While The Doll takes its fortuitous title from a minor episode involving a stolen toy, readers commonly assume that it refers to the principal female character, the young aristocrat Izabela Łęcka.

[3] Prus thus did for Warsaw's sense of place in The Doll in 1889 what James Joyce was famously to do for his own capital city, Dublin, in the novel Ulysses a third of a century later, in 1922.

[4] The enterprising Wokulski now proves a romantic at heart, falling in love with Izabela, daughter of the vacuous, bankrupt aristocrat, Tomasz Łęcki.

The manager of Wokulski's Warsaw store, Ignacy Rzecki, is a man of an earlier generation, a modest bachelor who lives on memories of his youth,[5] which was a heroic chapter in his own life and that of Europe.

At novel's end, when Rzecki hears that Loulou has perished in Africa, fighting in British ranks against rebel tribesmen, he will be overcome by the despondence of old age.

[7] For now, Rzecki lives in constant excitement, preoccupied by politics, which he refers to in his diary by the code-letter "P." Everywhere in the press he finds indications that a long-awaited "it" is beginning.

The half-starving students inhabit the garret of an apartment house and are in constant conflict with the landlord over their arrears of rent; they are rebels, are inclined to macabre pranks, and are probably socialists.

The Doll's plot focuses on Wokulski's infatuation with the superficial Izabela, who sees him only as a plebeian intruder into her rarefied world, a brute with huge red hands; for her, persons below the social standing of aristocrats are hardly human.

The Doll has been translated into twenty-eight languages: Armenian,[11] Belarusian,[12] Bulgarian, Chinese,[13] Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, French, Georgian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese (2017),[14][15] Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian,[11] Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Ukrainian.