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Virginia Woolf was haunted by her mother, Julia Stephens, who died when Virginia was thirteen. We are haunted by Virginia Woolf, one of the giants of modernism in fiction, concerned with the themes of time, memory, and the interiority of women. In 2004 alone there were nine books, 143 scholarly articles, and thirteen dissertations on the subject of Virginia Woolf (Hussey 2004). Scholarly focus ranges from her aesthetic contribution to modernism through the use of such devices as stream-of-consciousness interior monologues; her “poetics of time” her feminism; her exploration of mourning and the Great War; and the relation between her manic-depressive illness and her creativity. Not only was Woolf a prolific writer of novels and critical essays; she also began to keep a journal in her early teens that she continued until her death at fifty-nine; thirty volumes of her diaries and four thousand letters have provided an unusually intimate window on her inner world and her development as a writer. Katherine Dalsimer, in her elegant book, Virginia Woolf: On Becoming a Writer, “listens” to Woolf's diaries and published writings as a careful analyst might listen to the material in a good hour. Dalsimer “hears” in the silences, the elisions, and the associations in Woolf's texts how her experience, particularly with loss and death, informed her development as a writer as she struggled to keep vibrant her memories of those she had lost: “Perhaps the experience of early loss makes memory itself a matter of urgent concern. It is memory that maintains our living connection with the dead; it is the most palpable way to preserve what is otherwise irrevocably lost” (p. xv).
Dalsimer opens with Woolf's statement, “We think back through our mothers if we are women,” weaving a discussion of To the Light house intos an exploration of the writer's relationship with her mother. Virginia had her first breakdown shortly after her mother's death. She