The depiction of loss in both works is testament to the light touch that I was going on about. In To the Lighthouse, Mrs Ramsay is absolutely dominant. Not a single character’s interior monologue escapes mentioning her beauty, her aloofness, her authority. The word ‘rapture’ comes up a lot. And yet, when she dies, her death is recorded in parentheses. An afterthought. As much as the characters of the novel obsess about her, the narrator is completely indifferent. If I break my rule for a moment and say that she obviously represents Woolf’s own mother, the coldness of this moment is very unsettling.