What happenes when a woman looks into a mirror? Does she see her face or does she see herself? Jenijoy La Belle finds that women--both in literature and in life--interact with their reflected images for reasons that far transcend the gratification of vanity. In this thought-provoking account of the role played by the mirror in women's self-conceptions, La Belle focuses attention on literature of the last two hundred years in which a woman confronts her looking glass, and through her perception of how she looks, begins to consider who she is.

Complementing recent feminist studies of female self-representation, this book examines the dynamics of masculine self-representation in nineteenth-century British literature. Arguing that the category “autobiography” was a product of nineteenth-century individualism, the author analyzes the dependence of the nineteenth-century masculine subject on autonomy or self-naming as the prerequisite for the composition of a life history. The masculine autobiographer achieves this autonomy by using a feminized other as a metaphorical mirror for the self. The feminized other in these texts represents the social cost of masculine autobiography. Authors from Wordsworth to Arnold, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Stuart Mill, and Edmund Gosse, use female lovers and family members as symbols for the community with which they feel they have lost contact. In the theoretical introduction, the author argues that these texts actually privilege the autonomous self over the images of community they ostensibly value, creating in the process a self-enclosed and self-referential “community of one.”