On May 5, 1895, Virginia Woolf's mom died suddenly in the dark of morning. Woolf was 13 years old. She was taken downstairs to kiss her mother goodbye.

My father staggered from the bedroom as we came. I stretched my arms out to stop him, but he brushed past me, crying out something I could not catch; distraught. And [my half-brother] led me in to kiss my mother, who had just died.

Woolf wrote later that kissing her "was like kissing cold iron," which must've been a shock, because her mother was known for her warmth, and it's a fact she was beautiful.

Virginia Woolf's mother was so beautiful that when she was a child, she posed for Pre-Raphaelite painters and sculptors like Holman Hunt and Thomas Woolner, both of whom proposed marriage "when she was scarcely out of the nursery."

She did not marry either of them. She married someone else instead, someone with muttonchops, but he died while picking a fig, so then she married someone else, who was Virginia Woolf's dad.

On May 5, 1927, Woolf brought her mom back to life in To the Lighthouse—on the exact same day Mom had died, 32 years earlier. I have a piece about this over at Lithub this morning. It's one of the greatest magic tricks in literature. A full-on resurrection. Virginia Woolf's sister read To the Lighthouse and said Mom had been "raised from the dead." For Virginia Woolf fans, today's like Easter.

** This is the first literary thing connected to a date I have ever come across that is not mentioned in Tom Nissley's far-reaching and enriching book A Reader's Book of Days, which I rely on sometimes in Morning News if it's a particularly slow news day. No mention of Woolf or To the Lighthouse on the May 5 page at all, though! Instead, Kierkegaard and Karl Marx are born, Emerson and Longfellow found The Atlantic, 21-year-old Thomas Hardy gets a job as an architectural assistant... zzzzzz.