The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship

Lousiana State University Press, 1986.

Ellen Bayuk Rosenman

In both theme and technique, Woolf's writing reflects an ambivalent, obsessive relationship with her remarkable mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen. Rosenman employs psychoanalytic perspectives that focus on the mother-daughter relationship as the source and center of female identity, and feminist literary criticism that explores the role of the woman writer in a male-dominated culture. The mother-daughter relationship informed many aspects of her work, including narrative structure and characterization as well as the thematic issues of sexual politics, romantic and familial love, literary inheritance, and the role of the woman writer.