Virginia Woolf

I had to read Virginia Woolf’s work The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection several times before most of it made any sense at all to me. Though I did find it a bit difficult, I really enjoyed reading the work because of the way that each line really builds upon the previous even though they sometimes appear to have nothing to do with one another. At first I did not quite understand the first line “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime” because it the comparison seems almost irrelevant. However, after I read the line again and thought about it for a while I began to think of it as meaning that having to face yourself everyday, for some people can be as detrimental as leaving evidence of a murder for someone to stumble upon.

For some, the life that they live is not what they truly want and they know that, therefore it can be difficult for them to look at their own reflection and what they have become. Though I may be getting off topic from the reading, the first line sparked all kinds of thoughts in my head and I started to think about how hard it is to look at yourself in the mirror and be pleased with what you see when you know that you have done something wrong. Though the topics that one could find within Woolf’s poem are very interesting, I was really taken back by the way that one line of this work could make me feel and just how much that one line could make me rethink a simple mirror, or rather the reflection that is shown in that mirror.