Elinor/Marianne and Cecily/Gwendolyn

did not have a fortune, and their chances of "marrying well" are limited. The character of Marianne is that of an independent woman who wants to find love and prefers to abstain from social norm. She is fiery, and she is an uber romantic. Elinor is the more maternal of the sisters, and serves as the rock of a very dysfunctional family. Contrastingly, Cecily and Gwendolyn are not sisters. They are both engaged to the same imaginary man named Ernest.

The Ernest that they know are Algernon and Jack, respectively, both of whom claim to be named Ernest Worthing just to console the girl's obsession with marrying a man by the name of Ernest. Cecily is a rich lady from the country, and a ward of Jack. She is imaginative, and created from scratch a relationship with this Ernest she is obsessed with before even meeting the fake Ernest, Algernon. She is clueless, but comes out fiercely to defend her Ernest from Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn is a society lady from the city who has also been duped into thinking that her fiance is named Ernest.

Similarly to Cecily, she is clueless and acts quite snobby to Cecily to reinstate her status as a city aristocrat. However, both Cecily and Gwendolyn join forces at one point to counteract and fight the "Earnests" that had fooled them. In all, Cecily and Gwendolyn have very little in common with Elinor and Marianne. The first pair denoted more malice and less intelligence than the latter. If anything, they are alike in that social expectations are placed upon them through marriage and the need for status.