Sylvia Russell is the woman in this story, and she is a little power-crazed and has some well defined goals. To accomplish those goals, she is sadistically devoted to her son and daughter, possessing and controlling them; subtly ruins her daughter's marriage by corrupting a servant girl and then using her to compromise her son-in-law; gradually undermines her bumbling, unambitious husband's confidence, finds the man she desires in her husband's executive friend, and then poisons her husband in her own way in their quiet English manor.