Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf became friends in the 1930s, when the two were widely considered the pre-eminent women modernist novelists in the British Isles. Younger writers at the time, like literary critics later, compared the two women; yet in their private writings, both of them dwelt on their divergent personal characteristics. This underlines the importance of the notion of character to both Woolf’s and Bowen’s fictional projects. In her pivotal experimental essays and fictions of the early 1920s, Woolf returned to the idea of two people sitting opposite in a railway carriage to explore the ways in which the variety and intricacy of subjectivity could never be fully plumbed by another. Bowen, who admitted to being influenced by Woolf, used the same railway-carriage thought experiment in her own essays on the writer’s craft. Although Bowen understood character largely in terms of Woolfian notions of the vast complexity of subjectivity, she demonstrates in her own novels, particularly The House in Paris and To the North, that character needed to be delimited by more notions from previous eras that depend on the broader strokes of caricature to ascertain another’s personality.