Nat Beauchamp

The daughter of Lucas and Molly Beauchamp, Nat appears in "The Fire and the Hearth" as seen through her father’s eyes: "small, thin as a lath, young; she was their youngest and last - seventeen" (71). She marries George Wilkins, apparently in secret, but the 'ever after' involves her in an ongoing struggle against her domineering father and with her lazy husband. Despite her size, she is determined to get what she deserves from both of them. Despite her shrewdness as a bargainer, however, she can't ultimately overcome her domestic circumstances, though her troubles in the text are kept in an essentially comic context. The last time she is mentioned in the novel she is "an eighteen-year-old wife expecting a child" (118).