The relevant passage about Shelob in LotR is as follows:
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Originally Posted by The Choices of Master Samwise
Shelob was gone; and whether she lay long in her lair, nursing her malice and her misery, and in slow years of darkness healed herself from within, rebuilding her clustered eyes, until with hunger like death she spun once more her dreadful snares in the glens of the Mountains of Shadow, this tale does not tell.
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Now there's a downright refusal to provide "the purposed domination of the author" in the story. Some may liken that passage to the 'cup half empty/cup half full' interpretation, but I prefer simply to go with the ambiguity of the passage and recognise that Tolkien decided to leave the reader a bit of a tease.