The Lady in the Looking Glass Themes

In “The Lady in the Looking-glass: A Reflection,” Virginia Woolf describes an unnamed narrator viewing the home of a woman named Isabella Tyson, either through a looking-glass that hangs in the hall or through imagined scenes. The looking-glass reflects Isabella’s belongings and the home’s general ambiance, allowing the narrator to speculate about Isabella’s inner life. The looking-glass, however, is flawed and distorted, and the narrator’s own characterizations of Isabella seem rooted more in imagination…

In “The Lady in the Looking-glass: A Reflection,” Woolf questions a literary convention of the Edwardian Era in which authors would describe a character by describing, at length, the physical objects they owned. In the process of questioning this convention, she also explores whether having beautiful things can actually make a person happy, and, more generally, the nature of the connection between a person’s material possessions and their inner emotional state. Though the narrator observes…