Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina is General Epanchin's youngest daughter, the beauty of the house, twenty years old: proud, ironic, averse to haggling. She questions the prince in front of the family about whether he is asking her to marry him, and abandons him on the day she sees him hesitate before Nastasya Filippovna.
She appears in the Epanchins' little drawing room on the first day, and she is the only one whose face the prince refuses to judge: "Beauty is hard to judge; I am not ready yet." In the album, she dictates to the prince the line that answers a note from Ganya: "I won't haggle." She is harsh with the prince and, at the same time, the only one who takes him seriously as an opponent.
In Part Two she recites the ballad of the poor knight, swapping the letters on the shield for Nastasya's initials. In Part Three she proposes to the prince that he be her friend and help her run away from home, and says he has the right intelligence: "there are two intelligences: the principal and the non-principal." In Part Four she asks in public whether she is being proposed to and, at Darya Alexeyevna's house, demands that he choose between her and Nastasya. When he says Nastasya is "mad," she runs away.
Later, against her parents' wishes, she marries a Polish emigre who claimed to be a count. There are two readings: Aglaya was looking for a hero and found one in an impostor, or she was the only one who wanted to take the prince down from the role of savior of everyone and was defeated by his compassion.