You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The dead, so people say, are forgotten, or they should say, that life has for the most part little significance to any of us. But now and again, on more occasions than I can number, in bed at night, or in the street, or as I come into a room, there she is; beautiful, emphatic, with her familiar phrase and her laugh; closer than any of the living are, lighting our random lives with a burning torch, infinitely noble and delightful to her children.
“She” is Virginia Woolf's mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen. A celebrated beauty, an adored wife and a mother of eight, a strong-willed yet self-sacrificing woman whom even her famous husband's biographer considered the more extraordinary of the two (Annan 199), Julia remained, even after her death, a continuing influence on her artist-daughter, an “invisible presence” in Woolf's psychic and creative life (Woolf, “Sketch” 80).
Certainly Woolf infused her most celebrated heroines, Clarissa Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay, with the memory of her mother's remarkable womanhood: in both Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, suggestive echoes of Woolf's phrase “There she is” mark the most compelling appearances of these characters, implying how strongly the theme of the mother's presence preoccupied Woolf. But Julia was more than simply a model for female characters: Woolf's relationship to her mother shaped her notion of creativity, providing