Published by the Hogarth Press in 1966 with pictures by Duncan Grant, “Nurse Lugton's Golden Thimble” is one of two children's stories Virginia Woolf wrote. It was discovered in 1963 by Wallace Hildick, who found it in the manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway, which had recently been acquired by the British Museum. It was in the second of the three large Dalloway manuscript notebooks amid pages depicting Septimus Warren Smith's final scene, when he hurls himself out the window at the approach of Dr. Holmes, intent on separating him from his wife, Rezia. Just moments before, Septimus had been helping Rezia sew a hat, adding felt and flowers and laughing with his wife in a lovely and all too rare moment of lucidity. The children's story is short, just a couple of pages, about an old nurse, or governess, who is asleep as the story begins, having dozed of fwhile sewing a curtain with an animal pattern on it. As she sleeps, the animals spring to life; in fact a whole village appears. As soon as Nurse Lugton begins to stir, however, the animals flee in terror, and by the time she wakes up, they have resumed their frozen, lifeless stance.

Writing of his discovery in the Times Literary Supplement in 1965, Hildick speculates about the story's origins. Perhaps it provided a respite for Woolf from working out the scenes of madness and suicide in Mrs. Dalloway. He wonders ifthe list of animals written on the reverse side of the page indicates a potential reworking of, or alternate to, the Dalloway scenes set in Regent's Park—as the park is not far from the Zoo, and among these scenes is one of Peter Walsh dozing next to an “old nurse busily knitting” (Hildick). Ultimately, Hildick feels certain of the story's provenance: In a diary entry of September 7, 1924, Woolf writes of a delightful afternoon spent with her young niece, Ann, one of Adrian's daughters, leading Hildick to conclude that Woolf wrote the story specifically for her niece, a theory corroborated by Leonard Woolf, who had not seen the story before Hildick presented it to him.