Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Lady in the Looking Glass, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Perception vs. Reality
Appearances and Materialism
Imagination vs. Realism
Summary
Analysis
An unnamed narrator advises that “people should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms,” comparing this to leaving an open checkbook or a letter confessing to a crime. It’s a summer afternoon, and it’s impossible not to see into the looking-glass in the drawing room, which reflects a table, part of the garden beyond it, and an outdoor path that the mirror’s gold rim cuts off.
The narrator’s opening line is a somewhat mysterious warning, telling readers not to leave mirrors hanging in their homes. The comparison between a mirror and a checkbook or criminal confession seems to imply that mirrors might grant someone access to private truths about a person’s life, which is a confusing claim, since the function of a mirror is simply to reflect things exactly how they appear. In other words, if a secret is concealed, one wouldn’t expect it to be revealed in a mirror—although the narrator seems to believe that this is possible, or even inevitable. By pointing out that the mirror is impossible not to look into, the narrator implies that it is not their fault that they are looking in the mirror and—by extension—prying into the private details the mirror might reveal. Despite the narrator’s confidence that the mirror will reveal secrets, the end of this opening paragraph begins to cast doubt on the mirror’s reliability. After all, the mirror only reflects part of this home, so it seems limited in its ability to give a full picture of what goes on here, and it actively distorts the image of the garden path by cutting it off.
Themes
The narrator, who is alone in the empty house, feels like a camouflaged naturalist who watches shy animals while remaining unseen. The room’s “shy creatures,” though, are “lights and shadows, curtains blowing, petals falling”—things that rarely happen “if someone is looking.” The room is old and cozy, full of rugs and bookcases, and the narrator feels the room’s emotions—“passions and rages” and “envies and sorrows”—ebbing and flowing as though the room were human.
This passage establishes an ambiguity about who (or what) the narrator is. While they seem to be a person who is alone in this house, they are described as “unseen” and as having access to phenomena that rarely happen with a person present. This implies that the narrator might not be a human presence—a possibility that is bolstered later on when the lady of the house comes home and seems not to notice the narrator at all, despite the way the narrator can see her plainly. Woolf never clarifies who or what the narrator is. In contrast to the inhuman qualities of the seemingly-human narrator, Woolf describes the drawing room (which is clearly inhuman) as being essentially alive, and even humanlike. The room’s natural phenomena (curtains swaying, shadows moving) are described as “creatures” and the room itself has “emotions”—all of this makes the room seem more alive and physically present than the narrator itself. Overall, this story critiques an Edwardian literary convention in which an author describes a character’s belongings in order to give insight into that character’s personality. Similarly, in this moment, Woolf is describing inanimate belongings from which the narrator will later draw inferences about the life of their owner. By giving these objects a life of their own, however, Woolf implicitly undermines the notion that these belongings exist to reflect the truth of their owner—these objects have their own truth, it seems, and that truth itself seems constantly in flux and impossible to pin down. Therefore, it seems absurd to draw any inference at all from this room.
Themes
The way the looking-glass reflects the environment “so accurately and so fixedly” shows a world that is “all stillness,” unlike the constantly changing room. The doors and windows are open, which creates a sound like breathing in the room—but nothing breathes in the looking-glass, where everything is in a “trance of immortality.”
Here, the narrator draws a contrast between the physical presence of this home (which seems alive, and even human) and the reflection of the house in the looking-glass, which is still and lifeless. That the house seems to be physically breathing in real life, but then appears immortal and without breath in the looking-glass, implies that the looking-glass is essentially killing life by turning it into a still image. This hints that the looking-glass distorts reality merely by reflecting it, since it cannot capture the shifting atmosphere of a room or the sense of life in the house. This casts doubt on the credibility of the narrator’s future attempts to use the lifeless reflection in the looking-glass as a basis for assumptions about the life of the house’s owner. It also implicitly critiques realist literature, of which the looking-glass—and its supposed ability to reflect the world back accurately and without bias—is a common symbol.
Themes
A half-hour before, Isabella Tyson—the owner of the house—had gone down the path to the garden. As she walked, she was reflected in the looking-glass until she “vanished, sliced off by the gilt rim.” The narrator presumes that Isabella went to pick flowers—perhaps an “elegant” convolvulus whose colorful blossoms are often found on ugly walls. To the narrator, Isabella seems more like the “fantastic and tremulous” convolvulus than more “upright” or “starched” flowers.
The fact that part of the world is “sliced off” by the mirror’s rim shows how the mirror is an imperfect reflection of reality. The mirror does not reflect reality completely, but rather shows only parts of it—an incomplete vision of the world that cannot possibly contain the entire truth. Seemingly aware of this limitation, the narrator decides to turn to another tool—imagination—to attempt to accurately reflect reality. When the narrator tries to come up with an appropriate flower to represent Isabella, the narrator chooses the convolvulus, which seems to suggest that Isabella—like the convolvulus—is a beautiful, entrancing decoration, and that the world in which she is found—like the ugly walls on which the convolvulus grows—is made less dreary by her presence. It’s notable, though, that this description of Isabella is quite abstract: she’s not currently visible, the narrator is merely imagining that she’s picking a convolvulus (readers have no idea whether she has any real connection to this flower), and even the narrator struggles with comparing her to a flower, which suggests that the metaphor might not be all that illuminating.
Themes
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This comparison, the narrator reflects, shows how little anyone knows about Isabella—after all, a “flesh and blood” woman is nothing like a flower. Such comparisons can even be cruel, as they (like the convolvulus) stand in the way of seeing the truth about Isabella. “There must be truth,” the narrator muses, “there must be a wall.” Despite this, even after years of knowing Isabella, nobody can say much about who she is. What is known is that Isabella is a “spinster,” she is rich, and she collected the objects in her house “at great risk” to herself while traveling the world.
Here, building on the previous hints that using a flower as a metaphor for Isabella is somewhat arbitrary and imperfect, the narrator seems to suggest that imagination is also a flawed tool. After all, the narrator is pointing out that Isabella is a real person with real truth about her, which contrasts to the immaterial, speculative nature of metaphor and imagination. This moment implicitly calls attention to the fact that the reader is learning about Isabella through a written story narrated by a character who is not directly observing Isabella. By emphasizing the reader’s distance from “flesh and blood” Isabella, Woolf implicitly asks readers to doubt what is being said about her. The narrator compares the truth of Isabella the wall that is partially hidden behind the flowering convolvulus. Since Isabella herself was previously compared to a convolvulus, the implication here is perhaps that Isabella’s bright and beautiful exterior might be masking an uglier inner truth, or that comparing Isabella to a flower in the first place obscures the truth (metaphorically, “the wall”) of who she is.
Themes
The narrator notes that the furniture in Isabella’s house seems to know her better than the people in her life. The cabinets in her house have small drawers that “almost certainly” hold letters from her “many friends.” If one opened them, the narrator imagines, one would find records of these friendships: intimacy, jealousy, and other markers of the “passion and experience” Isabella has lived. The room becomes more “shadowy and symbolic” due to the “stress” of thinking about Isabella.
The narrator’s suggestion that Isabella’s furniture “knows” her better than the people in her life may be facetious, given that furniture cannot actually “know” anything at all. It's possible this is a humorous dig at Edwardian literary conventions, again showing Woolf's skepticism that a list of a character's material objects can really accurately convey any core truth about them. The narrator's suggestion that the letters would reveal everything about Isabella seems more genuine, however, demonstrating the narrator’s desire to dig beneath the surface of things and gain real insight into who Isabella truly is. The drawers and the envelopes represent how a thing’s superficial appearance can obscure its truth; the drawers hide the envelopes, and the envelopes hide the contents of the letters, where the narrator believes the real truth can be found.
Themes
Suddenly, the narrator’s musings are interrupted by a “large black form” that looms into the looking-glass, blocking the view of everything else. The form deposits a “packet of marble tablets” on the table and vanishes. For a moment, the image in the looking-glass is “unrecognisable and irrational,” but then the narrator realizes that the tablets are a stack of letters brought by the postman.
Earlier in the story, the looking-glass sliced off sections of Isabella's house, which called into question the looking-glass’s ability to reflect the truth of what happens in Isabella’s home. Here, the mirror’s credibility gets worse: not only does it reflect a limited picture of reality, but it’s also a distorted one. In this moment, the mirror is unable to accurately reflect such banal things as letters, and it even distorts the postman beyond the narrator’s ability to recognize him as human. Here, the mirror seems to actively and even wilfully distort reality in strange and unpredictable ways. This is surprising and disturbing, showing how perhaps realism, as represented by the mirror, is just as flawed as imagination as a tool for accessing truth. This section is powerful because it is one of the first moments in the story that so explicitly shows the looking-glass not only limiting but perhaps actively warping the truth.
Themes
The letters appear still and immortal in the looking-glass, and the narrator imagines that if one could read them, they would know everything about Isabella and even about life itself. The narrator imagines Isabella reading the letters and letting out “a profound sigh of comprehension” as if she, too “had seen to the bottom of everything.” Then, the narrator concludes, Isabella would lock the letters in a drawer to “conceal what she did not wish to be known.”
Though the narrator seems convinced that the letters will provide access to the truth, if only they can be read, the narrator has no evidence for this claim. Interestingly, rather than attempting to read the letters, the narrator instead uses their appearance in the mirror as a jumping-off point for an elaborate invented scene where Isabella both reads the letters and decides to hide them from the viewer. Aside from a view of the envelopes in the mirror, and this completely imaginary image of Isabella opening them, the narrator has no information about what is inside the envelopes. Thus this passage shows the narrator mistaking this surface detail—the visible envelope—for real information about what can be found under the envelope's surface. Perhaps the letters are correspondence, perhaps they are bills, perhaps they are something else altogether. But because the letters are never actually opened, this moment cannot tell the audience anything substantive about Isabella or the letters themselves. Instead, this moment testifies to the way the narrator mistakes surface details for inner truth, and how—even with the help of imagination—these surface details do not provide any real insight into Isabella's inner world.
Themes
This thought is a “challenge” to the narrator, who believes that, even though Isabella does “not wish to be known,” she “should no longer escape.” Since Isabella conceals her life and knowledge, “one must prize her open” with the “first tool that came to hand: the imagination.” The narrator believes one should “fasten her down there” and refuse to accept mere polite conversation—instead, one should “put oneself in her shoes.”
This is a vaguely threatening moment that hints at the fact the narrator may have sinister motives for prying into Isabella’s life. It's interesting to note that this "challenge" comes not from any real-life action by Isabella, but rather, simply the narrator's imagined scene, in which Isabella hides the letter from view after reading it. Despite the fact that Isabella's reluctance to share the letter (and thus the details of her life) is completely imagined, the narrator's response to this is quite violent. The language here is aggressive, implying that Isabella might want to escape from the narrator’s insistence on forcing her to reveal inner details about her life she would rather not share.
Themes
The narrator describes the elegant shoes that Isabella is wearing down in the garden. At that moment, Isabella must be pruning with the sun in her eyes, but then “at the critical moment,” a cloud covers the sun, making it hard to see whether the look on Isabella’s face is “mocking or tender, brilliant or dull.” So the narrator muses about what Isabella might be thinking—that she needs to send flowers to a widow and visit some acquaintances at their new home, perhaps, which are the kinds of things she would say at dinner. But “one was tired of” these sorts of banalities, wanting access instead to Isabella’s “profounder state of being.”
The narrator takes their own suggestion about putting oneself in Isabella’s shoes literally here, describing her actual shoes in what may be a moment that satirizes realism’s focus on hyper-specific descriptions of clothing and other material objects. The narrator then pivots from realism to imagination, picturing Isabella in the garden. Yet even in this imagined scene, the thoughts that the narrator imagines Isabella pondering are quite mundane: remembering minor social obligations or little errands she needs to do. The narrator quickly becomes tired of their own imaginings of what Isabella might be thinking, and signals that they will try to delve deeper. The narrator seems to be straining against their own impulses to keep things on a surface level, and it's an interesting point of tension in the story that seems to ask whether the narrator will actually be able to dive deeper and truly access Isabella's "profounder state."
Themes
The narrator believes that Isabella must be happy, given her many friends, her wealth, her extensive travels, and her exquisite belongings. As Isabella stands in the garden with the clouds masking her expression, there are many “avenues of pleasure” surrounding her.
Despite the fact that the narrator has vowed to dig deeper, the narrator continues to rely on superficial details here (including Isabella’s riches and her travels) as proof of her happiness. And—in an image that further casts doubt on the narrator's ability to truly access Isabella's inner state—even in this imagined scene in the garden, clouds obscure Isabella’s facial expression. The narrator cannot see whether Isabella is smiling or frowning in this made-up scene, showing how, even with imagination, Isabella's true emotional state is still obscured. Thus these clouds seem to suggest that imagination cannot provide full access to someone’s inner thoughts, just as the narrator's continued focus on the surface details of Isabella's life—like the "avenues of pleasure" available to her—call into question the narrator's ability to dig beneath those details and achieve the goal of discovering Isabella's authentic truth.
Themes
However, as Isabella snips a branch in the garden, the narrator imagines a little light falling on her face, allowing for more insight into her mind. Isabella feels a “tenderness” at cutting something living, given that life itself is “dear to her.” This act of cutting causes Isabella to reflect on her own mortality—both the “futility and evanescence of things” and the fact that her life has been good.
This imagined scene is one of the most beautiful in the book. Despite the fact that the narrator has just cast doubt on imagination’s ability to access truth, the ornate language in this passage makes a case for imagination’s aesthetic usefulness. Even if imagination is an imperfect storytelling tool that may not give the narrator full access into Isabella's inner life, in this section of the story, it at least allows the narrator to convey something beautiful: a poetic reflection on life, on mortality, and on the impermanence of things—something a literal and direct reflection in the mirror would not be able to offer on its own.
Themes
The narrator compares Isabella’s mind to her room, with her thoughts moving through it like lights “pirouetting and stepping delicately” across the floor. Isabella’s “whole being” is—like the room—flooded with “some profound knowledge, some unspoken regret,” and—like her cabinets—Isabella is “full of locked drawers, stuffed with letters.” The narrator decides that the talk of “prizing her open” is “impious and absurd,” since one must use the “finest and subtlest” tools to access Isabella.
Here, the narrator seems to regret their earlier—and somewhat sinister—goal of prizing Isabella open, even against her will. This aggression disappears from the narrator's language, replaced by a respectful and almost reverent posture toward Isabella. At this point, however, the narrator has changed their mind about many things in the story multiple times and is clearly a somewhat unreliable figure when it comes to their opinions of both Isabella and their own motives. For this reason, it isn't clear whether the narrator will actually follow through on this commitment to only prizing Isabella open with the "subtlest" of tools. It’s also worth noting that the narrator’s shift towards a less aggressive posture does not mean that the narrator is backing down from their initial goal of gaining access to Isabella’s inner truth, even if she doesn’t want it to be found. So this change of heart is mostly superficial: a shift in tone, rather than in intention.
Themes
Suddenly, Isabella herself is visible in the looking-glass. She is returning from the garden, walking slowly and becoming gradually larger and more visible in the frame. As she comes closer, she becomes more and more “the person into whose mind one had been trying to penetrate.” Since she approaches slowly, Isabella’s presence doesn’t disturb the “pattern” of objects in the looking-glass. Instead, the image seems to “make room for her,” and the objects in her home seem to move to “receive” her.
This is a strange moment. Though theoretically the entire story is about the titular "Lady" in the looking-glass, Isabella has not actually appeared yet in the flesh. For this reason, even though Isabella enters the scene gradually, her arrival feels somewhat abrupt, showing how far the narrator’s observations of Isabella's home and flights of fancy have gone from the real-life details of Isabella herself. Nevertheless, at least as the narrator sees it, this real-life Isabella also fits neatly into the image of her as reflected in the mirror; this is supported by the fact that as she approaches, Isabella doesn’t disturb the “pattern” in the looking-glass reflection at all. This suggests that the narrator is moving toward trusting the image in the mirror and whatever truth it may convey, even if earlier passages have cast doubt on the mirror's ability to provide a complete and non-distorted reflection of reality.
Themes
Isabella stops in the hall and the looking-glass casts its light over her, a light that “seem[s] to fix her” the way an acid would strip what is “unessential and superficial,” leaving “only the truth.” To the narrator, this new view of Isabella is an “enthralling spectacle.” Everything has “dropped from her”: the “clouds, dress, basket, diamond” are gone. There is no more “convolvulus”—only the “hard wall beneath.”
The narrator seems rather cruel again, leaving behind their reverent posture toward Isabella to instead enjoy the “spectacle” of seeing her truth revealed. The finer details of Isabella's life seem to disappear in the looking-glass's harsh light, and the narrator claims to be finally seeing the truth of who Isabella is (that is, the “wall” of truth previously hidden by the metaphorical convolvulus). Yet despite the narrator's seeming clarity that this vision of Isabella is the ultimate truth, the narrator has been proven time and time again to be unreliable. In this moment, the narrator has no more substantive information about Isabella than they had before; after all, it is still only Isabella’s image in the glass (her superficial appearance) this is visible.
Themes
The narrator sees “the woman herself.” In the “pitiless light” of the looking-glass, there is “nothing”: Isabella has no thoughts and no friends. The letters from friends are actually bills, and she doesn’t bother to open them as she stands there, “old and angular, veined and lined.”
As the narrator sees her in this closing image, Isabella is as unattractive on the outside as she is empty on the inside. This description of her is as “pitiless” as the light reflected in the mirror, calling into question whether it is actually the looking-glass that is pitiless—or perhaps the narrator themselves, who seems unwilling to see any potential redeeming qualities in Isabella. This idea that the narrator may actually be the "pitiless" one is further supported by the fact that story leaves ambiguous whether the idea of Isabella as friendless and with “no thoughts” is accurate or not. It may not be the light reflected in the mirror that is harsh and unrelenting; rather, it may the narrator, rendered biased by their own jealousy toward Isabella. Similarly, it is also possible that the looking-glass is in fact revealing a truth about Isabella, however partial or distorted this truth may be; the story leaves room for both these interpretations.
Themes
The narrator warns again that “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms.”
This final sentence—which is an echo of the story’s opening line—is ambiguous in meaning. Since the narrator is relaying this line after experiencing a moment of supposed clarity about Isabella, it seems that the narrator thinks it was unwise for Isabella to leave the looking-glass out, since it (supposedly) allowed the narrator to glimpse the bleak reality of her (lack of) inner life. However, the fact that this final sentence also repeats part of the story's first sentence adds to the feeling that the story has, in a way, led nowhere. Despite the narrator's assuredness that they have gained some insight into who Isabella truly is, it is actually impossible to know whether any of the narrator's claims about Isabella are true, giving the story a circular feel and leaving the narrative right back where it started: with a confusing piece of advice that leaves room for many different interpretations and symbolic possibilities.
Themes
