"Haunted by Great Ghosts": Virginia Woolf and To the Lighthouse

Abstract

When Virginia Woolf was almost sixty, she wrote that To the Lighthouse "expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion" about her mother, and "in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest." By comparison with Woolf s memoirs, Reminiscences and A Sketch of the Past , this essay sets out to explain how To the Lighthouse helped Woolf to overcome her obsession with her mother.