Roseanne is a 100-year-old woman—though she is uncertain of her actual age—who is a patient in the Roscommon asylum under the care of Dr. Grene. She has been at Roscommon for 40 years. Previously, she was a patient at Sligo Mental Hospital, where she had been committed by her father-in-law, Old Tom McNulty, and the clergyman, Father Gaunt.

Roseanne loved her father, Joe, but had a distant relationship with her mother, Cissy. Roseanne was raised Presbyterian in Sligo. When she was a teenager, Father Gaunt told her that she was one of the most beautiful girls in Sligo. After her father’s death, she took a job as a server at the nearby Café Cairo. One day, after nearly drowning at a nearby beach, she met her future husband, Tom. Her marriage to Tom is later annulled because of Father Gaunt and Mrs. McNulty’s meddling. While living ostracized in a hut in Sligo, she encounters Tom’s second brother, Eneas, recently returned from war. She finds comfort in Eneas, another social outcast, and they have a sexual encounter that results in her pregnancy. Roseanne gives birth alone on the beach at Strandhill, but her child is mysteriously taken from her.

Because Roseanne has been living in asylums for most of her life, the reader cannot be certain that she is a reliable narrator.