Miss Brill is a middle aged British woman, currently living in Paris and working as an English teacher there. No explanation as to her past is given, leaving it to the readers to draw their own conclusions.
             She sees herself as a normal woman living an ordinary life, but as it soon becomes apparent to the reader she is starving for warmth and companionship. She attempts to experience life through the experiences of total strangers, when she goes to the park every Sunday afternoon.
             The first thing to show her loneliness and lack of companionship is when she is thinking about her fur. Her fur is her only true friend which she loves so much that "She could have taken it off and laid it on her lap and stroked it". In a way Miss Brill and her fur are very much alike. They are bought old and bought live in a "box". The quote: "shaken off the moth powder and rubbed the life back into the dim little eyes" –referring to the fur, would pretty much correspond to Miss Brill's going out on the Sunday afternoons. She is looking forward to eavesdropping on other people's conversations, believing herself to be quite an expert in remaining unnoticed. But in reality she is more of an observer, a voyeur, and not an active participant in life as it unfolds around her. She simply doesn't see the reality.
             Miss Brill adopts a more critical, at times even hostile, attitude toward the women that she observes in the park, than toward their male companions. As to the couple sharing her special seat: she calls the man as "a fine old man" and sees the woman simply as "a big old woman". It is the same with the woman in the ermine toque: She refers the man with her as "tall stiff and dignified" and describes to the woman with "...her hair, her face, even her eyes were a shabby ermine colour" and as having a "tiny yellowish paw" instead of a hand. But it is...