"Every secret of a writer's soul," Virginia Woolf said, "every experience of their life every quality of their mind is written largely in their works." This is a deliberate extravagance but, in her case, nothing is so true as her fiction to her most cherished experiences. "I wonder, "she asked herself, "whether I really deal in autobiography yet call it fiction?" As a writer, Virginia Woolf, took hold of the past, of ghostly voices speaking with increasing clarity. When the voices of the dead – those of her mother, father and siblings – urged to impossible things they drove her mad, but controlled, they became the material of a fiction novel. Virginia's persistent memories of her parents helped shape her writing. Many have agreed that Ms. Woolf's literary work is a result of her childhood memories and of her intense sense of her past ties The experience of losing so many loved ones at a young age, along with the psychological traits lending themselves to madness that Virginia Woolf had inherited from both sides of her family is clearly portrayed in her writing (Ingram, 5). During times of mental clarity, Virginia writes and writes plentifully. However, during the times of breakdowns, and mental despair, Virginia's writing becomes sparse.
             There is a dim photograph of Julia Stephen, Virginia's mother, reading with her four young children in about 1894. More than 30 years later Virginia Woolf recorded a similar scene in her novel To the Lighthouse. The selfless character of Mrs. Ramsay, based on Virginia's memories of her mother, is depicted as the quintessential Victorian and the very pattern of motherhood as she reads to her children. This is the figure of her mother that Virginia tried to preserve and reconstruct on paper. Virginia Woolf's mother died of rheumatic fever at the age of forty-nine when Virginia was just thirteen years old. Occurring in the summer months, this is the first recorded breakdown suffered by Virgini...