Maud Lowder acquired her money through marriage, and she lacks the aristocratic pedigree that is necessary to function at the top of London’s disintegrating, but still snobbish, social order. As a social climber and would-be aristocrat, Maud seeks to use her beautiful niece to advance her own social standing by marrying Kate off to a member of the nobility. The immediate candidate for this end is Lord Mark, who has a beautiful estate but is otherwise essentially broke. He needs money to keep up his lifestyle and is unabashedly in the hunt for a bride so that he can barter his social position for a fortune. He is none too finicky, requiring only that the woman’s fortune be large enough. Lord Mark, a somewhat shadowy figure, turns out to be the closest thing to a purely evil force in the novel. His visit to Milly in Venice, in which he reveals to her the true state of the relationship between Kate and Densher, is as an act of malevolence and vengeance.

Aunt Maud’s social control extends also to Kate’s unfortunate and widowed sister Marian, who lives in lower-class penury with three children to care for. Marian has fallen out of favor with Aunt Maud because she married a man of whom Aunt Maud disapproved, and is now, after her husband’s early death, reduced to living in conditions close to squalor. Her only hope in the short run is for occasional acts of minor benevolence from her aunt. Both Marian and Lionel Croy, Kate and Marian’s disgraced father, harbor the idea that Kate one day will be able to care for them handsomely if she only submits entirely to Aunt Maud’s wishes. Lionel Croy has besmirched the family through unspecified criminal acts; he has been ostracized by Aunt Maud but from time to time extracts small sums of money from her.

Though Milly is the center of the novel’s action, she is not present in the first two books, and after one brief episode in book eighth, she disappears in the last two books of the novel. The novel’s first two books are given over entirely to Kate, to her relationship with Densher and to her family background. The initial chapters set the stage for Milly’s arrival in London and her debut in the London social scene. James had his doubts about this device of leaving Milly to a later appearance, fearing that he may be too long-winded in setting the stage. The novel then could end up having “too big a head for its body.”3 He feared that, by having to cram too much into the middle sections, he might cause sudden shifts of focus and make the narrative hard for the reader to follow. While Wings does lack the structural symmetry of The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, the technique of deferring Milly’s appearance heightens the drama and brilliantly succeeds in the final analysis.

Milly arrives on the scene in book third, and we learn all that we need to know of her New York background and her family circumstances. In demonstrating the force of her character by showing how she affects the others, James dramatizes her the more, just as he does with the figure of Mrs. Newsome in The Ambassadors (who never actually appears in the novel). Milly’s presence is powerfully felt even in her absence. She animates the other characters; they are at first preoccupied with trying to figure her out and then they scheme to use her for their own purposes. Her seeming victimhood is demonstrated by the way the others constantly plot behind her back. The tawdriness of their intrigues contrasts with Milly’s own lonely struggle to live.

Milly’s character is initially presented through the eyes of Susan Stringham, who is accompanying her to Europe. Susan’s role in Wings is similar to that of Maria Gostrey in The Ambassadors or to Colonel Bob Assingham’s role in the narrative structure of The Golden Bowl. James refers to this literary device as the ficelle (literally, a little piece of string), by which he means the use of a lesser character to facilitate the flow of events and to link the major scenes.4 One day in Switzerland, while looking for Milly, Susan Stringham sees the book Milly was reading left by the side of the trail and follows the path that leads to the edge of a precipice. She sees Milly sitting in a precarious position on a rock slab, gazing down at the valley stretched out below her. For a moment Susan is frightened, thinking that her friend might be contemplating suicide. She is afraid to call out for fear that a sudden disturbance might startle Milly and send her over the edge. Then, as Susan contemplates her friend, she slowly realizes that as Milly “was looking down at the kingdoms of the earth ... it wouldn’t be with a view of renouncing them. Was she choosing among them or did she want them all?” (p. 106).