Tennyson gave the Victorians a heroine who could only see life secondhand. Under a curse she doesn't understand, the Lady of Shalott watches the road to Camelot in a mirror and weaves what passes into a tapestry. Reapers, market girls, knights, a funeral, a pair of newlyweds: she gets all of it as reflection. Then Lancelot rides by singing, she turns to the window, the mirror cracks from side to side, and she knows she's going to die. She goes anyway. Waterhouse's 1888 painting, now at Tate Britain, catches her after the choice is made, loosening the chain on the boat that will carry her downriver.
The poem rewards reading as a parable about art. The mirror is the artist's way of seeing, safe and at one remove, and the tapestry is what that distance produces. For most of the poem she's content with it. The turn comes with a line anyone who has spent too long indoors will recognize: "I am half sick of shadows." What breaks the curse isn't really Lancelot, who barely registers her. It's her own hunger to see something directly, once.
The Pre-Raphaelites were obsessed with her. When Edward Moxon published an illustrated Tennyson in 1857, William Holman Hunt drew her tangled in her own threads and Rossetti drew Lancelot looking down at her dead face. Waterhouse, born in 1849, a year after the Brotherhood formed, came to her a generation later and couldn't let her go. He painted her three times: leaving in the boat in 1888, turning to see Lancelot in 1894, and finally, in 1915, stretching wearily at her loom under the title "I Am Half-Sick of Shadows." Few painters return to one character across nearly thirty years. It reads like a private argument he never settled.
What he chose to include in 1888 matters. Two of the three candles at the prow have already gone out. A crucifix stands beside them, as if the boat were a small chapel. And her tapestry, years of careful work made from reflections, trails over the side into the river. Everything she created from a distance is going with her to Camelot, where nobody will know what it was.
That ending is the cruelest part of Tennyson's poem, and the part people forget. The people of Camelot crowd around the boat and cross themselves in fear, and Lancelot, the man she died to look at, only remarks that she has a lovely face and asks God to lend her grace. He never knew she existed. The poem refuses to reward her choice in any romantic sense. Her only reward is that, for a few miles of river, she was living in the real world.
She keeps turning up in later culture. Anne Shirley acts out the poem in a leaky boat in Anne of Green Gables and has to be rescued. Agatha Christie borrowed The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side for a murder mystery, and Loreena McKennitt set the whole poem to music. Her story lands especially hard now, when so much of life reaches us as reflections on a glass screen. Tennyson's question is still open: how long can you watch the world before you need to walk out into it?
Waterhouse's 1888 Lady of Shalott appears on our: