lady lives in isolation in a tall tower located in the island. Her location is specific enough to prevent her to look directly at the kingdom of Camelot for fear of a curse.

For a modern comparison, "The Lady of Shalott" shows the idyllic type of setting that is replicated in fairy tales: The river running through, a castle in the distance, the peasantry living together in small cottages, a tower that can be seen from far away with a mystery guest inside of it, and the entrance of a hero to recover a damsel in distress.

 In the case of "The Lady of Shalott" it is the lady who is the sequestered guest of the tower waiting for Sir Lancelot to make his rescue. All that the townsfolk can hear coming from the tower is her singing. During the day, she stitches a tapestry of the outside world. She hears barely from it, but she does know that the town has continued life as usual although she is not a part of it.

Conclusively, "The Lady of Shalott" shows a utopic and idyllic setting that combines medieval chivalry with bucolic imagery, nostalgia, isolation, and the traditional mysteries of the townsfolk.

Throughout his oeuvre, Tennyson was concerned obsessively with Britain's distant past. In The Lady of Shalott he creates a scenario tangential to the primal legend of King Arthur, who is not mentioned, though the most prominent of Arthur's knights, Lancelot, is indirectly the cause of the Lady's misfortune.

Most scholars agree that the Arthurian legends have at least some basis, however tenuous, in fact and are rooted in the period of resistance by the indigenous Britons to the Saxon invaders of the fifth century CE. The exact geographical location in Britain of Arthur's court is not specified in the literary versions of the legend. But Tennyson merely has to mention "many-towered Camelot" for a set of mythic associations and ideas to be evoked in the collective consciousness of the English-speaking culture. These ideas establish a link between the immediate time/place of the Lady's story and the general concept of chivalric romance in old England. The Lady is the type of a doomed female spirit, isolated and condemned to a task, in this case one of endless weaving. She finally sets herself free from the confinement and floats downriver to her death.

Though it's a bit facile to interpret the story as a proto-feminist parable, the medieval setting forms a kind of double-edged literary sword. On the one hand, it is the ideal, pastoral place contrasting with the modern, increasingly mechanized world of Tennyson's era. But encompassed within that setting are isolation, sorrow, and the type of irrational punishment so often enacted in stories rooted in primal human desires and fears. There is also a breakout into freedom, a defiance by a woman of the unfairness of her fate. The death of the Lady of Shalott is one of many tragic events depicted in legend, like the romances of Guinevere and Lancelot, Tristan and Iseult, and Siegfried and Brunnhilde, except that in this case, the Lady remains alone, destined to die merely for intending to break the harsh curse imposed upon her.