In Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1864 novel, The Doctor's Wife, heroine Isabel gazes into the looking glass ‘to see if she really were pretty; or if her face, as she saw it in her day-dreams, was only an invention of her own, like the scenery and the dresses of those foolish dreams’ (155). Throughout The Doctor's Wife, Braddon explores the mirror's dual capacity to fashion fantasy and register reality. In the mirror, Braddon fashions a new symbolic relationship between reading and dressing and, thereby, metafictionally negotiates Isabel's dual position as reader and heroine, subject and object in the novel. Dressing, reading and dreaming in front of the looking glass, Isabel self-consciously acts out the construction and representation of the heroine in the Victorian novel. At the same time, Braddon negotiates shifts in conceptions of feminine and literary subjectivity in The Doctor's Wife and fashions a form of highly self-conscious and culturally receptive authorship and readership in the genred literary climate of the mid-nineteenth century.

The Doctor's Wife traces the life and reading of Isabel Gilbert (née Sleaford) from naïve adolescence to wisdom and maturity. Like many female members of ‘the poorer middle classes’, Isabel has received a ‘half-and-half education’ (Braddon 27). The narrator advises us that she