In the Library
The Lady of Shalott
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1842
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 1k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
“I am half-sick of shadows,” said / The Lady of Shalott.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Wilde hides the truth about a man inside an image the same way a mirror keeps the world at a distance, but his portrait finally tells on him.
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The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Gilman locks a woman alone with a pattern the same way a curse locks a weaver alone with hers, but a husband does the confining instead of magic.
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About the book
Four gray walls and four gray towers on an island in a river, long fields of barley and rye running down to Camelot, and in the tower a weaver who has never looked at any of it with her own eyes. A curse she cannot name forbids it, so she works from a mirror hung above her loom and takes the world secondhand: red cloaks of market girls, a funeral passing by night with plumes and lights, two young lovers lately wed. "I am half sick of shadows," she says, and the line lands like something overheard, the exact ache of a life watched at one remove. Then Lancelot comes riding between the barley sheaves, the sun flaming on his brazen greaves, and she crosses the room and looks down to Camelot. The mirror cracks from side to side. Tennyson has rhymed every stanza shut on her name to bring you to that sound. She goes down to the water, finds a boat beneath a willow, and writes her own name round the prow before she lies down in it.