Ophelia is a young woman in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. She is the daughter of Polonius, and she loves Hamlet. He pushes her away; her father is killed; her world falls apart; and she loses her mind. Later she is found drowned in a river among flowers. The play lets us wonder whether she meant to die or simply fell — later readers still argue about that, so the tidy schoolbook line “she goes crazy and dies” is tidier than the play itself. Painters and films often show her floating in the water with flowers in her hair, so the name can also call up that picture of a gentle person broken by other people’s plots. Some families give a girl this name. A small moon of the planet Uranus is named after the character too.