The Star's position in the sequence does most of the interpretive work, and it is worth stating the sequence plainly: Devil, Tower, Star. Bondage, collapse, and then this.
That placement gives the card its dominant reading, which is not simply hope but hope after damage. The figure is uncovered, at night, in the open, doing something quiet and unhurried. Nothing is being achieved. Nothing is being defended. Readers who take the card as straightforward optimism tend to lose the thing that makes it distinctive, which is that it describes a state available only to someone who has already lost something.
The second common reading is exposure in the neutral sense: being seen, being without cover, and finding that survivable. A third is replenishment, the pouring of water back into a depleted situation, which follows the picture directly.
A fourth, from the astrological layer, reads the card through Aquarius as a matter of the wider world rather than the private one: the querent's situation understood as part of something larger, and relief arriving through community rather than effort. This reading depends entirely on the Golden Dawn attribution and disappears in Crowley's system.
Waite gives loss, theft and abandonment for the reversed card. Readers who do not turn cards read a Star among bleak neighbours as hope that has not yet been believed, which is usually more accurate to what the querent is describing.
Of all the trumps this is the one whose meaning depends least on its attribution and most on its position, which is convenient given that its attribution is the single most disputed assignment in the deck.