Curiously, one of the aspects readers most commonly overlook when studying A Tale of Two Cities is the centrality of women in the story. The characters around whom the action revolves in both London and Paris are women: Lucie Manette and Madame Defarge. Additionally, Dickens uses women throughout the book to represent the moral climate of a group or family. Although Dickens may not develop his female characters as fully as he does some of the male characters in A Tale of Two Cities, nevertheless, the women provide the men in the novel with an emotional foundation that causes the men to act for or react against what the women represent.