Character Analysis
"A lonely girl sewing by a lonely window", (1.41) Marianna lives in a cottage in the mountains, waiting for her brother to come home. Or does she? The narrator says his trip to see her is "a true voyage" (1.20)—but he also says she's in fairy land and you never get a sense of how he gets from his own home to hers. He's just there, at her house, all at once, and then "Enough" (1.96), he's back home.
She looks out her window and sees his house and imagines that he is happy, and the narrator looks out from his piazza and imagines that she is unhappy. Are either of them real? Or is it just dreams dreaming? When the narrator says at the end that he is "haunted by Marianna's face, and many as real a story," (1.97) that could mean that Marianna is true and he's haunted by other true stories. But it could also mean that he is haunted by dreams.
All of which is to say—Marianna. She's a fiction. Just like all the stories.
Marianna's Timeline