so they ran away together to get married. He is an unconventional father in that he chose to raise Emily himself after her mother died and did not send Emily to school. He encouraged her to use her imagination, explore her freedom, and sometimes question authority. He is prayerful and has instilled a belief in God in Emily. Douglas has more expansive ideas about God than Ellen Greene and the Murrays do and rejects many social rules. Emily has absorbed these qualities, which sometimes clash with the more conventional society she encounters at New Moon farm and Blair Water.

Aunt Elizabeth is the elder of the two sisters who live at New Moon farm. She is stern and concerned with propriety. She often finds Emily’s behavior horrifying and doles out harsh punishments, such as locking her in the spare room for an evening because she walked to town barefoot. Emily believes that Aunt Elizabeth does not love her, but her aunt is just not able to show affection to anyone. Aunt Elizabeth does care about Emily, her beloved sister’s daughter, very much, something that comes to light after she violates Emily’s privacy by reading her letters to her father.

Aunt Laura is the younger of the two sisters who live at New Moon. She is gentle, kind, and more indulgent to Emily than Elizabeth is. Before Emily met her, her father said that Laura was the most like her mother, Juliet, who was the youngest of the sisters and whose much younger mother was Elizabeth and Laura’s stepmother, whom their father married after his first wife died.

When Emily is at New Moon, she is more likely to confide in Aunt Laura than Aunt Elizabeth. Aunt Laura keeps her secrets and does not tell Aunt Elizabeth when Emily climbs out of the spare room window. Laura is kind and nurturing but also acquiescent to Elizabeth.

Emily’s cousin Jimmy lives with Elizabeth and Laura and works on the farm; people say that he is “simple” because of a head injury he sustained as a child. He later tells Emily that people think that because he writes poetry and doesn’t worry about things as much as most people do. He is kind to Emily from the beginning. Once Emily is living at New Moon, she enjoys watching and helping him do chores around the farm, listening to his stories about her relatives and the people of Blair Water, and hearing his poetry, which he has memorized and only recites when he feels moved to do so.

Despite what the townspeople say about him, Jimmy is a very astute judge of character. Jimmy is very kind and generous to Emily and defends her against Miss Brownell and Aunt Elizabeth when they are harsh toward her. Jimmy especially has power over Aunt Elizabeth because she pushed him down a well when they were children, which caused his head injury. She feels guilty about this, and he knows she feels like she owes him something, so he sometimes takes advantage of it for his own or Emily’s sake.

Ilse Burnley lives with her father, the town doctor, in a house near Emily’s. Her father does not pay much attention to her, and she has a much less structured life than Emily. Ilse’s mother passed away when she was very young, and the adults in town always behave strangely when they mention her. After Emily’s friendship with Rhoda ends, she and Ilse become closer. They make a playhouse in the bushes between their houses and often play at Ilse’s house because no one minds if they are noisy or make a mess.

Ilse is a tomboy, rarely attends school, and is unsure whether she believes in God because her father doesn’t. She has a bad temper, and she and Emily frequently argue with Ilse calls her mean but creative names. Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Laura do not object to Emily playing with Ilse, which is surprising given her wilder lifestyle and “infidel” father; they pity her lack of a mother and sometimes mend her clothes and do other motherly tasks for her. Near the novel’s end, when they discover that her mother didn’t betray her father like he thought she did, she and her father grow much closer.

Teddy Kent is a young boy in Blair Water who has been very sick for months before Emily meets him. Dr. Burnley has treated him all summer, and when Teddy gets stronger, Dr. Burnley encourages Ilse and Emily to visit and play with him. Teddy is delicate and pale but also highly imaginative and intelligent.

Teddy lives with his mother, and they have a very close relationship; his mother seems jealous of anyone who spends time with him and is not particularly fond of Emily and Ilse, though she allows them to come over because Teddy’s health is improving. The summer that Emily and Ilse begin visiting Teddy, they become very close friends. Emily thinks that Teddy is a handsome boy, and she sometimes thinks he likes her best. Teddy is a talented artist and often sketches while he spends time with Emily and Ilse. He often tells Emily that he will make a large portrait of her when they are grown up.

Emily meets Perry when she is about to be charged by Mr. James Lee’s bull. He happens to be sitting on a fence watching her and calls for her to run and jump over the fence. Perry is friendly, with curly hair and gray eyes. He lives with his Aunt Tom in a poor area called Stovepipe Town. He tells Emily that his father was a sea captain, with whom he sailed around the world until he died.

After his first encounter with Emily, he takes the job as a farmhand at New Moon, which he had previously rejected. He is intelligent and competitive; he decides to go to school because Emily goes, and he quickly rises through the levels of their class. When Emily tells him that she writes poetry, he responds that he can write poetry as well as she can. Perry always defends Emily and seems to have a crush on her; he is especially jealous of her friendship with Teddy Kent.

Throughout the novel’s first half, Emily’s Great Aunt Nancy is a distant relative who asks Emily to write letters to her. She is very old and wealthy, and her relatives are eager to please her because they stand to inherit valuable objects and money when she dies. Nancy believes Emily must be stupid because of the first letter she sent, but she invites her to stay with her at Wyther Grange once summer. Over the several weeks that Emily is there, she finds that Nancy and her companion, Caroline, are less strict than Aunt Elizabeth, and Emily enjoys her freedom to roam around outside, read whatever she wants, and listen to them gossip. Aunt Nancy often talks about how beautiful she was in her youth and likes to tell Emily how to handle boys and men, which disturbs Emily. After a few weeks, Aunt Nancy abruptly tells Emily that she’s tired of her and it’s time for her to return to New Moon.

While Emily is visiting Wyther Grange, she meets Dean Priest while roaming near the shore. She reaches to pick a flower but slips and hangs onto a ledge. She is afraid that she will fall and hit the boulders below her, but Dean sees her and rescues her. Dean is Aunt Nancy’s nephew and is known around town as “Jarback” because one of his shoulders is stooped lower than the other. They become fast friends, even though Dean is more than 20 years older than Emily. She learns that he knew her father when they were in school, and Dean also loves to read; they have very similar personalities, and Emily feels comfortable sharing things with him that she does not with most other people. She enjoys his sense of humor; people around town have called him cynical and sarcastic, but she believes it is because they don’t understand his wit.

It is clear that Dean has romantic intentions toward Emily and plans to wait about 10 years before he proposes, at which point she will be 22, and he will be 46. Emily seems oblivious to this intention when they first meet, as she is only 12 years old and not interested in courtship and marriage at the time.