Edda Lowe

What it looks like, and what it does

A woman who looks no more than thirty standing beside a tall brass-framed mirror. In the glass, an old woman in the same clothes, thin, leaning on the lower frame. On the mirror's shelf, a blanket folded on the glass side.

The reflection keeps to the glass and tends it. Edda sits beside it. They speak in ways that visitors cannot hear, and that Edda says are mostly about nothing.

What is known

Edda Lowe was photographed for a regional paper in 1998 and has not changed since. The mirror hangs in her flat above an antiques shop. Visitors see their own reflections normally in it. Hers is the only one that ages.

The reflection is dying of her years. It wears her clothes, sleeps in the glass at night, and sometimes knocks on it from within. Lowe visits every day with tea she cannot pass through. She has refused several buyers, one of whom offered a fortune.

What it can do

• Her reflection carries her ageing, her illnesses and her injuries
• Stops her ageing for as long as the glass is intact

Where it stops

• If the mirror is broken or sold, the whole of her ageing returns to her in a single night
• The reflection cannot speak to anyone but her

An encounter

Obi reported the frame as Victorian and the glass as “not appraisable.” As he left, the woman in the glass asked him steadily whether the shop downstairs was still open, because she would like a cup of tea. He did not tell Edda. He bought one and left it on the stair.

Marcus Obi, valuer, Flat above an antiques shop, Dunmore Row, A valuation visit, three hours

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Photographs across twenty-six years show an unchanged woman and a progressively older reflection.
• rumor: That four earlier owners of the mirror each stopped ageing for a time.
• interpretation: The arrangement may be a kindness in both directions, which is why neither of them will end it.

Still unresolved

Edda says the reflection volunteered. The reflection says Edda did. Neither will say who asked first.

Where it has been recorded

• Dunmore Row (confirmed) — Recorded by Marcus Obi, valuer.

Stories about it

• The Mirror Keeps Her Years (Entity story, 4 min) — A shop assistant tells an insistent antique buyer that the brass-framed glass upstairs is not appraisable, and privately pieces together why the woman who owns it has looked twenty-nine since 1998.

Connected entities

• The Carp of the Small Room — Both hold a life behind glass, one old and one very small. Both are kept by someone who looks in every day.