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Article: Woolf's 'Mrs. Dalloway.' (novel by woman author Virginia Woolf)
- Article from:
- The Explicator
- Article date:
- March 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Heldref Publications. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The central image of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway appears in the bells that ring emphatically at crucial junctures and resonate metaphorically throughout the novel. A possible source for this image is a pivotal episode in Dickens's David Copperfield, a book Woolf read and reread, both before and after composing Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Her journals, letters, and diary entries attest to her great admiration for Dickens in general and for David Copperfield in particular, which she referred to as "a masterpiece" and "the most perfect of all the Dickens novels."(1)
In Dickens, as David Copperfield returns to Canterbury he contemplates the significance of the cathedral's ...