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Virginia Woolf began reading Marcel Proust in 1922. In an essay "On Rereading Novels," published in the Times Literary Supplement on July 20, 1922, she comments on the development of the novel since Henry James. Already, she notes, "the years have mounted up [since James's last novels]. We may expect the novel to change and develop as it is explored by the most vigorous minds of a very complex age. What have we not, indeed, to expect from M. Proust alone?"1 Four months later, Proust died. The "Hommage" to him that the Nouvelle Revue Française published on January 1, 1923 included a rather bland testimonial from a group of English writers - among them, Woolf, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, and a number of Bloomsbury figures.2 Leo Bersani has commented on the role that Proust's death played not only in cementing his reputation but also in completing his work since, as Bersani puts it, "for Proust, literature depends on death."3 Parallels between Woolf's works of the 1920's, notably Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu show how much this recently deceased master of modern fiction meant to Woolf as she was writing her major works. Woolf's reading of Proust also helped to shape her influential definitions of modern fiction, although his role in her work has been underestimated by critics who tend to emphasize her English-language precursors.4
In her diary and letters, Woolf continually meditated on the influence Proust might have on her own fiction. Even before she began reading him, in a letter of January 21, 1922 to E. M. Forster, Woolf wrote of Proust in terms that seem haunting in light of her later suicide: "Everyone is reading Proust. I sit silent and hear their reports. It seems to be a tremendous experience, but I'm shivering on the brink, and waiting to be submerged with a horrid sort of notion that I shall go down and down and down and perhaps never come up again."5 She actually began reading him by early May of that year, when she wrote to Roger Fry,
But Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I...