4 - Encountering Invisible Presence

Summary

“We think back through our mothers if we are women” Virginia Woolf famously declared in A Room of One’s Own, and she relished rescuing from obscurity women of earlier generations who had been lost to history, lost to memory. This chapter addresses the more complex relationship of Virginia Woolf with her own mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen. Drawing on Woolf’s diaries and letters, her unfinished memoir, her great autobiographical novel To the Lighthouse – and on Julia Duckworth Stephen’s own extant writings – the author explores Virginia Woolf’s lifelong, evolving relationship with what she called the “invisible presence” of her mother, who had died when she was a girl of thirteen.