Woolf wrote these words in her diary entry for 28 November 1928, almost two years after To the Lighthouse was completed. She records that, retrospectively, she regarded the novel as a turning-point in her relationship with both her parents: by writing this heavily autobiographical novel and by translating her parents into the fictional characters of Mr and Mrs Ramsay, Woolf readjusted her relationship with her past. It is tempting to use this diary entry, as Fogel does, to read To the Lighthouse as a process by which Woolf overcame parental influences and took control of her own writing. However, the latter part of the passage suggests a different dynamic, for it articulates a process of loss and recovery: although Leslie Stephen's death had left Woolf free to write, her sense of freedom was compromised by an ‘unhealthy obsession’, a form of longing for him. The process of writing To the Lighthouse helped Woolf address this loss by enabling her to know her father (though not her mother) in a new way: as a writer.