Margarita Nikolayevna is the woman who loves the Master and who, to have him back, agrees to become a witch and preside over Satan's ball. She is the one who drives the action of the novel's second part.
Chapter 19 introduces her: thirty years old, without children, married to a young, handsome, honest man who adored her, and never having known the horrors of sharing an apartment. The narrator asks whether she was happy and answers: "Not for a minute!" She does not know whether the Master is alive, and the impasse is summed up in one sentence: "She had to either forget him or die." The chapter opens with the narrator calling the reader to show him this love: "Who told you there is no true, faithful, eternal love in the world?"
Azazello promises her news of the Master, and she accepts the invitation. She applies the cream, grows young, leaves her husband a goodbye note, and flies off. She destroys the apartment of the critic Latunsky, shouting at him, "It was he who ruined the Master!", and then comforts a frightened boy. At the ball, she receives the dead guests as a queen. At the time of payment, her first request is for Frida, a stranger punished thirty years earlier with a handkerchief; only in the second does she ask for the Master.
Twice she asks on behalf of people she barely knows: for Frida, whom she only met at the ball, and, at the end, for Pilate, whom she had never seen. It is she who leads the Master to the eternal home and promises him: "I will guard your sleep."