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

Autores

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2025.e103755

Palavras-chave:

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

Resumo

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.

Biografia do Autor

Gabriela Zetehaku Araujo, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

Gabriela Zetehaku Araujo is a PhD candidate in the English Graduate Program: Literary and Cultural Studies at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil. Her research interests include life writing, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, spectral studies, and creative writing.

Maria Rita Drumond Viana, Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto

Maria Rita Drumond Viana is a faculty member at the Department of Letters at Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto (UFOP), Brazil, and her research interests include life writing, Irish studies, English Romanticism and Modernism, especially W. B. Yeats and Virginia Woolf.

Referências

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. The Orion Press, 1964.

Bell, Ilona. “Haunted by Great Ghosts: Virginia Woolf and ‘To the Lighthouse’”. Biography, vol. 9, no. 2, Spring 1986, pp. 150-175. U of Hawai'i P.

Cousineau, Diane. “Virginia Woolf's ‘A Sketch of the Past’: Life-Writing, the Body, and the Mirror Gaze.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 1993, pp. 51-71.

Dede, Demet Karabulut. “Specters of Virginia Woolf: Rhythmic and Heterotopic Haunting in 'A Haunted House'.” Neophilologus, vol. 108, no. 2, 2024, pp. 311–326.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of the Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Routledge, 1994.

Diaz, Brigitte. O Gênero Epistolar, Ou o Pensamento Nômade. Translated by Brigitte Hervot and Sandra Ferreira. Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2016.

Evaristo, Conceição. Becos da Memória. Pallas, 2017.

Hagen, Benjamin D. “Feeling Shadows: Virginia Woolf’s Sensuous Pedagogy.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 132, no. 2, 2017, pp. 266-280.

Henderson, Desirée. How to Read a Diary. Routledge, 2019.

Humm, Maggie. “The Sea Blazed Gold: Virginia Woolf in St Ives, Cornwall.” Night Bird Press N2, 2022. Pamphlet, artwork by Louisa Amelia Albani.

Lee, Hermione. “Preface.” The Life of Houses, edited by Hermione Lee and Kate Kennedy, Princeton UP, 2020, pp. xiii-xviii.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus. 1996.

Mesquita, Ana Carolina de Carvalho. “A Fish in a Stream: Body and Memory in Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Sketch of the Past’” Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, vol. 74, no. 2, 2021, pp.77-90.

Rahimi, Sadeq. The Hauntology of Everyday Life. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. The U of Chicago P, 2004.

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. U of Minnesota P, 2001.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being, edited by Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed., Mariner Books, 1985, pp. 64-159.

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 5 (1936-1941). Edited by Anne Olivier Bell, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.

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Publicado

2025-06-16

Edição

v. 78 n. 1 (2025):

Seção

Dossiê em Estudos Literários e Culturais

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Copyright (c) 2025 Gabriela Zetehaku Araujo, Maria Rita Drumond Viana

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Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.