The Mirror
by Lynne Freed

List Price: $11.95
Pages: 256
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345426894
Publisher: Ballantine Books

Designed to appear like an antique diary, with photographs tucked into each chapter, the fictional memoir of a beautiful, ruthlessly ambitious American woman follows her path to wealth and power in South Africa between the two world wars.

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1. What is the role of The Mirror in the story? In what way might the novel itself be considered a mirror?

2. Agnes undertakes many risks in the course of the novel. What are they? Are there risks she avoids taking? Can you explain this?

3. What are the things that Agnes determines for herself as either desirable or necessary? Do these change over the course of her life? What are the things she cannot make happen? What, if any, are her unfulfilled longings?

4. What does Agnes give up for her freedom? What does she gain?

5. Are independence and love mutually exclusive for this main character? What role does love play for the other characters in the book?

6. What are the values that Agnes subscribes to? What about Sarah or Leah? How would you rank these same values for yourself?

7. What other female protagonists are memorable for pushing the edges of conventional society? How are they like Agnes and how do they differ? Are there male counterparts that you would put in the same category? How do they differ from the female characters?

8. From the beginning of the novel Agnes wears a small purse around her neck. What is the meaning of this image? When the purse reappears at different points later in the novel, is its meaning the same?

9. What issues of class are brought up in the novel? Does class play a role in the story?

10. Why does Agnes identify the men and the mother-in-law in her story without reference to their names?

11. How would you describe the tone of the narrative? What sort of voice and manner of speaking do you imagine the narrator to have?

12. Are there any quotations from the novel that you found striking? Choose a few and discuss how they affected you.

13. Describe the relationship between Agnes and Leah. What other mother-daughter characters in novels or film come to mind? What comparisons can you make?

14. Compare the ways Sarah, Agnes, and Leah each looks at her own past and future. How do those different views influence the way they see themselves and each other?

15. Can you remember your own earliest sense of yourself? How did it come about? Did it change over time? How did you get a sense of that change?

16. Leah finds herself caught between two strong and different women. Is she like either of them? How does she deal with their competition for her?

17. Agnes says toward the end of the novel that she was "homesick for the future I'd once looked forward to." What do you think she means by that?

18. What themes of the novel are revisited in the last chapter? What conclusions does the narrator come to about these ideas?

19. What is it in the Byron poem at the front of the book that is well suited to the novel?

20. This novel is written in the form of a journal or memoir. Of what value is it to the narrator to tell her story? If you were writing a memoir of your own life, what sorts of truths would you tell or omit? On what basis would you make those selections?  

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"A poetically robust tale . . . Candor, passion, and love of life put Agnes on par with [Chaucer's] Wife of Bath, while Freed adds the treats of succulent place and period flavor, even 20 black-and-white photographs of the very places where Agnes walked, slept, loved, and lived. A pleasure. "

——Kirkus Reviews

(starred review)

"Lynn Freed has the remarkable ability to move her readers even as she compels them to think. The Mirror's heroine, Agnes La Grange, is the sort of woman we all long to be: strong yet warm, intelligent yet independent, passionate yet nevertheless fierce in her requirements for love. The story of the consequences of those requirements creates a lesson in the nature of love itself. "

——Linda Gray Sexton, Author of Searching for

Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother Anne Sexton

"The Mirror "wonderfully carries off that hardest of all literary effects--it feels effortless and therefore absolutely real, as if Freed just sat down by the fire one night and told the tale of a woman she'd once known. . . . Freed's language brings Agnes's world so vividly to life. "

——Elle Magazine

"Here's a good book to settle down with on a chilly winter afternoon. Start it right after lunch, and you'll be done in time for dinner--closing the book with the distinct impression that you have just wiled away several hours in the company of one of the most headstrong yet endearing women you've ever encountered. "

——Orlando Sentinel

"What a remarkable gift Lynn Freed has given us in this beautifully crafted story. The Mirror is sheer pleasure to read. "

——Arizona Daily Star

"A thoroughly satisfying tale to savor . . . Freed's latest novel exhibits the splendidly controlled prose of a master at once maintaining a remarkable level of tension in combination with surprising displays of humor. Her powerfully realized tale tells the story of a bold young woman's quest for a life fully lived. "

——Booklist

"Agnes is Moll Flanders without excuses--an enchanting and infuriating heroine, both admirable and wrongheaded in her commitment to honesty and her pursuit of adventure. "

——Entertainment Weekly

"Lynn Freed is the absolute master of one of the great themes of contemporary life--a woman's ascent toward strength and self-definition. Funny thing is, her narratives are timeless and universal and transcending, and The Mirror is probably the most clear-eyed novel you'll read this year. This is want I want from a book, from a writer, and from a passionate heart. "

——Bob Shacochis

"In prose as precise and alluring as a spray of diamonds, The Mirror traces a remarkable woman's saga. It's a sexy, compelling, highly original retelling of Pygmalion, only in Lynn Freed's extraordinary novel, the narrator is both clay and sculptor, muse and visionary, a true heroine of her own making. "

——Jill Ciment, author of Half a Life

"A woman in full possession of her powers is a thrilling sight, and the powerful woman at the center of The Mirror conducts her life on her own unequivocal terms. The results are surprising and erotic, rendered in brisk, mordant prose by a writer with no interest in half measures. "

——Amy Hempel

"Sparse and hard-eyed, shrewd without being cynical, The Mirror is an engaging tale, masterfully told. "

——Irini Spanidou, Author of God's Snake

" Agnes's journey is . . . told in the memorable voice of an ambitious, stubborn, sexually independent woman who won't allow a moment of boredom, either in her life or in the telling of it. . . . Her passion, candor, and fascination with life are contagious, not only to those around her but to her readers as well. "

——American—Statesman

(Austin, TX)

"A glance back through Western literature shows us that, at least in fiction, the Western world has always enjoyed females independent of the patriarchal laws, economic conventions and cultural repression of their day. Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, Emile Zola's Nana, Thackeray's Becky Sharp, Chaucer's Wife of Bath--all are examples of heroic women who lived their lives by their own rules. And now, thanks to author Lynn Freed, we have a new heroine. "

——The Sentinel

(Santa Cruz)

"Sultry and forthright, Agnes is a vivid character, and her story should appeal to fans of literary fiction. "

——Library Journal