Hardly had Virginia Woolf completed the manuscript for 'Mrs Dalloway' in October 1924 when she already envisioned the "Old Man," Mr. Ramsay from 'To the Lighthouse,' a portrait of her father, Sir Leslie Stephen. By January 1927, the manuscript was finished. "I am writing now as quickly and easily as I have ever written in my life..." she notes in her diary. As in 'Mrs Dalloway,' the focus of this novel is a woman, the very beautiful, veiled-in-sorrow Mrs. Ramsay, to whom Virginia Woolf imparts traits of her beloved mother. Mrs. Ramsay has the gift of intuitively understanding and connecting the people around her - her family, consisting of her self-centered husband and eight children, as well as summer guests in a secluded holiday home in the Hebrides. The behavior of these people towards each other, both in harmony and conflict, forms the core of the narrative.