though her own son has died. 

Minny is another maid. She speaks her mind more freely than any other character, with the possible exception of Miss Hilly. Minny experiences a great deal of hardship over the course of the novel, while the other major characters relate important events that take place outside the time context of the novel. This makes Minny the most dynamic character in the book, in a position not only to change herself but to change others. 

Hilly Holbrook is the antagonist of The Help. Once the best friend to Miss Skeeter, Hilly runs rampant over her former friend and any one else who would dare to get in her way. She is a bigoted and brattish woman. Though she truly loves her children, she cannot see her way to a compassion that extends beyond her own narrow interests. 

The Help is told in first-person narrative and with alternating chapters by three main characters: Aibileen, Minny, and Miss Skeeter. Aibileen Clark is a black maid who works for the Leefolt family. She dotes on baby Mae Mobley Leefolt, and she quietly tries to teach the young girl something about racial tolerance. Aibileen’s own son Treelore was killed in a work-related accident. One of the woman’s talents is that she is successful at praying for people and for good causes in need. She writes out her prayers in a notebook each night. Aibileen agrees to help Miss Skeeter come up with answers for the Miss Myrna column in the local newspaper. Eventually she agrees to also help with the black maids book project.

Minny Jackson is a black maid who works for Celia and Johnny Rae Foote. Minny is known around Jackson as being a terrific cook. But she also has a temper and is stubborn and opinionated. Before she left her last employment, she made a pie for Hilly Holbrook that included what she calls the “Terrible Awful.” Minny lives with her husband Leroy and a house full of kids. Sadly, she suffers regular domestic abuse by Leroy. She clearly knows the lines between whites and blacks in the Mississippi of the early 1960s. She’s reluctant to help with Skeeter’s black maids book, but is eventually won over to help. She becomes a sort of friend to Celia, since the woman has been rejected by most of the members of the Jackson Junior League. By the end of the book, Minny is pregnant again, has gotten beaten up again, and has finally decided to leave her husband.

Miss Skeeter’s real name is Eugenia Phelan. She’s a white woman with frizzy white-blonde hair, and she’s an officer with the Jackson Junior League. She lives at her childhood home, the Longleaf cotton plantation, with her parents, Carlton and Charlotte Phelan. She graduated from Ole Miss and wants to be a writer. She gets $10 a week to write the Miss Myrna housekeeping hints column in the local paper, with Aibileen’s advice. Skeeter begins to get annoyed, frustrated, and angry, with the way that whites (including her best friends) treat the blacks in this city. She decides to compile a book of the black maids’ true stories, with their names changed to protect their identities. Skeeter dates Stuart Whitworth for a time, but she breaks up with him when it’s obvious that he expects her to abandon her civil rights and women’s rights ideas. By the end of the book, the black maids book is a success, and Skeeter has been offered a publishing-related job in New York.

In Kathryn Stockett's The Help, the three main characters have strengths and weaknesses.

Skeeter Phalen's strength is her resolve in wanting to expose the often difficult lives of black maids working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi. Her weakness, at least at the beginning, is that she has no concept of what the life of a domestic worker is really like, and equally has no concept of what dangers she and the others are in by exposing how poorly many of the maids in the novel are treated.

Minny's strengths and weaknesses are easy to spot. She admits that she cannot keep her mouth shut, and has been fired from numerous jobs because of it. Ironically, this may be a strength of character in some form, for it is her inability to pretend and play the game that the whites want her to play by "yes, ma'am-ing" them when their demands are poorly planned or idiotic. It is her honesty that might be seen as a strength. However, the one that most stands out for me is Minny's courage. Regardless of what she is feeling, she puts herself out to protect others. We see this when she insists that her "Terrible Awful" is put in the book: it exposes her to danger, but protects the other maids who have placed their stories in the book as well.

Aibileen's strength is easy to find when we see how much she cares for the seventeen children she has raised during her career, as shown in the way she is raising Mae Mobley. She has loved these children as if they were her own. Aibileen is also extremely bright, a peacemaker and a realist. She is brave and supportive of others, as we see in her friendship with Minny. Finding a weakness for Aibileen is much more difficult. Perhaps her weakness is giving so much of her heart to the children of folks who will retrain the children in their own image (bigoted, inflexible, catty, etc.) when they no longer need Aibileen.

Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter are the novel's three central protagonists, also used as first person narrators. Hilly and Celia are two other characters that are developed over the course of the novel and play significant roles in the action of the story, especially Hilly. Hilly is the antagonist of the novel. 

Aibileen is a caring, intelligent and somewhat bitter maid living in Jackson, Mississippi. She has lost her only son to a work accident that did not need to be fatal and perhaps would not have been if her son's skin color had been lighter.

Though she has suffered the early death of her only son, Treelore, she is still able to love both white and black people.

Aibileen is a talented writer and, though not one to break the rules openly, she is courageous enough to take risks for positive change in her community. 

Minny is a hot-headed maid who speaks her mind.

She has a reputation of having a big mouth, but also being a superb cook.

She does not trust easily and is abused by her husband. Minny is a strong woman, but her strength is repeatedly challenged by the circumstances of her life. 

Skeeter is a recent college graduate with aspirations to become a writer. She is part of the upper class of Jackson, but does not identify with the people and values of this group. Skeeter has a troubled relationship with her mother because she does not seem to be pursuing a conventional life (a husband). Skeeter's boldness is fueled in part by her naivete. She takes risks and takes action without fully considering the implications for herself and others. 

In Kathryn Stockett's novel The Help, Aibileen is the maid. She is an African American woman who both cleans the house and cares for the children of her employers. Her position at the time of the novel is the first since her own son died from an accident on the job. 

In The Help, she is one of three protagonists and first-person narrators. She is befriended by Skeeter, another of these narrators, who is attempting to engender change in the South's institutionalized and socialized racism. Aibileen helps Skeeter write a household tips column, and in exchange, Skeeter pays her. Eventually, Aibileen agrees to tell Skeeter her "story", and eventually manages to convince several other exploited "help" to contribute to the project as well. 

Kathryn Stockett is the author of the best-selling book The Help, which was subsequently made into a Hollywood movie. The book is about a young lady called Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan who yearns to break free from the confines of Southern society to become a writer in New York City.

In writing The Help, Stockett drew on her own personal experiences of growing up in the South. The central relationship in the book between Skeeter and Aibileen, her friend's African American maid, takes its inspiration from characters that Stockett encountered when she was growing up.

Stockett herself hails from Skeeter's hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, and she too left home to pursue a career in New York, working for a time in magazine publishing. It wasn't until many years later, however, that she was finally able to make it as a writer. Like many first time authors, Stockett encountered a number of rejections and setbacks in trying to get her book published. But her persistence paid off, and as we've seen, her debut novel was a great success, both critically and commercially.