Caro’s younger sister Grace is fairer, shorter, and has been praised for her beauty since childhood. As beauty is the primary virtue for women in her society, Grace is self-assured from a young age and unlikely to challenge a status quo that provides her with a comfortable life and a government official husband. Grace’s manner of walking encapsulates her placidity, creating “a soft impression, yielding” (7). While Caro’s love story is just beginning, Grace, who is engaged to Christian as the novel opens, seems to have completed her romantic journey.

For much of the novel Grace becomes a subsidiary housewifely figure, only mentioned in scant lines that relate to pregnancies or taking care of her mother-in-law. However, an incident in her early forties reveals that she is unfulfilled: After having given so much of her life to caring for Christian and their children, she falls in love with Angus Dance. Although the relationship doesn’t work out, it leads Grace to realize that she has forgotten all sense of who she is in her domestic role. She finds herself regretting that the most exciting thing that ever happened to her—the death of her parents in a shipwreck—occurred when she was a child. Thus, in the last section of the novel, a middle-aged Grace is on the verge of undoing much of what seemingly completed her; she detaches from her sense of duty towards her husband, reunites with her sister, and contemplates a voyage with her to Australia to reclaim her roots. She also resumes playing the piano, creating a link between the present and her childhood passion.

Dora is the half-sister who raises Caro and Grace after their parents’ death and initially accompanies them to London. She is small, dark, and resentful of the younger sisters whom she had to spend her youth raising. Following the younger sisters’ independence, Dora enters a dysfunctional marriage with Major Ingot, who takes her money and leaves her dependent on her sisters’ charity. In a bid for attention, she frequently comments that she would be better off dead. This exacerbates the sense of indebtedness the sisters feel toward Dora for having raised them, and they struggle to set boundaries with her. The burden especially falls upon Caro, as Christian insists that Grace’s current familial duties make her exempt. In an interview, Hazzard said that Dora was based on her own mother, who was “manic-depressive, which became a great trouble as the condition intensified. The character of Dora, in my Transit of Venus, is a very mild dose of my mother—a destroyer who sees herself as a perpetual victim” (McClatchy, J.D. “Shirley Hazzard, The Art of Fiction No. 185.” The Paris Review, Spring 2005, https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5505/the-art-of-fiction-no-185-shirley-hazzard. Accessed 8 Aug. 2021). The fact that readers see Dora mostly through Caro’s eyes reinforces this idea of her as a burden rather than as someone to empathize with. Caro resents her duties towards Dora, and during her youth, the shadow of Dora’s overbearing nature is so great that Caro shuns all intimate relationships. 

Ted Tice is an astronomer with working-class, Northern English origins. While his intellectual ability enables him to gain Professor Sefton Thrale’s attention and rise to enjoy some middle-class privileges, he remains an outsider within the Thrales’ classist set. Hazzard describes him as “young and poor and [with] the highest references—like a governess in an old story, who marries into a noble family” (26). His servant-like position becomes apparent when Ted repairs a table, and Tertia Drage pays him a backhanded compliment about being genetically predisposed towards manual labor.

In his youth, Ted has an unprepossessing appearance, being “a callow ginger presence in a cable-stitch cardigan” (26). He also has a scratch in his eye from a childhood injury. However, while Ted is self-conscious about wearing working-class clothes, he does not attempt to disguise his Northern accent, which indicates a measure of security and authenticity on his part. This accent, which is regional as well as class-inflected, underscores the parallels between his position and that of the Bell sisters, who as Australians also exist on the fringes of polite English society. Ted is also distinctive for the complexity of his character, which causes him to free a German prisoner of war and to keep the secret of Paul Ivory’s complicity in Victor’s death. While the first of these secrets, which Ted reveals to Caro, causes her to esteem him, it is the second, revealed to her by Paul, that causes Caro to finally return his affection. Caro learns that there is much more to Ted than meets the eye, and that it is he rather than Paul who has true depth of character.

Ted’s steadfast devotion to Caro is both noteworthy and ennobling in a novel where other characters are inconstant in or uncertain of their affections. However, his unrequited love also causes him to dismiss other women and later to casually cheat on his wife, eventually leaving her for Caro. Early on in the novel, Hazzard’s omniscient narrator mentions a point in the future when Ted will kill himself but does not provide any clue as to the cause of his suicide, building suspense and mystery around his character. 

As the son of the poet Rex Ivory and the godson of Charmian Thrale, Paul Ivory has the charming manners and polished, attractive appearance of a modern-day English gentleman. When Caro first sees him, she feels that his stylish espadrilles and “cotton jerseys—some blue, some black […] inaugurate[] […] the modern era” (70). His plays, which venture beyond his immediate experience into working-class themes, also establish him as a watershed figure who combines traditional upper-class traits with a modern sensibility. Sefton Thrale is right to predict that Paul will make his mark.

Paul’s personal life is shrouded in layers of secrecy. Caro assumes that as Paul’s mistress, she is the woman with whom he is truly vulnerable, since his marriage to the aristocratic Tertia is one of convenience. However, Paul’s real secret is his former gay relationship with Victor Locker, a working-class man whose family relies upon Paul financially. When the arrangement becomes an inconvenience for Paul and threatens his public life, he stands by and allows Victor to drown—an incident that reveals Paul’s true sadism and calculating nature. Paul afterwards becomes obsessed with the male witness to his crime, Ted Tice, entering into a lifelong fascination and competition with him. Arguably, Caro becomes a worthier conquest for Paul because Ted is interested in her. He also relishes Caro’s divulgement of Ted's secret and, when he hears of Caro’s marriage to Vail, is relieved that at least Ted did not end up marrying her.

While Paul generally withdraws from vulnerability, abandoning Caro when she becomes too dependent on him in an attempt to maintain control, he finds himself broken and in confessional mode following his son’s leukemia. This unpredictable stroke of fate forces Paul to face the consequences of life and death, even as Caro abandons all thoughts of him and focuses her desire on Ted.

Grace’s husband Christian Thrale is “a sandy man, quite tall” and a government official from a landed British family (19). As such, he considers his social status superior to that of the Australian Bell sisters, who are living in a rented flat. However, Christian is, ironically, enchanted by the sisters largely because they show no signs of feeling inferior and have a self-assurance that he lacks in social situations. In order to moderate the threat these attractive outsiders present to his controlled life, Christian chooses to focus on the milder-tempered sister, Grace. Hazzard reveals Christian’s petty childishness in the humorous bathos of how “on the brink of the sofa he renounce[s] any possibility of Caro” (23), coming to “almost dislike[] her” the moment he decides that she is “too much for him” (23). This mingled dislike and attraction continues throughout the novel, as Christian admires Caro’s striking appearance and independence while at the same time wishing her ill. He especially hopes that she will fail to support herself, since her independence threatens his chauvinistic belief that women should rely upon men.

If the Bell sisters are one unpredictable element in Christian’s ordered life, Cordelia Ware, the young woman he has an affair with, is another. Christian finds himself besotted with Cordelia’s youthful beauty and cannot prevent inconvenient feelings from carrying him away. Still, as the existing power structure favors men like him, Christian is able to use his position to contain the affair and then banish all traces of it, regardless of Cordelia’s feelings.

Charmian Thrale is Christian’s mother and the Thrale family matriarch. She belongs to an earlier generation than the protagonists; her “[a]ge [is] coiled in smooth grey hair, [and] [is] explicit in skin too delicate for youth” (4). She also follows Victorian customs of feminine propriety in not permitting her back to touch the chair she’s sitting in, lessening her own comfort in order to appear correct. While Charmian seems a submissive figure focused on her duties towards her husband and household, she is a keen observer of other people; she notices, for example, the difference between the Bell sisters’ receptions of Ted and Paul.

When her husband Sefton dies and makes Peverel over to his son, Charmian undergoes a loss in status. She is a tenant at her former home until Christian decides to put her in a residence for elderly people. As Charmian loses her memory and sees her Australian daughter-in-law more often than her son, a sense builds that she is in exile from her former self.

The Thrale family patriarch is a professor of astronomy who is approaching the end of his career and life. Hazzard writes how “Sefton Thrale’s own important work had been accomplished in youth, before the Great War” (12), and everything he has produced since is second-rate; his speech is also peppered with “outworn idiom,” giving him an old-fashioned appeal. The idea of Sefton’s best work being produced before the First World War is symbolic, as this was the period when the British Empire was at its most powerful and the class system its most prevalent. While he tolerates working-class Ted as an apprentice and Australian Grace as his daughter-in-law, he regrets the changes to the social structure that threaten to make his way of life irrelevant. His true, mean-spirited nature surfaces in his resentment of Ted for being a more innovative scientist than he is, and of Grace for not compensating for her Australianness with a fortune. 

Caro’s husband Adam Vail is an American businessman who first appears as a “wide, tall, motionless man in a dark-blue coat, who held a black stick and stood with feet apart and his bare dark head raised, confident that the house, or the world, would yield to siege” (180). Adam’s stance shows his confident, direct manner and aligns with his forthright pursuit of Caro. Adam is also frankly American in his embrace of ideals of freedom and justice, being involved in human rights attempts to liberate Latin Americans from execution.

Adam also has a vulnerable side and tends to become involved in the battles of the women he loves, including his late wife, who eventually made him an enemy. Although he loves Caro, he does not fully understand her more romantic side and finds it a mystery when she cries over poetry. As he gets older, he worries that she will tire of him and leave. Adam appears in only about a quarter of the novel, as he dies of a stroke at the beginning of the fourth section. He is thus an episode in Caro’s life rather than a defining feature.

Paul’s wife, Tertia Drage, is the daughter of a lord who lives in a castle. On the surface, she is an unlikeable character who epitomizes British aristocratic snobbishness. She is “so sleekly pretty, so fair and tall that she seem[s] an advertisement for something very costly” (66). Arguably, Tertia is an “advertisement” for an aristocratic way of life that is unsustainable and on the brink of extinction. Listless, dispassionate Tertia, who has the appearance of not being “humanly touched” contrasts with the passionate societal interloper Caro (66). The two women are also rivals, as Tertia is Paul’s wife of convenience while Caro is his mistress. Tertia’s resentment of Caro informs her snide remarks about Caro’s character and dress.

However, Tertia and her relationship with Paul are not what they seem. Tertia knows Paul better than Caro in the sense that she is aware of his bisexuality. Additionally, when Paul returns home after encountering Caro in the park, Tertia is in tears, which indicates that she has suffered from her husband’s infidelity.