Strouse compares Lily Briscoe's tie to Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse with Virginia Woolf's actual relationship to three other women. These are her older sister, Vanessa, and her friends, Violet Dickinson and Vita Sackville-West. The thesis is that Woolf was in search of the earliest mother-daughter tie, a symbiotic merger. Thus, even though she was thirteen when she lost her mother, her yearnings suggest abandonment by the mother of her earliest childhood. The evidence for yearnings for fusion is abundant. Woolf is amply quoted from her letters and novel. For example, "Could loving as people called it make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? For it was not knowledge, but unity that she desired." Strouse masterfully pulls together diverse sources to illustrate specific variations on the theme of the fantasy of merger.