Linda Snopes

Linda is the natural daughter of Eula Varner Snopes and a Frenchman's Bend suitor named McCarron. Although Linda lacks her mother's voluptuous appeal, she is very attractive to men in her own right, as the reactions from Chick, Gavin, and Matt Levitt all demonstrate. She seems like contested territory on a number of fronts; various people attempt to direct her education, inheritance, and marital status throughout the novel. While Eula exacts a promise from Gavin that he will marry her daughter, Linda herself is reluctant to accept his conditional offer of matrimony. At the end of the novel, her mother's suicide releases Linda from her Jefferson ties, and with her 'father's' permission and Gavin's assistance, she leaves Jefferson for Greenwich Village, which Gavin calls "a place with a few unimportant boundaries but no limitations where young people of any age go to seek dreams" (367). Her future in New York and beyond plays out as one of the central narratives in The Mansion, the final volume in the Snopes trilogy.