French language Q&A Forum

How do you know 'lui' in the instance below is a woman?

Il n'avait jamais pu lui avouer la vérité?

Unlike the examples in the explanation materials, THE question /answer is incorrect.  The review materials limit the number of people to one actor and one actress (only two people). In the exam question, their is an unknown number of people (could be 100) therefore the person speaking is unknown.

After trying this exercise several times in the past few weeks, I'm still trying to figure out 

1) why "They stayed there to watch..."  is "Elles sont restées..." instead of "Elles y sont restées.."  Is "there" implied and therefore the "y" is unnecessary?

2) why s'approcher is used in the instance of the people approaching the fence while approcher is used in the horses timid approach. Both connote gradually moving closer, don't they?

I am confused because I thought 2nd and 3rd verbs were always spelled out in full so i put aller here.

In the following:

ATTENTION

But I've been given the following information which I am struggling to reconcile with:

When you combine personal pronouns with prepositions such as avec (with), chez (at the home of), and pour (for), they change their form.

Daniel habite près d’ici. On va chez lui ? Daniel lives close by. Shall we go to him?
Sarah veut nous rejoindre. Il y a de la place pour elle? Sarah wants to join us. Do we have space for her? 

**why do we use elle in the above? isn't Sarah an indirect subject here? "Is there a space [for] Sarah**

I selected nationality with Capital letter, but it says I selected lower case