Word: dora
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...Dora Greenfield arrives at Imber Abbey without her bags, holding only a butterfly between her hands. She soon realizes her mistake—that she has left all of her belongings on the train, including her husband’s irreplaceable notebook—and releases the colorful butterfly...
...same instincts that attracted her to the butterfly on the train, and made her forget all else, seem irreconcilable with the routine life that those at Imber lead. Dora has come to the Abbey as an outsider—she joins her husband Paul, a scholar who is investigating Imber’s medieval manuscripts. She has no innate religious tendencies...
...Dora by nature fears oppression and responsibility (she had briefly left Paul, finding him dour), but her time at the Abbey changes her. By the end of the novel Dora senses that the habitual life of the religious offers her the possibility for an unexpected kind of freedom...
Murdoch expresses this desire to return through a well orchestrated series of images, all of which seem to follow from the original depiction of Dora with the butterfly in her hands...
...Though Dora doesn’t talk to him, she is unspeakably moved by the sound of his voice and then the soft song of a blackbird on the other end of the line. In distress, she leaves Noel and goes to the National Gallery, where a Gainsborough painting excites unfamiliar emotions in her. Suddenly disordered and overwhelmed by the noise and jazz of London, and with the blackbird in her mind, she returns to Imber almost involuntarily. There, she feels, she can address her “real” problems...