THE LADY IN THE LOOKING-GLASS by Virginia Woolf

Books at Bedtime by Calming Anxiety The Lady in the Looking Glass by Virginia Woolf. A reflection. People should not leave looking glasses hanging in their rooms. Anymore, they should leave open check books, All Letters, Confessing some hideous crime.

One could not help looking, that summer afternoon. In the long glass that hung outside in the hall. Chants had so arranged it. From the depths of the sofa, in the drawing room, One could see reflected in the Italian glass, Not only the marble top table opposite, But a stretch of garden beyond.

One could see a long grass path, Leading between the banks of tall flowers, Until slicing off an angle, the gold rim cut it off. The house was empty, and one felt, Since one was the only person in the drawing room. Like one of those naturalists who, Covered with grass and leaves, Lie watching the shyest animals, Badgers, otters, Kingfisher's, Moving about freely, themselves unseen. The room that afternoon was full of such shy creatures, Lights and shadows, curtains blowing, Petals falling, things that never happen, so it seems.

If someone is looking, The quiet old country room, With its rugs and stone chimney pieces, Its sunken bookcases, And red and gold lacquer cabinets. It was full of such nocturnal creatures. They came pirouetteing across the floor, Stepping delicately, with high lifted feet, And spread tales, and pecking elusive beaks, As if they had been cranes, The flocks of elegant flamingos, whose pink had faded, Or peacocks, whose trains were veiled with silver, And there were obscure flashes and darkenings too, As if a cuttlefish had suddenly suffused the air with purple, And the room had its passions and rages, And envies and sorrows coming over it, And clouding it, And the human being, Nothing stayed the same for two seconds together, But outside, The looking glass reflected the hall table, The sunflowers, The garden path so accurately and so fixately, That they seemed held there in their reality, Unexcapably. It was a strange contrast, All changing here, Stillness there.

One could not help looking from one to the other. Meanwhile, since all the doors and windows were open in the heap, There was a perpetual sign and ceasing sound. The voice of the transient and the perishing, It seemed, Coming and going like human breath, While in the looking glass things had ceased to breathe, And they still in the trance of immortality. Half an hour ago, The mistress of the house, Isabella Tyson, Had gone down the grass path in her thin, summer dress, Carrying a basket, And had vanished, Sliced off by the guilt room of the looking glass.

She had gone, presumably, Into the lower garden to pick flowers, Or, as it seemed more natural to suppose, To pick something light and fantastic and leafy and trailing. Travelers join, Or one of those elegant sprays of convolvulus, That twine round ugly walls, And burst here and there into white and violet blossoms. She suggested the fantastic and the tremulous convolvulus, Rather than the upright aster, The starched sinia, Or her own burning roses, A light like lamps on the straight posts of their rose trees. The comparison showed how very little, After all these years, One knew about it.

For it was impossible, For any woman of flesh and blood, Of 55 or 60, Should be rarely a rep, Or a tendril. Such comparisons are worse than idle and superficial. They are cruel even, For they come like the convolvulus itself, Trembling between one's eyes, And the truth. There must be truth, There must be a wall.

Yet it was strange that after knowing her all these years, One could not say what the truth about Isabella was. One still made up phrases like this, About convolvulus and travellers joy. As for facts, It was a fact that she was a spencer, That she was rich, That she had bought this house and collected with her own hands, Often in the most obscure corners of the world, And at great risk, And poisonous things, And oriental diseases, The rags, the chairs, The cabinets which now lived their nocturnal life, Before one's eyes. Sometimes, It seemed as if they knew more about her than we.

We who sat on them, Wrote at them, And trod on them so carefully, Were allowed to know. In each of these cabinets, Were many little drones, And each almost certainly health letters, Tied with bows of ribbon, Sprinkled with sticks of lavender or rose leaves. For it was another fact, If facts were what one wanted, That Isabella had known many people, Had had many friends, And thus, If one had the audacity to open a drawer and read her letters, One would find the traces of many agitations or appointments, Of unbraidings, For not having met, Long letters of intimacy and affection, Violent letters of jealousy and reproach, Terrible, final words of parting. For all those interviews and assignations, Had led to nothing, that is, She had never married.

And yet, judging from the mask-like indifference of her face, She had gone through twenty times more, Of passion and experience and those whose loves, A trumpeted forth for all the world to hear. Under the stress of thinking about Isabella, A room became more shadowy and symbolic. The corners seemed darken, The legs of the chairs and tables, More spindly and hieroglyphic. Suddenly, These reflections were ended violently, And yet without a sound, A large black form loomed into the looking glass, Blotted out everything, Stued the table with a packet of marble tablets, Vained with pink and grey, and was gone.

But the picture was entirely altered. For the moment it was unrecognizable, And irrational, and entirely out of focus. One could not relate these tablets to any human purpose, And then, by degrees, Some logical process set to work on them, And began ordering and arranging them, And bringing them into the fold of common experience. One realised at last, That they were merely letters, The man had brought the post.

There they lay, On the marble top table, All dripping with light and colour at first, And crude and unabsorbed, And then it was strange to see, How they were drawn in and arranged and composed, And made part of the picture, And granted that stillness and immortality, Which the looking glass conferred. They lay there, invested, with a new reality and significance, And with a greater heaviness too, As if it would have needed a chisel to dislodge them from the table. And, whether it was a fancy or not, They seemed to have become, Not merely a handful of casual letters, But to be tablets graven with internal truth, If one could read them, One would know everything there was, To be known about Isabella, yes, And about life too. The pages inside those marble looking envelopes, Must be cut deep and scored thick with meaning.

Isabella would come in and take them, One by one, very slowly, And open them, And read them carefully word by word. And then, with a profound sigh of comprehension, As if she had been to the bottom of everything, She would tear the envelope to little bits, And tie the letters together and lock the cabinet, In her determination to conceal what she did not wish to be known. The thought served as a challenge. Isabella did not wish to be known, But she should no longer escape.

It was absurd. It was monstrous. If she concealed so much and knew so much, One must price her open with the first tool that came to hand, The imagination. One must fix one's mind upon her, At that very moment, One must pass on her down there, One must refuse to be put off any longer, With sayings and doings such as the moment brought forth, With dinners and visits and polite conversations.

One must put oneself in her shoes. If one took the phrase literally, It was easy to see the shoes in which she stood, Down in a lower garden, at this moment. They were very narrow and long and fashionable. They were made of the softest and most flexible leather.

Like everything she wore, they were exquisite. And she would be standing under the high edge, In the lower part of the garden, Raising the scissors that were tied to her waist, To cut some dead flower, some overgrown branch. The sun would be down on her face. Into her eyes, but no.

At the critical moment, a veil of cloud covered the sun, Making the expression of her eyes downpour. Was it mocking or tender, brilliant or dull? One could only see the indeterminate outline Of her father faded, fine face looking at the sky. She was thinking, perhaps, That she must order a new neck for the strawberries, That she must send flowers to the Johnson's widow.

That it was time she drove over to see the his pleas in their new house. Those were the things she talked about, a dinner, certainly. But one was tired of the things she talked about at dinner. It was her profound estate of being, That one wanted to catch and turn into words.

A state that is to the mind what breathing is to the body, What one calls happiness or unhappiness. At the mention of those words, it became obvious, surely, That she must be happy. She was rich, she was distinguished, She had many friends, she travelled, She bought rugs in Turkey and blue pots in Persia. She had a news of pleasure, radiated this way and that, From where she stood with her scissors raised, cut the trembling branches, While the lacy clouds veiled her face.

Here, with a quick movement of her scissors, She snipped the spray of traveller's joy, And it fell to the ground. As it fell, surely, some light came into, surely, One could penetrate a little farther into her being. Her mind then was filled with tenderness and regret, To cut an overgrown branch, saddened her, Because it had once lived, and life was dear to her. Yes, and at the same time, The fall of the branch would suggest to her, How she must die herself, and all the futility and even sense of things.

And then again, quickly, catching this thought up, With her instant good sense. She thought life had treated her well, Even if fall she must, it was to lie on the earth, And mold her sweetly into the root of violence. So she stood thinking, Without making any thought precise. But she was one of those reticent people, Whose minds hold their thoughts, Amashed in clouds of silence.

She was filled with thoughts. Her mind was like her room, In which lights advanced and retreated, Came pirouetteing and stepping delicately, Spreading their tails, pecked their way. And then her whole being was suffused, Like the room again, With a cloud of some profound knowledge, Some unspoken regret. And then she was full of locked draws, Stuffed with letters, like her cabinets.

To talk of pricing her open, As if she were an oyster, To use any but the finest and subtlest and most pliable tools upon her, Was impious and absurd. One must imagine. Here was she, in the looking glass, It made one start. She was so far off at first, That one could not see her clearly.

She came lingering and pausing, Here straightening her rose, There lifting a pink to smell it, But she never stopped. And all the time she became larger and larger, Within the looking glass. More and more completely, The person into whose mind one had been trying to penetrate. One verified her by degrees, Fitted the qualities one had discovered into the visible body.

There were her grey green dress, Her long shoes, her basket, And something sparkling at her throat. She came so gradually, That she did not seem to arrange the pattern in the glass, But only to bring in some new element, Which dently moved and altered the other objects, As if asking them, Caretiously, to make room for her. And the letters and the table, And the grass walk in the sunflowers, Which had been waiting, In the looking glass, separated, And opened out, So that she might be received among them. At last, there she was, In the hall, She stopped dead, She stood by the table, She stood perfectly still, At once, the looking glass began to pour over her, A light that seemed to fix her, That seemed, like some acid, To bite off the unessential and superficial, And to leave only the truth.

It wasn't in the throeling spectacle, Everything dropped from her, Clouds, dress, basket, diamond, All that one had called the creep, All that one had called the creeper, And the convolverless. He was the hard-walled manoeuvre. He was the woman herself. She stood naked in that pitiless light, And there was nothing.

Isabella was perfectly empty. She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for nobody.

As for her letters, They were all bills. Look, as she stood there, Old and angular, Vained and lined, With a high nose and her wrinkles neck. She did not even trouble to open them. People should not leave looking glasses, hanging in their room.