The narrator’s voice in the story is so strong as to qualify as a character: In many ways the narrator is more knowable in the story than Isabella is. The narrator is a self-conscious observer in many ways drawn from the omniscient narrators of pre-Modernist writing. They feel like “one of those naturalists” observing the “shy creatures” of Isabella’s home (2). The story immediately sets up the realist premise that that narrator is seated in Isabella’s drawing room and can see that room, along with a slice of the house and garden captured in the mirror on the wall. The identity and role of the narrator is ambiguous, however, and Woolf sets up this traditional premise only to explode it as the story progresses.

At first the narrator is “one,” a more nebulous pronoun that can mean “I,” “we,” or “you.” The use of “one” as a narrative point of view in literature is highly unusual and deliberately ambiguous. It is (or was at the time) considered more correct than more personal pronouns and was standard use in upper-class spoken English. This is partly because it is simultaneously impersonal and inclusive—i.