London Fictions |
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Clarissa Dalloway's Westminster home is never precisely located - it seems to be in or around Great College Street, within a few minutes walk of Parliament and the major ministries.
We first come across her in Dean's Yard, behind Westminster Abbey, and as she traverses central London, we see her crossing Victoria Street and entering St James's Park A little later, Mrs Dalloway is walking along Piccadilly towards Bond Street - while on Piccadilly, she looks into Hatchard's, then as now a leading bookshop.
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Intersecting with Clarissa's walk is the journey of Septimus Warren Smith and his Italian wife, Rezia - they are in Bond Street, then in Regent's Park to the north, and later in Portland Place and on to Harley Street to see a leading doctor. Another medical man, Dr Holmes, comes to the Warren Smiths' home in Bloomsbury to take Septimus away to an institution - prompting the shell-shocked young war veteran to jump out of a window to his death. Other characters are plotted precisely as they walk ... across Green Park - along Fleet Street - always within a fairly circumscribed area of central London, never more than a mile or so from Westminster Bridge.
These paragraphs have been informed by the section 'A Walking Tour with Mrs Dalloway' in David Daiches and John Flower, Literary Landscapes of the British Isles, first published in 1979. And here's a brief extract: 'If one does not follow the topography of the novel one loses a great deal. Virginia Woolf's sense of London helps her to define the characters and her sense of the characters helps her to define London, to a greater degree than in any other of her novels. ... the London that really haunted her imagination was her own London, where she was born and grew up and spent so much of her life, the London which, as her diary shows, she rediscovered with excitement every time she came back to it after an absence.' Andrew Whitehead
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