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Mark Spilka, in his monograph on Virginia Woolf, reconstructs Virginia's “deathbed reactions in 1895 when she had secretly laughed at her mother's crying nurse and, on a second visit, had hallucinated a man at the edge of her mother's bed.” The man, Spilka reasons, is her mother's first husband Herbert Duckworth, safely dead after a blissful four-year marriage, but a nonperson thereafter, no longer mentioned and therefore susceptible to various idealizations, whether they be conducted by his remarried widow Julia, or by her impressionable daughter, Virginia. Duckworth is the robber in the bedroom, the ghostly thief of the mother's affections, the source of her melancholic preoccupations, and an elusive rival still haunting the second marriage to the celebrated Victorian man of letters, Leslie Stephen.
Certain maternal deficits in the areas of empathy and mirroring, complicated by the burdens of repeated pregnancies and a selfishly demanding spouse, have been noted by Ernest Wolf and other readers of Virginia's early history. Spilka's thesis certainly supports the view that Virginia was not ready at 13 to relinquish her attachments to her mother and so subsequently could not help fixating first on her sister Vanessa and then on other women. Virginia's inappropriate affect and her hallucination are signifiers that the mother's loss is being denied and that Virginia cannot bring herself to engage the work of mourning.
It is evident that Virginia Woolfs writing was placed in the service of mastery over the loss of her mother. Some 30 years after her mother's death, Virginia wrote To the Lighthouse, and later (in Moments of Being) asserted that “when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.” But she did hear voices again and following publication of the novel sank into a severe depression. Less a successful psychoanalysis than a remarkable fictional achievement, To the Lighthouse begins, in Spilka's view, “the real