Virginia Woolf’s writing reflects an intimate, radical engagement in the feminine, which interests us here insofar as it seems inseparable from her listening, as writer and as the child searching for meaning that she was, listening for the places engendered in speech, however fragmentary. In To the Lighthouse the maternal feminine is the voice of the mother V. Woolf lost on the threshold of her adolescence. The reminiscence of words heard, the ear straining to capture a state of language anterior to conscious representation, to catch its primordial, unconscious rhythm, provides the tension and musicality of the writing. In the paper here presented we shall concentrate upon the mnesic trace of aural memory which founds the movement of the writing while sketching out a back-stage maternal-echolalic scene in which the sounds of words are heard and exchanged.