The vicissitudes of mourning. Virginia Woolf and To the Lighthouse

We know from Virginia Woolf's diaries and letters that she intended the novel To the Lighthouse to be autobiographical. In a memoir written toward the end of her life, she stated that in writing the novel she had "ceased to be obsessed" by her mother, who had died when Woolf was a girl of thirteen. This paper explores the evolving relationship of a grown daughter with a mother long dead and the ways in which the writing of the novel both reflected and altered that internal relationship.