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psychic significance that
To the Lighthouse
had for her. As she initially conceived the novel, she noted that ‘the centre is father’s character, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel’, 43 and after she had completed it she observed that ‘when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.’ 44 In a study of
Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis,
Elizabeth Abel has argued that ‘Woolf’s two versions of the genesis of her text depict different parental inspirations and distinct compositional processes that reproduce the psychoanalytic disputes over the narrative priority of each parent.’ 45 Yet it may not be necessary to decide on the ‘narrative priority’ of either parent if one sees that the core project of the novel is both an exorcism of, and an elegy for, the sex roles of ‘father’ and ‘mother’ as they were prescribed during the years when Woolf was growing up. ‘I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it out to rest’, 46 Woolf mused as she looked back on the composition of
To the Lighthouse,
and certainly in writing this book she had ‘laid… to rest’ the ghosts of traditionally defined parent figures who had haunted her work from
The Voyage Out
onwards.
    Orlando
is in fact the first Woolf novel in which a meditation on the configurations of the family as it is structured around the stereotypical heterosexual couple does not in some sense dominate the plot. Instead, this parodic but ultimately serious ‘biography’ takes as its starting point a character who may be said to have evolved as much from Lily Briscoe, the determinedly single woman artist of
To the Lighthouse,
as from Vita Sackville-West. What would Lily’s life have been like,
Orlando
asks, if she had been set free to rove through history and discover that what Mrs Ramsay considered the ‘universal law’ of marriage (along with the sex roles on which that law was founded) was as much an artifice as the clothes she wore or as her own painting of the ‘relation’ of ‘masses’? And what would Lily’s life have become had all history been, for her, a surprisingly free space in which one could easily and insouciantly be woman
or
man? More, how would the engenderings of history appear to such a radically new kind of being? Would the two histories – the masculine chronicle solemnly produced by Big Ben and the feminine record more diffidently offered by the ‘other clock’ – retain their separateness, remain divided?
    After she had explored these issues in
Orlando,
Woolf never again returned to the kinds of representations of the traditional family that had concerned her in her earlier books.
A Room of One’s Own,
the work that immediately followed, was of course pioneering not only in its effort to excavate women’s history but in its advocacy of a creative androgyny that recalls Edward Carpenter’s celebration of a ‘third’ or ‘intermediate sex’, as well as in its imaginative resurrection of the lost woman poet ‘Judith Shakespeare’.
The Waves
(1931), which Woolf was planning even as she wrote
Orlando
and began composing
A Room of One’s Own,
focused on six speakers (three women and three men) whose family backgrounds are so blurred that one might almost think each had been parthenogenetically produced. And although in her last two novels,
The Years
and
Between the Acts,
Woolf did return to a scrutiny of family dynamics, she there approaches the history as well as the problems and pleasures of ‘compulsoryheterosexuality’ even more sceptically and sardonically than she had before
Orlando
had ‘shoved everything aside to come into existence’.
    At the same time, however, all these works ask a question that was implicit in the revisionary history, the