Behind the Scenes at the Museum: a reader's guide to the characters, the family tree and the York places in Kate Atkinson's novel

Behind the Scenes at the Museum is Kate Atkinson’s first novel, and it’s narrated by Ruby Lennox, who grows up above her parents’ pet shop in the shadow of York Minster. I just read it. It was absolutely lovely, and the writing was done in a different style than I’ve seen before. I did have a little bit of trouble keeping up with the character names, which is exactly why this page exists. It’s also one of the books we’re considering for the reading months before our Yorkshire trip.

Below: how the book is built, a family tree with every main character (spoilers hidden until you click), the York places in the book and what they are today, and some questions for your book club.

Is Behind the Scenes at the Museum about a museum?

Here’s what surprised me. I thought from the title that the book would be heavily focused on the museum. It’s not. It’s focused on the places around the museum and everyday life in York and Yorkshire. There is a tie-in, it’s just not as extensive as I first thought when I read the opening lines.

The museum of the title is York Castle Museum, the social history museum in York’s two old prisons, best known for Kirkgate, a full-size Victorian street you can walk into. Atkinson explained the tie-in herself in a 2008 piece for the Guardian. The title came to her in a dream of being alone in the Castle Museum in the middle of the night. As a child she’d walked there regularly with her father from the family shop in Stonegate, and she came to see the novel as doing what the museum does: keeping ordinary things safe. She also said this:

Looking at Behind the Scenes now, I can see that York, not Ruby, is the all-pervading main character of this book.

— Kate Atkinson, “Night in the museum,” The Guardian, 1 November 2008 (read it)

So think of the “museum” as the whole family’s life on display: the button box, the clock on the mantelpiece, the photographs. The real building is the frame. The streets are the story.

How the book is built (read this first)

This is the bit that trips people up, so it’s worth two minutes before you start.

The chapters are Ruby’s. There are 13 of them, each headed with a year, running from 1951 to 1992. Ruby narrates in the first person, and she starts before she’s even born:

I exist! I am conceived to the chimes of midnight on the clock on the mantelpiece in the room across the hall.

— Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), opening line (author’s excerpt)

The footnotes are everyone else’s. After each chapter comes a “footnote,” and it isn’t a footnote in the usual sense. It’s a full story from an earlier generation: Ruby’s great-grandmother Alice, her grandmother Nell and Nell’s brothers and sisters, her mother Bunty, and the men in the family in both World Wars. Each one hangs off a small object from the chapter before. In Chapter One, Ruby’s sister swallows a pink glass button from Nell’s button box, and the text says “see Footnote (i).”

The footnotes aren’t in date order. That’s the part that loses people. You’ll jump from the 1950s to the First World War, back to the 1950s, then to the 1890s. Ruby also tells you some things long before they happen and keeps other things back until the end, on purpose.

Three tips that help:

1. Keep the family tree below open while you read. Every footnote has new names, and most of them are Nell’s siblings or Bunty’s.
2. Note the object. Each footnote picks up something from the chapter before it (a button, a clock, a photograph). Spot the object and you’ll know whose story you’re in.
3. Don’t skip the footnotes. The chapters make much less sense without them, and the big reveals are hidden in both.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum characters: the family tree

• Alicegreat-grandmotherm.Frederick Barkergreat-grandfatherlater m.RachelNell's stepmother
  • Ada, Lawrence, Tom, AlbertNell's siblings
  • Lilliangreat-aunt
    • EdmundBunty's cousin
  • Nellm. Frankgrandmother
    • Cliffordm. Gladysuncle
      • Adriancousin
    • Babsm. Sidneyaunt
      • Daisy & Rosetwin cousins
    • Buntym. Georgemother
      • Patriciasister
      • Gilliansister
      • Rubynarrator
    • Bettyaunt
      • Hopecousin
    • Teduncle

Here’s the family by generation, counted from Ruby. Everything in the tables is spoiler-free: who the person is and how they fit. What happens to them is in the click-to-open boxes underneath each table.

Generation 1: Ruby’s great-grandparents

Name	Who they are to Ruby	Spoiler-free note
Alice Barker	Great-grandmother (Nell’s mother)	The clock on the mantelpiece in the first line was hers. Her story opens the family history.
Frederick Barker	Great-grandfather	Alice’s husband.
Rachel	Nell’s stepmother	She runs the household Nell grows up in.
The French photographer	No relation	A traveling photographer who photographs Alice and her children at the end of the 19th century.

Spoilers: what happens to Alice and the great-grandparents

The family believes Alice died giving birth to Nell, her youngest. She didn't. She ran away with the traveling French photographer (named Jean-Paul Armand in the character lists) to escape a life she couldn't bear, and left all her children behind. She spent her last years back in York, looking for them, and died without finding them. The photographer later dies in Grimsby. Rachel marries Frederick after Alice is gone, and their son Samuel, Nell's half-brother, dies as a small child.

Generation 2: Ruby’s grandmother Nell and her brothers and sisters

In Chapter One, Atkinson gives you Nell’s whole family in one list, which is worth bookmarking: mother to Clifford, Babs, Bunty, Betty and Ted; daughter to Alice; stepdaughter to Rachel; sister to Ada, Lawrence, Tom, Albert and Lillian; wife to Frank.

Name	Who they are to Ruby	Spoiler-free note
Nell	Grandmother (Bunty’s mother)	Alice’s youngest. By 1951 she lives in a small terraced house on Lowther Street.
Frank	Grandfather	Nell’s husband. Already dead when the book opens.
Ada	Great-aunt	Nell’s eldest sister.
Lawrence	Great-uncle	Nell’s brother. “Presumed dead” by 1951.
Tom	Great-uncle	Nell’s brother.
Albert	Great-uncle	Nell’s youngest brother, the golden-haired favorite.
Lillian (Lily)	Great-aunt	Nell’s closest sister. “As good as dead” to the family by 1951.
Jack Keech	No relation	Albert’s best friend.
Percy Sievewright	No relation	An early boyfriend of Nell’s.

Spoilers: what happens to Nell's generation

Ada dies in childhood. Albert is killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, and so is Jack, who was the man Nell meant to marry. Jack is also the father of Lillian's son, Edmund. Lillian never names him, and you only find out on the last page of the footnote before Chapter 11. Lillian leaves for Canada with Edmund and later marries a farmer, Pete Donner. Lawrence runs away to the Amazon. Nell marries Frank instead, and by the time Ruby knows her she's a small, faded woman with very little of the girl from the footnotes left in her.

Generation 3: Ruby’s parents, aunts and uncles

Name	Who they are to Ruby	Spoiler-free note
Bunty (Berenice) Lennox	Mother	Nell’s daughter. Never wanted to marry George, hates the shop and daydreams about being a film star.
George Lennox	Father	About ten years older than Bunty. Runs the pet shop he took over from his father in 1945.
Clifford	Uncle	Bunty’s brother.
Gladys	Aunt	Clifford’s wife.
Babs (Barbara)	Aunt	Bunty’s sister.
Sidney	Uncle	Babs’s husband.
Betty	Aunt	Bunty’s sister.
Ted	Uncle	Bunty’s youngest brother. In the Merchant Navy in 1951.
Edmund	Bunty’s cousin	Lillian’s son, raised in Canada. Comes back to England with the air force in the Second World War.
Bill and Eliza	Uncle and aunt	George’s side of the family.
Buck	No relation	The American sergeant Bunty wanted before George.
Walter and Bernard Belling	No relation	George’s shopkeeper friends: a loud butcher and a plumbing-supplies man.

Spoilers: what happens to Bunty, George and their generation

George has affairs, one with Doreen, an Irish nurse. At Uncle Ted's 1966 wedding, Ruby catches George with a waitress, and he dies of a heart attack straight afterwards. Bernard Belling later becomes Bunty's boyfriend. Edmund dies in a bombing raid on Dresden, leaving Doreen pregnant; she gives the baby up for adoption. In the last chapter Bunty has dementia, and she dies after a stroke in 1992. Clues suggest the nurse with her at the end is Doreen and Edmund's daughter. Before she dies, Ruby finally sees that her mother did love her, in her way.

Generation 4: Ruby, her sisters and cousins

Name	Who they are to Ruby	Spoiler-free note
Ruby Lennox	Herself	The narrator, born 1952. Quiet, watchful, and the youngest.
Patricia Lennox	Eldest sister	Five in 1951. Clever, serious and lonely at school.
Gillian Lennox	Middle sister	Nearly three in 1951. Golden curls, loud, the favorite.
Adrian	Cousin	Clifford and Gladys’s son.
Daisy and Rose	Cousins	Babs’s twin daughters. Ruby shares their attic bedroom when she’s sent to stay.
Hope	Cousin	Betty’s daughter.
Lucy-Vida	Cousin	Bill and Eliza’s daughter.
Kathleen Gorman	Friend	Ruby’s best friend through school.

Spoilers: what happens to Ruby, Patricia and Gillian

Gillian is killed by a car on Christmas Eve 1959, aged 11. (Ruby tells you this in Chapter One, years before it happens.) The book's biggest secret: Ruby had an identical twin, Pearl. Gillian dared Pearl out onto a frozen pond, Pearl went through the ice shortly before the twins' fourth birthday, and Patricia couldn't pull her out. Gillian said Ruby pushed her, Bunty half believed it, and Ruby lost every memory of her twin. She only learns about Pearl as a teenager, when Bernard Belling throws it at her, and remembers what really happened under hypnotherapy at 18. Patricia has a baby that is given up for adoption and leaves home. Ruby goes to Scotland for a summer job and never comes back to live in York; she marries a man who needs to stay in the country, has two daughters and later divorces. The sisters come back together when Bunty is dying.

If you keep losing track, the people who matter most are only eight: Alice, Nell, Lillian, Bunty, George, Patricia, Gillian and Ruby. Everyone else orbits them.

Places in Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Almost all of the book happens in a few streets inside and just outside York’s walls. Atkinson opens with the family’s home:

The Shop (a pet shop) is in one of the ancient streets that cower beneath the looming dominance of York Minster.

— Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), Chapter One (author’s excerpt)

On Ruby’s first day, Bunty walks Gillian down Blake Street to the Museum Gardens, shops at the butcher’s and baker’s, then goes up Gillygate and along Clarence Street to Nell’s house on Lowther Street. You can walk that whole route in under half an hour.

York places in the book

Place in the book	What it is today	Can you visit?
”Above the Shop”, the pet shop beneath the Minster	Atkinson’s own parents’ shop was in Stonegate, and she wrote that the Lennoxes’ shop was there too. It’s a pedestrian street of shops running toward the Minster. Guy Fawkes was born on it.	Yes, it’s a public street. The Lennoxes’ shop is fiction, so there’s no plaque.
York Minster	The Gothic cathedral the shop sits beneath, built 1220–1472.	Yes, paid entry. Plan your visit
Blake Street and the Assembly Rooms	A short street near St Helen’s Square, on the way to the Museum Gardens. The book’s ghosts include dancers at an Assembly Rooms ball.	Yes, on foot.
Museum Gardens and St Mary’s Abbey	Ten acres of botanical gardens by the River Ouse, with the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey. Bunty pays sixpence at the gate.	Yes. Open daily, 9am to 6pm, per the gardens’ visitor page. About the abbey
The Bar Walls	York’s medieval city walls. A peacock flies off them in Chapter One.	Yes, free. Check the council’s walls page for closures.
Gillygate, Clarence Street, Lowther Street	Ordinary streets just north of the walls. Nell lives in a terraced house on Lowther Street.	You can walk past. These are homes, so be polite.
York Castle Museum	The museum of the title, in the old Debtors’ Prison and Female Prison, opened 1938. Its Kirkgate street is what Atkinson loved as a child.	Yes, paid entry. Visitor information

The book’s first chapter also name-checks the city’s famous residents, real and not: Guy Fawkes, Dick Turpin, Robinson Crusoe and “the Reverend Sterne,” author of Tristram Shandy, which Atkinson notes was written in York and first sold in Stonegate. (Crusoe was born in York, according to Defoe. Atkinson asks which of them is real and which a fiction, and that’s the point.) The opening of the novel is her nod to Tristram Shandy, which also starts with its narrator’s conception.

The Shambles isn’t one of the streets named in the opening chapter, but it’s a five-minute walk from Stonegate, and it’s the closest you’ll get today to the tilting, centuries-old building Ruby describes. Our guide to the Shambles in York has the history and the best time to go. For everything else in the city, see our guide to things to do in York.

Places outside York

Place	Who goes there	Today
Harrogate	Only as a ghost: the old Harrogate Tally-Ho coach rattling over the cobbles in Chapter One.	A spa town about 35–40 minutes from York by train. See our Harrogate guide.
Leeds	George’s father dies on a day trip there in 1945.	West Yorkshire’s big city, an easy train ride from York.
Doncaster	George is in a Doncaster pub when Ruby is born.	A South Yorkshire town on the main line south.
Scotland	The Lennoxes go on holiday there with their neighbors, and Ruby goes back later.	Edinburgh, where Atkinson lives, is on the same main line north from York.
Canada	Lillian’s footnotes, and Edmund’s childhood.
The Western Front	The First World War footnotes.	The Somme battlefields in northern France can be visited.
Kansas	Where Buck, the American sergeant, went home to. Bunty’s road not taken.

About Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson was born in York on 20 December 1951, a few months before her narrator. She studied at the University of Dundee and lives in Edinburgh. Behind the Scenes at the Museum was her first novel, and it won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year, beating Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. She later won the Costa Novel Award twice, for Life After Life (2013) and A God in Ruins (2015).

Is it autobiographical? Partly, and she’s been open about it. Like the Lennoxes, her family had a shop in Stonegate, though hers sold medical and surgical supplies. Like Ruby, her first book was a Ladybird book about puppies and kittens. Her family watched the coronation on TV, just like the Lennoxes, and she’s kept her coronation mug. She put it this way in the Guardian: she is not Ruby Lennox, “but she is me.”

Adaptations. We couldn’t find a film or TV version. Her Wikipedia entry notes radio and stage adaptations. Her other books have done well on screen: the Jackson Brodie novels became the BBC One series Case Histories, and Life After Life became a BBC series in 2022.

Book club questions for Behind the Scenes at the Museum

These are ours. The first six are safe for anyone. The last four are in a spoiler box, for when everyone’s finished.

1. Ruby narrates things she couldn’t possibly know, starting with her own conception. Did that bother you, or did you go along with it?
2. Why do you think Atkinson called the family stories “footnotes” when they take up so much of the book?
3. The book is full of objects: a clock, a button, photographs. Which one stuck with you, and why?
4. Atkinson said York, not Ruby, is the main character. Do you agree? What did you learn about the city?
5. Bunty, Nell and Alice all marry men they aren’t sure about. What choices did these women really have?
6. Ruby tells us about some events long before they happen. Did knowing in advance make them easier or harder to read?

Spoilers: four questions for after you finish

7. Looking back, which clues to Pearl did you spot, and which did you miss? (The doctor's surprise at Ruby's birth, the midwife saying "Snap," twice as many photographs of Ruby.)

8. Is Gillian a villain, or just a frightened child who told a lie?

9. Alice and Lillian both disappear from the family. Were they wrong to go?

10. By the end, do you forgive Bunty? Does Ruby?

What to read next

If you liked it, these are the natural next steps:

Book	Year	Why
Life After Life	2013	Another English family across the World Wars, with a heroine who keeps getting another go at life. Costa Novel Award.
A God in Ruins	2015	The companion to Life After Life. It turns a bomber-crew story first told in a footnote here into a whole novel. Costa Novel Award.
Case Histories	2004	The first Jackson Brodie mystery. Then One Good Turn (2006), When Will There Be Good News? (2008), Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), Big Sky (2019) and Death at the Sign of the Rook (2024), in that order.
Human Croquet	1997	Her second novel: another family, another girl narrator, more play with time.
Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne	1759–67	Atkinson says it was written in York and first sold in Stonegate. Her opening is a nod to it.

For more books tied to the places on our route, see the Yorkshire Departure Shelf.

Visiting Ruby’s York

If you want to walk the book, here’s a short loop from the Minster that takes about two hours with stops:

1. Stonegate, from St Helen’s Square up to the Minster. This is the Lennoxes’ street.
2. York Minster, at the top of Stonegate.
3. Blake Street down to the Museum Gardens and St Mary’s Abbey, Bunty’s route on Ruby’s first day.
4. Back through Bootham Bar and up Gillygate, then Clarence Street, if you want to see Nell’s side of town.
5. Through the center and the Shambles to York Castle Museum, south of the Shambles. Leave two hours for Kirkgate and the rest of the museum.

On our October 2027 Yorkshire trip, we go round York Castle Museum together on Thursday 7 October, after lunch at Bettys and a walk through the Shambles. If this is one of the books we read in the months before, you’ll walk into Kirkgate knowing exactly why it’s in the title.