Upright the Queen of Swords is read as clarity, honesty and perceptive, unsentimental judgment; reversed, as coldness, bitterness, or a sharpness of mind that has hardened into a defense against ever being hurt again.
As a person card, she is conventionally associated with independence, often specifically with someone who has been through difficulty and emerged more clear-sighted rather than more guarded, a distinction commentary on the card is generally careful to draw: the ideal reading is wisdom purchased by experience, not simply coldness that experience happened to produce. Where a reading tips into the reversed sense, the difference is usually described as whether the querent's honesty still serves connection or has become a habit of keeping people at a distance.
Waite's own printed meaning stresses widowhood, privation and mourning for the upright card, a considerably more specific and biographical reading than the general clarity and independence most contemporary practice now assigns her; the shift toward a broader personality reading, away from Waite's narrower circumstantial one, follows the same pattern seen across most of the court cards as twentieth-century practice moved from reading them as messengers or specific people toward reading them as qualities or archetypes.
She is frequently paired, in practice, with the King of Swords as the suit's two mature figures, her judgment tempered by feeling recalled rather than feeling suppressed, his by principle applied rather than principle merely held.