Describe the character of Miss Brill in "Miss Brill."

It is hard not to feel incredibly sorry for the character
of Miss Brill in this excellent short story. We are told that she teaches English and
that she also reads the newspaper to an "invalid old gentleman" four times each week.
However, without a doubt, the highlight of her week is going each Sunday at the same
time to listen to the band in the Jardins Publiques--the public gardens. This is clearly
an important event for her, as she takes great care in the way that she dresses. This
time of the week is so important for her because she loves watching the other people in
the gardens and listening in on their conversations:

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She had become really quite expert, she thought,
at listening as though she didn't listen, at sitting in other people's lives just for a
minute while they talked round
her.

It is this "sitting in
other people's lives" that is the central attraction, as we can infer that Miss Brill
has no "life" of her own to "sit" in, and therefore she is reduced to living other
people's lives vicariously through such trips to distract her from the emptiness of her
own life. As she observes more and more, she imagines that the scene before her is like
a "play" in which she too has a part and is significant. However, this dream of hers is
punctured rather suddenly and rudely when a couple that she imagines to be "the hero and
heroine, of course, just arrived from his father's yacht" make fun of her and send her
back home to her "cupboard" of a room in tears.

Miss Brill
therefore is a single woman who is profoundly lonely and isolated, and goes to the
gardens each week to savour something of the life that she herself has never
experienced. Although she tries to forget the empty reality of her existence by
elaborate illusions and fantasies designed to give her significance and meaning, and
link her in with others, at the end of the tale she is forced to confront her shadow of
a life.