Which woman is central to Lovecraft's 'The Thing on the Doorstep'?

Asenath Waite is the central woman in Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep.” She is an occultist from Innsmouth who marries Edward Derby, the story’s troubled central figure and the narrator Daniel Upton’s friend.

Asenath’s influence over Derby becomes increasingly disturbing. After their marriage, Derby displays abilities he never learned, drives cars despite lacking driving experience, and sometimes behaves as though another personality controls him. He tells Upton that Asenath has used his body and suggests that her supposedly dead father, Ephraim Waite, remains involved in the horror.

The story’s central terror is bodily transference: consciousness can move between bodies, making identity, gender, and agency unstable. The narrative strongly implies that Ephraim’s occult experiments have trapped or displaced Asenath’s identity. Lovecraft wrote the tale in August 1933, and it was first published in Weird Tales in January 1937. Keziah Mason and Lavinia Whateley are important women from other stories, while Sonia Greene was Lovecraft’s wife, not a character in this tale.