The Haunted House in St. Ives: Ghostly Presences and Sensuous Memories in Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch Of The Past”

Abstract

This article explores how Virginia Woolf’s memories as worked into her piece of life writing “A Sketch of the Past” (1939-1940) can be perceived as haunted. Employing the tropes of the “haunted house” and “ghostly presences,” we examine Woolf’s “colour-and-sound memories” (Woolf 66) of her childhood summer home—Talland House in St. Ives—and its central spectral figure: her mother, Julia Stephen. To develop this, we situate “Sketch” within the broader field of life writing, emphasizing its fragmented and sensorial nature while discussing the hybrid and liminal characteristics of auto/biography. We then delve into the relationship between houses and memory (Lee 2020; Bachelard 1964) and the concept of hauntology (Derrida 1994; Rahimi 2021) to highlight the inextricable link between memory, space, and haunting as well as how Talland House emerges as a site of spectral memory, with Julia Stephen as its abiding ghost.

Keywords

• Virginia Woolf
• A Sketch of the Past
• Life Writing
• Memory
• Haunted House