Marisa Coulter (née Delamare) is a fictional character in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and one of the main antagonists of Northern Lights. She is the former lover of Lord Asriel and is usually called "Mrs Coulter". Description Mrs Coulter is 35 years old in the third novel, The Amber Spyglass. She is described as being "beautiful and young" with "sleek black hair" that "framed her cheeks" and slim, though later accounts of her describe her as having blonde or "golden" hair. Such details of a character's physical appearances are uncommon in His Dark Materials. There is a reference in Lyra's Oxford to Mrs Coulter having written an academic work called 'The Bronze Clocks of Benin'. In the books, she is portrayed as an elegant and cool-minded sophisticate with social savoir faire, but she is also calculating, power-hungry and ruthless. She has political connections, and is highly placed and trusted in the Church's hierarchy, who give her a large degree of autonomy. She arranges for Iorek Byrnison, the heir to the throne of the armoured bears, to be exiled, and plots to dominate the new king, turning the bears into her subordinates. When Lyra is in danger in Bolvangar, her maternal instincts override her other loyalties and she rescues Lyra, although in the second book of the trilogy she still expresses no qualms about killing her to prevent the Fall.<ref>The Subtle Knife p. 328:"What will you do to her? What will you do?""Why, I shall have to destroy her", said Mrs Coulter, "to prevent another Fall. Why didn't I see this before? It was too large to see".</ref> However, by the third book she finds herself torn, ultimately feigning loyalty to betray the Church and finally giving up her life to save Lyra. Metatron, the Regent of the Authority describes her character in "the most searching examination Marisa Coulter had ever undergone", stripping away "all shelter and deceit" and describing that he sees: "Corruption and envy and lust for power. Cruelty and coldness. A vicious probing curiosity. Pure, poisonous, toxic malice. You have never from your earliest years shown a shred of compassion or sympathy or kindness without calculating how it would return to your advantage. You have tortured and killed without regret or hesitation; you have betrayed and intrigued and gloried in your treachery. You are a cess-pit of moral filth". Despite this, Metatron describes her as lovelier