Religion, Secularism, and Spiritual Paths

Religion, Secularism,
and the Spiritual Paths

of Virginia Woolf
Edited by
Kristina K. Groover
Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths
of Virginia Woolf
“Recent scholarship has begun to address the spiritual side of Virginia Woolf’s
writing. The essays in this collection explore a wide range of religious contexts for
Woolf’s work, including Quaker and feminist theology, Victorian antecedents such
as Arnold and Hopkins, recent theories of secularism, and even Dostoevsky’s
Russian Orthodoxy. Together, they paint a nuanced portrait of Woolf’s complex
spiritual engagements in her major novels and many of her most important essays.”
—Pericles Lewis, Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of Comparative Literature and
Professor of English, Yale University, USA, and author of Religious Experience
and the Modernist Novel (2010)
“This important collection sheds new light on an ambiguity that has long puzzled
readers of Virginia Woolf. Woolf considered belief in God ‘obscene’ and often
characterized religion as a mask for avarice, cruelty, and worldly authority. Yet she
also insisted that ‘the soul slips in’ to any scrupulous encounter with ‘reality,’ and
W.H. Auden considered her writing to be an expression of ‘a religious, mystical
view of life.’ These essays sharpen our understanding of the complex interplay
between Woolf’s fidelity to the secular world and her exploration of the spiritual
life.”
—Matthew Mutter, Associate Professor of Literature, Bard College, USA, and
author of Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance (2017)
“Religion, Secularism and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf is a timely and fas-
cinating reworking of Woolf’s reputation for Godlessness, cutting across sterile
oppositions such as religion and secularity, faith and reason, and the sacred and
profane, to show the complexity and richness of her engagement with spirituality.
It is a collection with many unexpected dimensions, foregrounding new and
unusual approaches from enactment theology, cultural geography, and philosophy
to the ethics of critique.”
—Suzanne Hobson, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature, Queen
Mary University of London, UK, and the author of Angels of Modernism:
Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960 (Palgrave, 2011)
Kristina K. Groover
Editor
Religion, Secularism,
and the Spiritual Paths
of Virginia Woolf
Editor
Kristina K. Groover
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-32567-1 ISBN 978-3-030-32568-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32568-8
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In loving memory of my mother and father
who gave me everything
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the constellation of teachers, scholars, colleagues, stu-

dents, and friends who have influenced and supported my work. First
thanks must go to the writers who have contributed to this collection and
from whom I have learned so much; they have been the best of writing
companions and collaborators.
The English Department at Appalachian State University has been my
academic home for more than 20 years, and I am grateful to be a part of
this vibrant and supportive community of scholars and teachers. Special
thanks for their collegiality and friendship go to Carl Eby, Tammy
Wahpeconiah, Sandy Ballard, Joseph Bathanti, Rosemary Horowitz, Lynn
Moss Sanders, Susan Staub, Jill Ehnenn, Susan Weinberg, Jennifer Wilson,
Zack Vernon, Jessica Martell, Belinda Walzer, Leon Lewis, Tom McGowan,
Tom McLaughlin, and Chip Arnold. Thanks also to my students at
Appalachian, who continue to energize and surprise me; their openness,
insight, and willingness to tackle difficult texts with honesty and rigor
make teaching seem like the greatest job in the world.
My family and community of friends provide the foundation on which
everything else depends. Thanks to all; I am sustained by your love, gen-
erosity, and good humor. Deepest thanks as always to Marian Peters—my
partner in every undertaking, and an intrepid forger of new paths.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction—Desire Lines: The Spiritual Paths of

Virginia Woolf 1
Kristina K. Groover
2 “Some restless searcher in me”: Virginia Woolf and

Contemporary Mysticism 15
Jane de Gay
3 A God “in process of change”: Woolfian Theology and

Mrs. Dalloway 33
Kristina K. Groover
4 “The thing is in itself enough”: Virginia Woolf’s Sacred

Everyday 51
Lorraine Sim
5 Virginia Woolf Reads “Dover Beach”: Romance and the

Victorian Crisis of Faith in To the Lighthouse 69
Amy C. Smith
6 Woolf and Hopkins on the Revelatory Particular 87

Dwight Lindley
ix
x Contents
7 “Perpetual Departure”: Sacred Space and Urban

Pilgrimage in Woolf’s Essays109
Elizabeth Anderson
8 Quaker Mysticism and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse131

Emily Griesinger
9 Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Dostoevsky: The Sacred Space

of the Soul151
Rita Dirks
10 “She heard the first words”: Lesbian Subjectivity and

Prophetic Discourse in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and
Between the Acts167
Margaret Sullivan
11 Sensibility, Parochiality, Spirituality: Toward a Critical

Method and Ethic of Response in Woolf, Spivak, and
Mahmood189
Benjamin D. Hagen
Index209
Notes on Contributors
Elizabeth Anderson is Lecturer in English Studies at the University of

Aberdeen. She holds a PhD in Literature, Theology and the Arts and
English Literature (2011) and an MLitt in Modernities (2007) from the
University of Glasgow. She is the author of H.D. and Modernist Religious
Imagination (2013) and Material Spirituality in Modernist Women’s
Writing (2020) and the co-editor of Modernist Women Writers and
Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She serves
as assistant editor for Literature and Theology.
Jane de Gay is Professor of English Literature at Leeds Trinity University
and an Anglican priest. Her monograph Virginia Woolf and Christian
Culture (2018), which draws on insights from both vocations, reveals that
Woolf was profoundly interested in and knowledgeable about Christianity
as a faith and a socio-political movement. She has published widely on
Woolf, including an earlier monograph on Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the
Literary Past (2006), and chapters on intertextuality in Sentencing Orlando
(Eds. Högberg and Bromley, 2018), and ‘Allusion and Metaphor’ in the
Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf.
Rita Dirks is Associate Professor of English at Ambrose University,
Calgary. Her PhD dissertation “The Symbolist Novel as Secular Scripture:
Huysmans, Wilde, and Bely” explored the idea of French, English, and
Russian modernism and decadence in relation to religious thought of the
fin-du-siècle. Her research and publishing interests in decadence and
modernism continue into the present, with recent and forthcoming
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
publications on Bliss Carman, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde. She is

co-editor of Peter Svarich, Memoirs: 1877–1904 (1999). She is working
on a manuscript on the novels of Canadian author Miriam Toews.
Emily Griesinger is Professor of English at Azusa Pacific University,
where she teaches courses in British literature, literature and theology,
literature and medicine, and spiritual autobiography and memoir. She has
written several award-winning essays, including the Christianity and
Literature Lionel Basney Award for 2015 for her article on Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In 2006 she co-edited a collection of essays with
Mark Eaton entitled The Gift of Story: Narrating Hope in a Postmodern
World. She is working on a book on theological approaches to literary
texts and a second book on empathy and the moral imagination in British
women writers from Florence Nightingale to Virginia Woolf.
Kristina K. Groover is Professor of English at Appalachian State
University. She is author of The Wilderness Within: American Women
Writers and Spiritual Quest (1999) and editor of Things of the Spirit:
Women Writers Constructing Spiritualities (2004). Her essays on Virginia
Woolf have appeared in Literary London, Renascence, South Atlantic
Review, and Virginia Woolf Miscellany.
Benjamin D. Hagen is Assistant Professor of English at the University of
South Dakota where he teaches courses in modern and contemporary
British/Anglophone literature and the history of literary criticism and
theory. His research on the life and work of Virginia Woolf has appeared
in Virginia Woolf Miscellany (2010, 2011); Modernism/Modernity (2009);
PMLA (2017); and several edited collections including Sentencing
Orlando: Virginia Woolf and The Morphology of the Modernist Sentence
(2018) and The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (2018). His first book,
The Sensuous Pedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, is forth-
coming in 2020 from Clemson University Press.
Dwight Lindley is Associate Professor of English at Hillsdale College,
Michigan. His publications include essays on George Eliot, Jane Austen,
John Milton, John Henry Newman, and literary theory. He teaches
courses on great books in the core curriculum, as well as courses on nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century British literature.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Lorraine Sim is Senior Lecturer in Modern English Literature at Western

Sydney University. She is the author of Ordinary Matters: Modernist
Women’s Literature and Photography (2016) and Virginia Woolf: The
Patterns of Ordinary Experience (2010).
Amy C. Smith is Associate Professor of English and Director of the
Center for Teaching and Learning Enhancement at Lamar University in
Beaumont, Texas. Her publications include essays on Virginia Woolf, Iris
Murdoch, and ethics and literature. She co-edited the fall 2011 issue of
the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, “Virginia Woolf and Spirituality.”
Margaret Sullivan is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Marshall
University. Her research interests include British modernist literature, reli-
gious studies, and queer theory. Her essays have appeared in Literature
and Theology, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and Journal of Religion and Film.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction—Desire Lines:
The Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf
Kristina K. Groover
Virginia Stephen was born into a family of skeptics and non-believers. Her
father, Leslie Stephen, who descended from the Clapham Sect of evangeli-
cal Christians, renounced his religion and resigned his fellowship at
Cambridge while he was still a young man. Virginia’s mother Julia lost her
faith after the death of her beloved husband, Herbert Duckworth; there-
after she immersed herself in self-sacrificing caretaking for her demanding
second husband, Leslie Stephen; her household full of children and step-
children; and the poor and the sick in her community. As Virginia Woolf
writes in her autobiographical essay “A Sketch of the Past,” she was “born
into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late
nineteenth century world” (1985, 65). The Stephen family believed not in
religion but in their own moral, intellectual, and social powers.
Upon leaving their father’s home in Kensington after his death, 22-year-
old Virginia Stephen and her siblings formed what came to be known as
the Bloomsbury group, a circle of artists and intellectuals who helped to
define British modernism. Like many of their fellow modernists, those in
the Bloomsbury circle rejected religion’s moralism, its anti-intellectualism,
K. K. Groover (*)
Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, USA
© The Author(s) 2019 1

K. K. Groover (ed.), Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths
of Virginia Woolf, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32568-8_1
2 K. K. GROOVER
and its failure to explain or assuage terrible tragedies: in particular, the

horrifying losses of World War I. Despite the Bloomsbury participants’
general rejection of the moral codes and sense of “duty” that guided the
Stephens’ Kensington upbringing, they shared the Stephen family’s faith
in the life of the mind and in their own powers to enact social and cul-
tural reform.1
Virginia Woolf’s atheism and her sharp criticism of religion have
become commonplaces, well-established and regularly repeated in the
critical literature. Woolf’s work is often scathingly critical toward religion,
associating it with ignorance, sentimentality, and simple-mindedness. She
reserves her harshest criticism for religion’s authoritarianism, its claims to
truth and its bullying restrictions on individual freedom.2
Yet Woolf’s sometimes withering critique of religion belies what might
well be called a religious sensibility in her work. Woolf’s entire oeuvre—
her essays, fiction, diary, and letters—is replete with religious language and
themes. Her characters often have heightened, even transcendent experi-
ences that are not fully explained by their sensory and cognitive engage-
ment with the world. She is preoccupied with the mysterious and the
inexplicable. Woolf’s distinctive idiom—her unanswered questions, her
frequent use of ellipses and other textual lacunae—probe what Judith
Butler terms the “limits of knowability” (2003, 63).3 She poses weighty
1
As a number of critics have noted, the Claphamite evangelicals of Leslie Stephen’s
upbringing and the Bloomsbury circle of intellectuals shared a number of qualities: a rigor-
ous work ethic, a reformist sensibility, and a sense of themselves as a rarefied elect. See Annan
(1984, 159–161); Lee (1996, 54); Pecora (2006, 165–69); and Taylor (2007, 405–406).
2
To cite a few examples: In The Voyage Out, Helen Ambrose worries that her children’s
nursemaid will encourage them to pray, saying that she “would rather my children told lies”
([1915] 1948, 27). In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa frets over the tutor Miss Kilman’s religious
influence on her daughter Elizabeth, calling the thought of them praying together “nauseat-
ing” ([1925] 1981, 117). Miss Kilman, whose self-pity, anger, and frustrated desire are
thinly veiled by her religious zealotry, represents one of Woolf’s most scathing portraits. In
her letters, Woolf inveighs against the “self conceit of Christians” and the “arrogance and
monopoly of Christianity” (1977–1980, 4: 442, 83). For a thoughtful study of Woolf’s
representations of clergy, see de Gay (2009).
3
In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler writes that the “suspect coherence” of narrative
“may foreclose an ethical resource—namely, an acceptance of the limits of knowability in
oneself and others. To hold a person accountable for his or her life in narrative form may even
be to require a falsification of that life…we may be preferring the seamlessness of the story to
something we might tentatively call the truth of the person, a truth that…might well become
more clear in moments of interruption, stoppage, open-endedness—in enigmatic articula-
tions that cannot easily be translated into narrative form” (2003, 63–64). Butler offers a
1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRE LINES: THE SPIRITUAL PATHS… 3
questions—about life’s meaning, the inevitability of death, the impossibility

of knowing another person. As Christopher Knight writes, Woolf’s work
is characterized by its “tone of enquiry, of questioning, wherein it is
understood that if the object of the enquiry, of the quest, is to be imagined
as worthy, it should admit of a full freedom of probing, of questioning,
where even doubt and disbelief are not unwelcome” (2010, 83). Woolf’s
rejection of religion, however vehement, does not answer the profound
questions she poses; but neither does it foreclose her open and rigorous
examination of them.
The chapters in this collection take up a challenge posed by Woolf her-
self: how to understand her persistent use of religious language, her repre-
sentation of deeply mysterious human experiences, and her recurrent
questions about life’s meaning in light of her sharply critical attitude
toward religion. To overlook Woolf’s frequent use of religiously inflected
language and her invocation of a world both enchanted and ensouled is to
disregard a persistent pattern in her work.4 As Mark Hussey writes in The
Singing of the Real World, Woolf’s body of work is “above all a literature
of rigorous honesty in its exploration of what it is to be” (1986, xix); her
work pursues not “an external, objective Reality” but “our experience of
the world” (1986, xiii). A significant dimension of that lived experience,
for Woolf, is spiritual. This is reflected, not in her espousal of religious
ideas, but in her persistent investigation of those otherwise inexplicable
experiences from which religious ideas emerge. As theologian Michael
Novak writes, “the sacred does not define one class of things, while the
profane defines another; the terms do not point to two different worlds,
realms, or sets of objects.” Rather, Novak argues, “The terms sacred and
profane refer…to the light in which things are regarded; they point to
human interpretations of the real” (1971, 26, 27).
In her essay “Modern Fiction,” Woolf memorably criticizes novelists
whom she terms “materialists,” who are bound by conventional novelistic
form “to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an
air of probability embalming the whole….” By contrast, she argues, mod-
ern novelists seek to convey “life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essen-
rather apt description of Woolf’s vernacular, which is so markedly characterized by “moments

of interruption, stoppage, open-endedness” in the interest of telling the “truth” about her
characters.
4
Critics who have analyzed forms of the “religious” in Woolf’s fiction include de Gay
(2018), Gualtieri-Reed (1999), Howard (1998), Knight (2010), Lewis (2010), McIntire
(2013), and Pecora (2006).
4 K. K. GROOVER
tial thing.” While “spirit” does not necessarily convey a religious meaning,
it does suggest an invisible and elusive quality of human experience.
Throughout “Modern Fiction,” as in much of her writing, Woolf reaches
for metaphorical language to convey this sense of mystery. “Life is not a
series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged,” she asserts; “life is a luminous
halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of
consciousness to the end” (1986–2011, 4: 160). Woolf’s metaphors—the
“luminous halo,” the “semi-transparent envelope”—challenge binaries
that separate the physical and the spiritual. They suggest a porousness
between internal and external worlds as well as a numinous quality found
in that liminal, “semi-transparent” space. As Naomi Toth argues, Woolf’s
metaphors “displace the accent of fiction not towards an intimate, private
interior, but towards that which exceeds the consciousness while remain-
ing contiguous with it” (2011). She is continually engaged, not in describ-
ing or responding to a pre-given world, but in depicting the world as a
relationship in which the individual’s experience—of mind, body, spirit—
is inseparable from the surrounding environment.
In writing of her own illnesses, in particular, Woolf often depicts illness
as a liminal state that offers a heightened form of “knowing.” Woolf suf-
fered throughout her life with both physical and mental illness—character-
ized by headaches, fevers, weight loss, hallucinations, and other debilitating
symptoms—that sometimes confined her to bed for days or weeks. Writing
about these periods of illness in her diary and in letters, Woolf blurs dis-
tinctions between body and mind, between the rational and non-rational.
Recovering from a depression, she writes that “I feel unreason slowly tin-
gling in my veins,” her words locating insight both in the body and in a
place outside of cognition—in “unreason” (1977–1984, 1: 298). She
describes a devastating bout of illness as “a plunge into deep waters; which
is a little alarming, but full of interest….One goes down into the well &
nothing protects one from the assault of truth” (1977–1984, 3: 112).
Woolf’s language thus suggests that her illnesses, however harrowing,
provide entry to otherwise inaccessible insights. Periods of convalescence
are often followed by bursts of creativity: “Six weeks in bed now would
make a masterpiece of Moths,” she writes in her diary in 1929, referring
to her working title for The Waves (3: 254). The following year, after a
week-long bout of influenza, she writes, “Once or twice I have felt that
odd whir of wings in the head which comes when I am ill so often—last
year for example, at this time I lay in bed constructing A Room of One’s
Own…If I could stay in bed another fortnight…I believe I should see the
whole of The Waves…” (3: 287). Woolf thus locates her creative power
not in a disembodied mind, but a mind specifically connected to an ill
body. And her insights, while related to her art, are not limited to the
aesthetic. Rather, she frequently characterizes these experiences in spiritual
terms: her illnesses are “queer spiritual states” which bring her “nearest a
true vision” (1977–1984, 1: 298); they are “partly mystical” (3: 287). In
a letter to E.M. Forster, she writes of her “insanities and all the rest” that
“I suspect they’ve done instead of religion” (1977–1980, 2: 499). Woolf’s
mystical experiences point not to an extra-human spiritual reality, but to
one that emerges from embodied experience.
Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” reflects on the limitations of language that
make certain kinds of phenomena available while repressing others. Her
narrator expresses wonderment that “English, which can express the
thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver
and the headache.” The ill person “is forced to coin words himself, and,
taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as
perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them
together that a brand new word in the end drops out” (1986–2011, 5:
196). As Kimberly Coates observes, in this essay Woolf argues that both
art and illness require “that we inhabit an entirely different reality, a reality
that eludes our grasp just as it alters and renders foreign what at one times
seemed most familiar. Illness, like art, poises us ‘quiveringly’ between sen-
sation and intellect” (2002, 246). Woolf’s experiments with language—
her use of silences, ellipses, allusions, metaphors, and the sound and
appearance of words—strive to convey inexplicable experiences for which
the available language is inadequate.
While conventionally “religious” language is often associated with
authority and pronouncement, theologian Catherine Keller argues that
the fixedness and certainty implied by such language corrupts the essen-
tially metaphorical nature of theological thought. “Literalism is the simple
word for this fallacy,” Keller writes. “It freezes theology into single
meanings.…metaphors are language in process, not in stasis” (2008,
15–16). Metaphors therefore evoke the very power of language to invent
new truths. In Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since
1960, Amy Hungerford analyzes the role of language in not simply reflect-
ing but constructing religious meaning. Hungerford points to non-
semantic aspects of language in which words themselves—not their
referential meaning, but their sound, form, or allusiveness—are “magi-
cally, supernaturally efficacious” (2010, 42). Hungerford characterizes
6 K. K. GROOVER
this “belief in the nonsemantic powers of language” as “a world where

religion and literature collaborate” (xx). Her argument recalls Woolf’s
claim that “In illness, words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp
what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and
the other—a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause…to evoke…a
state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain”
(1986–2011, 5: 201–202). Woolf’s vernacular thus reconstitutes the lan-
guage of spiritual experience as embodied and participatory—not a “dis-
course of answers,” in Hungerford’s terms, but a “discourse of relationship”
(2010, 118).
Although Woolf’s writing is replete with dismissive and scornful treat-
ments of religion and of God, she repeatedly invokes heightened, mysteri-
ous experiences that she characterizes in religious or quasi-religious
language. In “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf famously refers to these experi-
ences as “moments of being,” claiming that she makes such “revelation[s]”
real “by putting them into words” (1985, 72). In Religious Experience and
the Modernist Novel, Pericles Lewis (2010) characterizes Woolf’s moments
of being as “almost sacred.” But what prevents our defining them as sacred?
What doubt does “almost” refer to? This hesitation to characterize such
anomalous experiences as “sacred” perhaps points to the question of
authority in naming a given experience as religious, or spiritual. As religion
scholar Ann Taves points out, religious experience has largely been delim-
ited, not by the person having that experience, but by outsiders—scholars,
religious leaders—who have “the power to categorize and define” (2009,
23). She suggests that the term “religious experience” needs to be “disag-
gregated” in order to understand how and why people characterize certain
of their own experiences as spiritual, numinous, mysterious, or magical.
Taves regards religions and spiritualities not as sui generis truths, but as
complex socio-cultural constructs deriving from human experiences. She
therefore advocates studying experiences that people “deem spiritual,” or
regard or describe as “set apart” or “special,” in order to broaden and
destabilize notions of the spiritual. In this ascriptive model, experiences are
not inherently religious, but may be constituted as such by individuals.5
5
Throughout this essay, I use terms such as religious, spiritual, sacred, mysterious, or
numinous more or less interchangeably. Following the example of religion scholar Ann
Taves, I am using these as first-order experiential terms: that is, they are defined by the per-
son having an experience she deems as “special” or “set apart,” rather than by an outside
authority who categorizes an experience as religious or spiritual based on pre-defined (sec-
ond-order) terms. This shift in language allows a recalibration of religious terminology and
Throughout her oeuvre, Woolf represents such “special” and “set apart”
moments while continually experimenting with language to adequately
capture them. Traditional religious discourse has produced a limited and
particular understanding of what the sacred looks like and how it is best
described.6 Woolf, whose writing disrupted so many literary, linguistic, and
cultural norms, also disrupts the prescriptive language of religion. Even as
she denies God, she locates the divine elsewhere, representing aspects of
human experience as mysterious and numinous.
Familiar paradigms for spiritual experience are largely based on the
metaphors provided by patriarchal religious traditions, which often exclude
women’s knowledge, skills, and practices. Further, women have histori-
cally been precluded from authoring sanctioned forms of spiritual writing
such as sermons, liturgies, hymns, and creeds. For this reason, other forms
of women’s writing—their diaries, memoirs, letters, poetry, essays, and
fiction—are particularly useful in revealing ways that women construct
spiritual experience.7 My own work focuses on ways that feminist theolo-
gies can illuminate literary texts by women writers. Feminist theologians
redefine sacredness, wresting its meaning from thousands of years of male-
dominated spiritual traditions. In “A God ‘in process of change’: Woolfian
Theology and Mrs. Dalloway,” I analyze Woolfian spirituality through the
lens of feminist enactment theologies, which situate the sacred neither in
a transcendent God nor in individual consciousness, but in the relation-
ship between self and other. Woolf invites this discussion of a reimagined
spirituality through her frequent depictions of extraordinary experiences
and her repeated use of religiously inflected language, even as she explic-
itly denies God and criticizes religion. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf depicts
people and places as mysteriously connected, the boundaries between
enables analysis of a wide range of experiences that may be “deemed religious” or otherwise
“special” by the individuals experiencing them.
6
Although Woolf was not Christian, Christianity of course remained the dominant religion
of English heritage and culture up to and including Woolf’s lifetime. As Jane de Gay writes,
“Woolf argued with [Christianity] because it was both an integral part of the literary, artistic,
and architectural heritage of England, and a live social and political force to be reckoned
with” (2018, 2). For the most part, the essays collected here reflect Woolf’s “argument” with
Christianity either directly or obliquely. At the same time, Woolf and other modernists were
developing an increasingly sophisticated awareness of other religious and spiritual traditions,
and a limited number of studies have examined Woolf’s work in conjunction with eastern
religious influences; see, for example, Banerjee (2016) and Kohn (2010).
7
For a more extensive discussion, see my Introduction to Things of the Spirit: Women
Writers Constructing Spiritualities (2004).
8 K. K. GROOVER
them so thoroughly blurred that her characters are “completed” by one

another and by the spaces they inhabit. Building on phenomenological
studies of Woolf’s work, this essay argues that Woolf’s religious thought
emerges from situated and embodied experiences, challenging traditional
theistic views that regard the spiritual self as immaterial.
Several of the essays collected here examine Woolf’s relationship to
other spiritual traditions. Both Emily Griesinger and Jane de Gay note
that, while critics have been largely reluctant to link Woolf with conven-
tional religions, they have been more open to exploring her relationship to
mysticism. Woolf often describes both herself and her work as mystical,
although without defining what she means by the term. De Gay and
Griesinger propose that mysticism perhaps offered Woolf a way to explore
spiritual ideas outside of religious authority or dogma. In “Quaker
Mysticism and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,” Griesinger probes
Woolf’s imaginative engagement with the Quaker concept of divine light.
She argues that, through the central image of the lighthouse, which both
recalls and revises the traditional Christian symbol of salvific light, Woolf’s
text rejects the notion of Christ as the “light of the world” while simulta-
neously conveying a profound ambivalence toward secularism. De Gay, in
“‘some restless searcher in me’: Virginia Woolf and Contemporary
Mysticism,” extends the discussion of Woolf’s mysticism beyond Christian
influences. De Gay argues that the pluralistic mystic spirituality reflected in
Woolf’s writing is both feminist and intellectually engaged, influenced by
a rich interest in mysticism within modernist culture. Woolf’s engagement
with the mystical leaves room for doubt and uncertainty, de Gay argues,
allowing her to interrogate conventional religion while pursuing her inter-
est in “spiritual questing.”
Like her relationship to mystical traditions, Woolf’s relationship to nine-
teenth-century religious and literary traditions is both engaged and critical.
In “Virginia Woolf Reads ‘Dover Beach’: Romance and the Victorian Crisis
of Faith in To the Lighthouse,” Amy C. Smith posits that Woolf’s novel rep-
resents a “conversation” with Arnold’s well-known poem, which drama-
tizes man’s frailty in a universe being rapidly claimed by science. In To the
Lighthouse, Smith argues, Woolf engages Arnold as a “worthy interlocutor”
as she extends and interrogates his invocation of the divine feminine, grant-
ing Mrs. Ramsay agency to imagine her own godlike powers. Woolf’s novel
examines the loss of religious faith, the search for consolation, and the
dangers of a compensatory romantic love that fetishizes women. In “Woolf
and Hopkins on the Revelatory Particular,” Dwight Lindley writes of
Woolf’s somewhat surprising admiration for the work of the devoutly

religious Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Lindley links Woolf’s
“almost mystical depiction of human experience” with Hopkins’ Christian
theology, arguing that revelatory moments in Mrs. Dalloway and in
Hopkins’ poetry produce fleeting moments of insight, wonder, and tran-
scendence. Woolf, like Hopkins, treats these revelatory moments as expres-
sions of divinity that elicit love and generosity in return. In “Woolf’s Mrs.
Dalloway and Dostoevsky: The Sacred Space of the Soul,” Rita Dirks argues
that Woolf’s novel echoes aspects of Russian Orthodoxy as mediated
through Dostoevsky’s fiction. Dostoevsky’s work offered Woolf a model
for establishing the “soul,” rather than materiality, as the center of the
modern novel. Dirks reads Mrs. Dalloway as a response to Crime and
Punishment, arguing that the mystical connection between Clarissa
Dalloway and Septimus Smith at the novel’s conclusion reflects Dostoevsky’s
idea of sobornost’, or “holy togetherness.”
Other essays included here pursue revised and expanded definitions of
the spiritual. Lorraine Sim’s “‘the thing is in itself enough’: Virginia
Woolf’s Sacred Everyday” frames Woolf’s spirituality in the context of her
profound engagement with the material world. While Woolf writes repeat-
edly of numinous experiences, Sim argues, she always grounds these within
an immanent frame, granting a sacred quality to ordinary things, daily
routines, and social connections. Woolf’s philosophy embraces both the
plenitude of the everyday and a sense of mystery that animates the material
world. Elizabeth Anderson’s “‘Perpetual Departure’: Sacred Space and
Urban Pilgrimage in Woolf’s Essays” examines the blurring of boundaries
between sacred and profane in Woolf’s depictions of the city. Woolf’s
essays “Street Haunting” and “Abbeys and Cathedrals” depict pilgrimage
not as a set-apart spiritual practice, but as part of ordinary urban life.
Woolf treats the journey itself as sacred: not a pursuit of a fixed end point
but, in Michel de Certeau’s terms, a “perpetual departure.”
The writers whose work is collected here also take up the intersection
between spirituality and politics, especially in Woolf’s later work. In “‘she
heard the first words’: Lesbian Subjectivity and Prophetic Discourse in
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Between the Acts,” Margaret Sullivan
examines the lesbian subject as an increasingly political and disruptive fig-
ure in Woolf’s writing. Sullivan argues that, in light of the growing threat
of European fascism in the interwar period, Woolf’s lesbian subject gradu-
ally transformed from the frail and mystical Rhoda (The Waves, 1931) to
the disruptive figure of Miss La Trobe (Between the Acts, 1941). While
Rhoda, as a lesbian mystic, offers a revised reading of the Genesis story,
10 K. K. GROOVER
Sullivan argues that her disappearance from the text as a suicide “announces
the continuing power of Christianity’s hegemonic discourse.” As a later
figuration of the lesbian prophet, Miss La Trobe—radical, outspoken, and
disliked—effectively fractures the linguistic structures of religion, return-
ing to “first words” and, thus, to the potential for shaping a new world.
Woolf increasingly viewed the writer as “a fighter against oppressive
regimes,” Sullivan writes, “and the war is waged through language.”
Benjamin Hagen argues that Woolf’s anti-war writing in Three Guineas
and “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” anticipates contemporary writ-
ings on war and terrorism by Gayatri Spivak and Saba Mahmood. In
“Sensibility, Parochiality, Spirituality: Toward a Critical Method and Ethic
of Response in Woolf, Spivak, and Mahmood,” Hagen frames Woolf’s late
body of work—written, as Hagen notes, from her “actual (and rhetorical)
position beneath a firefight”—as an “ethic of response” to war and the
threat of fascism. In our own time, Spivak and Mahmood similarly con-
template ethical responses to unspeakable violence. All three writers,
Hagen argues, regard “the problem of imagining the other as a self” as
fundamental to the question of responding to cataclysmic threats: a ques-
tion that remains as critical to contemporary readers as it was to
Woolf in 1940.
The title of this introduction is inspired by the geographical term
“desire lines,” which names the trails that spontaneously emerge when
pedestrians wander from prescribed walkways to pursue their own paths.
Virginia Woolf was an inveterate walker who, by her own accounting,
often “made up” her novels while walking in London or across the Sussex
downs; desire lines thus form a fitting metaphor for her literary perambu-
lations and for the divergent spiritual paths described in these essays.8
Rooted in intuition and sensory observation, desire paths are organic and
tentative; they map the efforts of explorers who navigate obstacles and
occasionally backtrack as they wander into unfamiliar territory. They are
fundamentally emergent, appearing as people both seek and create new
8
In “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf writes, “Then one day walking around Tavistock Square
I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently invol-
untary, rush. One thing burst into another….my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord
as I walked” (1985, 81). Hermione Lee writes that while Woolf was living at Monk’s House
in Sussex, “every afternoon, in all weathers, she would walk with the dog, up on the Downs
or along the river. Local people got used to the sight of her: in their eyes, an eccentric, soli-
tary figure, shabbily dressed and talking to herself” (1996, 427).
routes and new destinations. Above all, the creators of desire lines resist
authority, defying official directions that steer them toward prescribed
avenues. Similarly, the spiritualities described in these essays forego estab-
lished paths and the authorities that reinforce them—religious orthodoxy,
familiar rites, traditional conceptions of God—and seek to forge new paths.
In compiling the essays collected here, I have learned from and been
inspired by the wide-ranging views of the spiritual that other scholars see
at work in Woolf’s writing. These writers provide an expansive and inter-
disciplinary study of Woolf’s work, drawing on theology, psychology,
geography, history, gender and sexuality studies, and other disciplines to
interrogate conventional approaches to the spiritual. These essays expose
a dimension of Woolf’s work that is fundamentally theological—not in its
declarations of either faith or doubt, but in its honest, courageous, and
relentless investigation of the inexplicable. A Woolfian spirituality is con-
stituted in embodied human consciousness, emerging through interaction
with others and the world. It is intersubjective and communal, but not
universal; expressed through ritual and metaphor rather than doctrine;
through questions and silences as much as through words. Finally, the
essays collected here characterize a spirituality that is neither fixed nor
prescriptive, but instead is fluid and evolving. Together, they enliven a
neglected area of Woolf studies by treating Woolf’s engagement with the
spiritual as contested critical ground.
Woolf’s work undermines the critical presumption that the modern
novel is both a creator and creation of a newly secular age.9 “If the
Victorian era is often characterized as an age of faith and its crisis,” Jerilyn
Sambrooke writes, “the twentieth century is marked as an era that takes
God’s death for granted” (2018). While Woolf may indeed have taken the
death of God for granted, that absence is not the focus of her work. Rather,
Woolf’s writing reframes and reclaims the spiritual in alternate forms; she
strives to find new language for those numinous experiences that remain
after the death of God has been pronounced.
9
As Matthew Mutter argues, the notion that modernism introduced a fundamental secu-
larism takes for granted a series of reductive binaries between secularism and religion. These
binaries are based on a “caricature” of religion, Mutter argues; likewise, they present a reduc-
tive view of secularism, which, like religion, has its own methods, assumptions, and “imagi-
naries” (2017, 4). For an essential critical discussion of modernism and secularism, see also
Lewis (2010).
12 K. K. GROOVER
Works Cited
Annan, Noel. 1984. Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian. New York: Random House.
Banerjee, Sheela. 2016. Spectral Poetics in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. In
Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality, ed. Elizabeth Anderson et al.,
153–168. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Butler, Judith. 2003. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Coates, Kimberly Engdahl. 2002. Exposing the ‘Nerves of Language’: Virginia
Woolf, Charles Mauron, and the Affinity Between Aesthetics and Illness.
Literature and Medicine 21 (2): 242–263.
de Gay, Jane. 2009. Virginia Woolf and the Clergy. Southport: Virginia Woolf
Society of Great Britain.
———. 2018. Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Groover, Kristina K. 2004. Introduction. In Things of the Spirit: Women Writers
Constructing Spiritualities, ed. Kristina K. Groover, 1–16. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press.
Gualtieri-Reed, Elizabeth. 1999. Mrs. Dalloway: Revising Religion. Centennial
Review 43 (2): 205–225.
Howard, Douglas L. 1998. Mrs. Dalloway: Virginia Woolf’s Redemptive Cycle.
Literature & Theology: An International Journal of Theory, Criticism and
Culture 12 (2): 149–158.
Hungerford, Amy. 2010. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion
Since 1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hussey, Mark. 1986. The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia
Woolf’s Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Keller, Catherine. 2008. On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process. Minneapolis:
Fortress Press.
Knight, Christopher J. 2010. Omissions Are Not Accidents: Modern Apophaticism
from Henry James to Jacques Derrida. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Kohn, Robert E. 2010. Buddhism in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts. Notes and
Queries 57 (2): 233–236.
Lee, Hermione. 1996. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage.
Lewis, Pericles. 2010. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
McIntire, Gabrielle. 2013. Notes Toward Thinking the Sacred in Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse. Modern Horizons 4: 1–11.
Mutter, Matthew. 2017. Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious
Inheritance. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Novak, Michael. 1971. Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove: An Invitation to
Religious Studies. New York: Harper & Row.
Pecora, Vincent. 2006. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation,

and Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sambrooke, Jerilyn. 2018. Secularism, Religion, and the 20th/21st Century
Novel. Literature Compass 15 (1).
Taves, Ann. 2009. Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach
to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Toth, Naomi. 2011. Reincarnating Shakespeare’s Sister: Virginia Woolf and the
‘Uncircumscribed Spirit’ of Fiction. E-rea: Revue Electronique d’Etudes Sur le
Monde Anglophone 8 (2).
Woolf, Virginia. (1915) 1948. The Voyage Out. San Diego: Harcourt.
———. (1925) 1981. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt.
———. 1977–1980. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne
Trautmann. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace.
———. 1977–1984. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols.
San Diego: Harcourt Brace.
———. 1985. Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing, ed.
Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt.
———. 1986–2011. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie.
New York: Harcourt.
CHAPTER 2
“Some restless searcher in me”: Virginia

Woolf and Contemporary Mysticism
Jane de Gay
While critics have traditionally been reluctant to associate Virginia Woolf

with any religious or spiritual movement, they have been more open to (or
at least less uncomfortable about) exploring her affinities with mysticism.
After all, Woolf herself used the word “mystic” to describe her experiences
and her aspirations for her own writing. She told Gwen Raverat in March
1925 that “I become mystical as I grow older” (Woolf 1975–1980, 3:
171), and she conceived The Waves as a novel about the “mystical side” of
solitude (Woolf 1977–1984, 3: 113), “an endeavour at something mystic,
spiritual” (3: 114), a “mystical eyeless book” (3: 203). Early critics also
used this designation: W.H. Auden wrote that “what she felt and expressed
with the most intense passion was a mystical, religious vision of life.”
Quentin Bell used the word to describe Woolf’s spirituality: “she tended
to be, as she herself put it, ‘mystical’; but she entertained no comfortable
beliefs” (1972, 136). The concept of mysticism is therefore particularly
useful for Woolf because it acknowledges her interest in spirituality whilst
leaving room for doubt and uncertainty: as Val Gough has argued, it pro-
vides a way of speaking about the divine that goes beyond “religious
J. de Gay (*)
Leeds Trinity University, Leeds, UK

16 J. DE GAY
dogma,” and ready-made ways of expressing and conceptualizing the

divine. Mysticism is therefore conducive to the spiritual questing that
Woolf often expressed, such as her diary note, “I have some restless
searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay
hands on & say, ‘This is it’?” (Woolf 1977–1984, 3: 62).
However, mysticism is a slippery term and we have no specific point of
reference as to how Woolf understood the word, for she never discussed mys-
ticism directly as a concept. Critics have therefore engaged various different
points of comparison or congruency to explain how we can classify her work
as mystical. Julie Kane situated Woolf’s mysticism entirely within an Eastern
tradition, most notably Buddhism; this rightly acknowledges a strong Eastern
influence on modernism and the Bloomsbury Group, but mysticism is richer
and more varied than this, and it has more congruencies with Christian
thought than Kane allowed, for, as Suzanne Raitt notes, “the dominant tradi-
tion in England was Judaeo-Christian and patriarchal” (1993, 118). Donna
Lazenby traces philosophical perspectives from the early Christian tradition
that “both directly and indirectly” inform Woolf’s work, focusing on Plotinus
and Pseudo-Dionysius, but Woolf’s work does not sit comfortably within a
Christian tradition: as Stephanie Paulsell’s study of parallels between Woolf
and the medieval mystical writer Marguerite d’Oingt demonstrates, despite
the similarities in approach, Woolf’s focus was on “reality” not God, on this
world not the hereafter. Val Gough’s approach of setting Woolf within a looser
company of writers is therefore more convincing, selecting sceptical literary
mystics such as Meister Eckhart, Margaret Porete, St Teresa of Avila, St John
of the Cross, Hélène Cixous, and Clarice Lispector, who have produced
“innovatory, highly literary discourses which functioned to leave the door
open for meaning in an attempt to avoid reifying God” (1999, 59).
Woolf may also be set within the company of a more contemporary
group of authors, for mysticism was of great interest in early twentieth-
century culture. As Jane Shaw has demonstrated, mysticism was more
significant within the modernist era than had been assumed, and it was
subject to highly informed discussion. Woolf encountered this current of
thought through her Quaker aunt Caroline Emelia Stephen, whose influ-
ence on Woolf is becoming more widely recognized, through Vita
Sackville-West, and also through popular culture. This chapter will there-
fore consider how the term “mysticism” was discussed by Woolf’s con-
temporaries, particularly by women writers who, as Law has shown, were
particularly concerned with developing discourses about mysticism
(1997, 21). The chapter will demonstrate that Woolf engaged closely
2 “SOME RESTLESS SEARCHER IN ME”: VIRGINIA WOOLF… 17
with contemporary debates about mysticism across a range of her writ-

ings, as she repeatedly explored images and ideas across a series of works
leading to The Waves, before analysing her experiences more directly in
“A Sketch of the Past.” The essay will show that Woolf’s engagement
with mysticism was complex, but at heart sceptical, informed, and feminist.
Caroline Emelia Stephen

Caroline Emelia Stephen was an important influence on Woolf’s under-
standing of mysticism; she also had a closer involvement with the modern
world than critics have often assumed. As Rufus Jones acknowledged in
1921, Stephen played a part in the shaping of modern Quakerism, a move-
ment that played an important role in reviving ideas about mysticism
(Jones 1921, 967). Although Stephen was a member of the previous gen-
eration, their lives overlapped by 27 years and Woolf spent much time with
her, including formative visits to Stephen’s home at The Porch in
Cambridge 1898, 1902, and 1904. The last of these stays was at a pivotal
time in Woolf’s life as she recovered from her breakdown following her
father’s death, and it helped her make the transition from her childhood
home in Hyde Park Gate to Bloomsbury. Her aunt gave her a safe space
and a peaceful environment and encouraged Woolf as a writer, as well as
taking her to Quaker meetings and house groups.
Caroline Emelia Stephen also provided an important bridge between
two strands in Woolf’s family background: the Evangelical fervour of the
Clapham Sect of earlier generations and the scepticism of Caroline Emelia’s
brothers, Fitzjames, a gradually lapsing Christian, and Leslie, the self-
declared agnostic. Stephen had freed herself from the word-laden liturgy
of the Church of England and the authority of its ministers, not by reject-
ing religion, but by discovering the silence of the Quaker Meeting, in
which the individual has a direct relationship with God.
Importantly, Stephen wrote about faith from an intellectually engaged
point of view. Jane Marcus underestimates both Stephen and Woolf when
she argues that their mysticism was an anti-intellectual rejection of the male
academic world, for Stephen engaged in intellectual debates publicly in the
pages of journals and privately in meetings with students and academics
from Cambridge, not least her two university-educated brothers (most
notably in an exchange of articles with Fitzjames on female vocations in the
pages of The Nineteenth Century). In papers published p osthumously as
Vision of Faith (edited by her niece Katharine Stephen, a Cambridge aca-
demic), she navigated the clash between traditional approaches to faith and
18 J. DE GAY
new ideas provoked by Darwinism and other currents of thought. Noting

that the “flood of free thought” had made it impossible to formulate opin-
ions about higher truths that were both “correct and accurate,” she added:
“I suppose this is a mild form of agnosticism, but I don’t think it is any the
worse for that. Agnosticism with mystery at the heart of it seems another
description of the ‘rational mysticism’ which is my favourite expression of
my own ground” (Stephen 1911, cxi).
Woolf read Stephen’s books attentively, as Kathleen Heininge (2016) and
others have shown, and she had an affinity with Stephen’s formulation of
belief as “agnosticism with mystery at the heart of it” or “rational mysti-
cism,” for Woolf’s works show an openness to mystery while not subscribing
to any belief system. This paradox was important to both Woolf and Stephen;
Jane Goldman denies this paradox when, in response to Marcus, she debates
whether Woolf was “rational or mystic” to declare Woolf as firmly “rational,”
seeing mysticism as too closely associated with the hysterical and irrational
(1998, 23–24). As Donna Lazenby has convincingly argued, Goldman was
working with a “limited definition of ‘the mystical’” by ignoring the long
intellectual heritage of mysticism (Lazenby 2014, 15). Lazenby notes that
“Marcus and Goldman associate the mystical with the threat of the dismissal
of female experience and authority, with being deemed ‘irrational and eccen-
tric’: but neither consider contrasting interpretations of mysticism, or the
mystical, which positively oppose this threat” (2014, 16). As we will see,
Woolf engages with mystical ideas from an informed and critical perspective,
in order to endorse “female experience and authority.”
Stephen also taught Woolf the value of the home as a place for retreat
and contemplation in counterpoise to public activity. Stephen’s semi-
monastic life at The Porch was not the complete escape from the world
that Marcus has suggested; rather, it was socially engaged without being
worldly, for Stephen hosted meetings with both male and female Quaker
students at her home, she attended Quaker meetings in Cambridge, and
she gave lectures at women’s colleges. Virginia Stephen witnessed her
aunt’s house-groups and attended Quaker meetings with her during for-
mative visits; she later followed in her aunt’s footsteps by delivering two
lectures at Cambridge that would become A Room of One’s Own. We can
therefore see that the public and private, the male and female spheres,
were not clearly separated for Caroline Emelia Stephen, and indeed, as
Anna Snaith has shown, neither were they for Woolf (2000, 1). Stephen’s
religion was not solipsistic, as Ashley Foster has shown, for it was socially
and politically engaged (2016, 45): she was particularly committed to
pacifist causes and founded the Metropolitan Society for Befriending

Young Servants. Woolf, likewise, harnessed a spiritual approach to real-
world issues. In her feminist-pacifist tract, Three Guineas, she recognized
both that the established church played a role in endorsing a society that
suppressed women and supported war, and also that a new approach to
religion was needed in order for women to find a way ahead:
By criticizing religion [the daughters of educated men] would attempt to

free the religious spirit from its present servitude and would help, if need be,
to create a new religion based it might well be upon the New Testament,
but, it might well be, very different from the religion now erected upon that
basis. (Woolf [1938] 2015, 189)
Woolf’s position, which owed much to her Quaker aunt, was significant to
her understanding of mysticism.
Contemporary Contexts
As Jane Shaw has shown, “the early twentieth century saw a surprising but
very definite revival of interest in religious experience generally, and mysti-
cism in particular, after decades, even centuries, of disparagement of the
subject in the British context” (2017, 226). As W.R. Inge, Dean of St
Paul’s, wrote in 1913: “Books on mysticism are now pouring from the
press, and some of them are sold by the thousand” (1913, 368). Significant
texts in this revival included Inge’s own Christian Mysticism (1899);
Varieties of Religious Experience (1901–2) by William James; The Inner
Light (1908) by English priest A.R. Whateley; The Mystical Element in
Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends (1909)
by the modernist Catholic writer Baron Von Hügel; Mysticism (1911) by
Evelyn Underhill; and Mystical Religion (1909) by Quaker scholar Rufus
Jones (Shaw 2017, 226; Greene 1991, 41). Caroline Emelia Stephen’s
contemporaneous works, Light Arising (1908) and Vision of Faith (1911),
can be classed as part of this revival; indeed, Jane Marcus notes that
William James admired her work.
To the best of our knowledge, apart from her aunt’s books, Woolf did
not own any of these spiritual classics, though her library does include two
earlier works by William James (Human Immortality and The Will to
Believe). Woolf is likely to have been aware of this discourse however, for the
educated public was reading widely in the literature on mysticism, as Joanna
20 J. DE GAY
Dean has shown. Evelyn Underhill in particular promoted mysticism: as

Greene argues, she was its “populizer and defender” (1991, 57) during the
early part of the twentieth century, and her prolific career of lectures, radio
broadcasts, and reviews provided ways of developing popular understanding
as part of her quest to “explain the spiritual life to her contemporaries”
(1991, 98). Donna Lazenby does not consider this significant tide of popu-
lar interest when she argues that we “must look elsewhere than to Woolf’s
contemporaries” for an understanding of Woolf’s mysticism, citing “Woolf’s
lack of engagement with theological ideas per se” (2014, 27).
Underhill was also part of a growing interest in mysticism among women
writers, including Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, and Vita Sackville-
West. Lazenby likewise sidelines women writers for when she argues that
neither Woolf nor her “immediate philosophical or aesthetic influences”
were influenced by mysticism, she has in mind the men of Bloomsbury,
including their mentor G.E. Moore (2014, 27). As Law notes, Underhill
“to a large extent initiated” the progression of the influence of mysticism
on women’s writing, for she began as a novelist and her work was read by
May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson (1997, 7). Also, as Suzanne Raitt
has argued, feminist interests in contemporary mysticism were closely con-
nected with the modernist interest in psychoanalysis (2000, 233–39);
indeed, Underhill described her “mystic way” as a “psychological process”
(1911, 110). Woolf was aware of this group of writers: she met Sinclair in
1909 and wrote about her rather disparagingly, and she reviewed two vol-
umes of Richardson’s Pilgrimage series of novels in 1913, declaring
Richardson’s method to be “better in its failure than most books in their
success” (Woolf 1986–2011, 3: 12). Though Woolf makes no comment
about Underhill, she cannot fail to have known of her broadcasts and jour-
nalism. A more direct encounter with contemporary interest in mysticism
came through Vita Sackville-West. This encounter was also marked with
ambivalence: as we will see, Woolf was frustrated by Sackville-West’s retreat
into mysticism, but this spurred her into thinking about solitary lifestyle
and contemplation, for Sackville-West, like Stephen, redefined the home as
a place of independence rather than domestic seclusion.
Spirituality and Institutional Religion

Virginia Woolf’s relationship to wider contemporary debates emerges
more clearly when we consider three key questions that Jane Shaw has
identified in early twentieth-century writings on mysticism: the relation-
ship between the individual and institutional religion; the question of

where authority might rest; and the nature of religious experience. As we
will see, Woolf was interested in all three questions. The first two are
related, for interest in mysticism had increased as part of a quest to “fill the
religious gap exposed by the modernist challenge to traditional religion”
(Shaw 2017, 240) and address needs not met by the church (Greene
1991, 41). As Shaw’s spectrum of case studies shows, mystical ideas were
explored by writers within the church (Dean Inge), by those outside the
church (William James), and by those moving into the church from the
margins (Evelyn Underhill) (2017, 240). Underhill was brought up an
Anglican, then considered joining the Catholic Church but decided
against it, before committing to Anglicanism around 1920–21 (Greene
1991, 74; Shaw 2017, 239). The women writers among whom I am locat-
ing Woolf all occupied marginal positions: Sinclair rejected Christianity
but had a love of the spiritual (Shaw 2017, 238); Richardson spent time in
a Quaker community but did not join; Sackville-West, like Underhill,
became interested in Catholicism but did not convert. Virginia Woolf’s
position was also marginal, though further out than these, for she was not
a member of a church but visited churches and cathedrals for peace and
reflection, and she attended church services as an onlooker: she advised
women in Three Guineas to “inform themselves of the practice of that
religion by attending Church services, by analysing the spiritual and intel-
lectual value of sermons” (2015, 189).
From this marginal position, Woolf criticized the church for failing to
practise spirituality: in The Voyage Out (1915), the protagonist Rachel
attends a church service and thinks that “All round her were people pre-
tending to feel what they did not feel, while somewhere above her floated
the idea which they could none of them grasp, which they pretended to
grasp, always escaping out of reach, a beautiful idea, an idea like a butter-
fly” (Woolf 1915, 264). The butterfly, an ancient symbol for the soul, has
been lost. Rachel struggles to find an object of worship, finding the clergy-
man particularly distracting: “always misled by the voice of Mr. Bax saying
things which misrepresented the idea” (265). Dr Crane in The Waves
(1931) is even more soul-destroying: Woolf describes his preaching at a
college chapel service as having “minced the dance of the white butterflies
at the door to powder” (27). Underhill also found the church wanting,
writing to Archbishop Cosmo Lang around 1930–31 that “the real fail-
ures, difficulties and weaknesses of the Church are spiritual and can only be
remedied by spiritual effort and sacrifice … her deepest need is a renewal,
22 J. DE GAY
first in the clergy and through them in the laity; of the great Christian tradi-
tion of the inner life” (Underhill c. 1930). With a few notable exceptions,
Underhill argued, the clergy were “lacking in spiritual realism,” lacking
both a sense of adoration and a prayer life, and “their dealings with souls
are often vague and amateurish.” Underhill also argued that clergymen
were too involved in profession of priesthood; Woolf engages with this
debate specifically in Three Guineas, when she notes that “so many people
are saying now about the Church and the nation,” that “[o]ur bishops and
deans seem to have no soul with which to preach and no mind with which
to write” (1938, 152). And in a pointed riposte to the leading proponent
of mysticism within the church, Woolf adds in evidence: “Listen to any
sermon in any church; read the journalism of Dean Alington or Dean Inge
in any newspaper” (1938, 152–53). Woolf castigated the church of the
1930s in particular for endorsing war, which she argued was unchristian, a
view that Underhill put forward two years later in her pamphlet, War and
Peace: The Church and War: “The Christian church is the Body of Christ.
Her mission on Earth is to spread the Spirit of Christ, which is the creative
spirit of wisdom and love; and in so doing bring in the kingdom of God.
Therefore, she can never support or approve any human action, individual
or collective, which is hostile to wisdom and love” ([1940] 2014).
The Site of Spiritual Authority

With a decline in adherence to the authority of the church, and a decline
in beliefs in biblical authority, greater emphasis came to be placed on the
individual and lived experience. This development helped bring Quakerism
to the fore, “precisely because,” Shaw notes, “the Friends had always
focused on the individual’s relationship with the divine” (2017, 236).
Even Inge wrote that “life or experience” had become more important
than church or Bible, with “the attempt to realise, in thought and feeling,
the immanence of the temporal in the eternal and the eternal in the tem-
poral” (1913, 5), adding that the “Divine spark already shines within us,
but it has to be searched for in the innermost depths of our personality,
and its light diffused over our whole being” (1913, 7). The quotidian was
important to Underhill: as she wrote in her poem “Immanence” (1912),
“I come in the little things, saith the Lord.” Greene notes of Underhill
that “the lived experience provided the context for her ideas to emerge. It
was the ordinary, the daily, which was the theatre in which the infinite
broke through” (1991, 5).
Woolf was deeply concerned with accessing the eternal in the temporal.
In her essay “Modern Fiction”—a work that stresses the importance of the
“spiritual” over “materialism”—she urges writers to “[e]xamine for a
moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day,” in order to capture “life,”
which is “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us
from the beginning of consciousness to the end,” adding, “Is it not the task
of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed
spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mix-
ture of the alien and external as possible?” (1986–2011, 3: 160–61). Woolf
therefore saw fiction as an important medium through which to explore
these things. Woolf also showed a sense of immanence in the lives of her
characters: in To the Lighthouse, Mrs Ramsay sees her dinner party as pre-
senting a piece of “eternity” ([1927] 1992, 142), whilst Lily Briscoe sees
life as a series of “little daily miracles” (218).
The Nature of Religious Experience

Woolf’s representation of literature as a spiritual activity in “Modern
Fiction,” along with her exploration of the spiritual lives of certain charac-
ters, suggests an interest in probing the nature of religious experience.
Writers on mysticism in the modernist era debated whether such experi-
ence was sporadic (unbidden), or methodical and structured. The sporadic
approach was propounded by William James who, as Shaw notes, “favoured
examples of the spontaneous reception of mystical experiences rather than
the preparation of the mind to receive them” (2017, 233). James cites
John Russell Lowell (Woolf’s godfather) as an example: “As I was speak-
ing, the whole system rose up before me like a vague destiny looming from
the Abyss. I never before so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me and around
me” (1902, 66). As in this example, the outdoor world was seen as a strong
influence on spirituality. Underhill balanced the two approaches: as Jamie
Callison notes, she “makes room in her scheme for sudden moments of
illumination but nonetheless insists upon the work requisite for a religious
life” (Callison 2016, 44). Underhill details this spiritual work in “The
Mystic Way,” the second and practical part of her book Mysticism.
Woolf’s writings suggest that she too had sympathy with both views.
She was prone to unbidden spiritual experiences, often arising from the
natural world. For example, she recorded an experience on Russell Square:
“I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; & the moon which is
risen over Persia; I have a great & astonishing sense of something there,
24 J. DE GAY
which is ‘it’” (Woolf 1977–1984, 3: 62). Woolf’s most explicit discussion

of these comes in her late memoir, “A Sketch of the Past,” where she
describes “moments of being”: events that stand out from the normal
course of life and strike her as “violent shocks.” Woolf gives three exam-
ples, all from her childhood: fighting with her brother and becoming hor-
rified at the human capacity to hurt others; overhearing the story of a
suicide; and seeing a flower and experiencing the integrity with the leaves
and the surrounding earth. She argues that the shock “is or will become a
revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appear-
ances.” These instances connect her to “a pattern” by which “we – I mean
all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work
of art.” Such shocks emanate from outside herself, coming as an “intuition …
so instinctive that it seems given to me, not made by me” (1985, 84).
However, even while celebrating unbidden spiritual experience, Woolf
also notes the importance of discipline, for she points out that she needs
to write in order to make sense of the experience: “I make it real by put-
ting it into words.” Much of Woolf’s writing about spiritual experience
throughout her career is concerned with making sense of it through fic-
tion. Woolf also recognized the need to ready oneself for receiving spiri-
tual experience. Woolf recognized the importance of reflective and
contemplative practice, with retreat—and particularly retreat to the
home—as a key part of the process. Woolf saw the spiritual value of her
home at Monk’s House: “Often down here I have entered into a sanctu-
ary; a nunnery; had a religious retreat” (1977–1984, 3: 196). The value
Woolf placed on the home owed much to the values of her Clapham Sect
ancestors, but also to the examples of Caroline Emelia Stephen and Vita
Sackville-West, as we have seen.
Two scenes from Woolf’s novels demonstrate that she recognized the
importance of meditative practice, and that she was interested in analysing
the nature of mystical experience. The first is in Mrs Dalloway, when
Clarissa returns from her shopping trip and enters her home as a sacred
space, feeling “like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her
the familiar veils and the response to old devotions,” and later retiring to
her bedroom “like a nun withdrawing” ([1925] 2015, 26–34). The sec-
ond is in To the Lighthouse, when Mrs Ramsay has a moment after putting
her children to bed when she can “be herself, by herself” ([1927] 1992,
85–89). Both Clarissa and Mrs Ramsay have structured experiences, going
through stages comparable with Underhill’s mystic way: the awakening of
the Self to consciousness of Divine Reality; purgation the self; illumination
of the self, involving “a sense of the Divine Presence”; the dark night of
the soul, mystic death and self-surrender; and union with the Absolute
Life (Mysticism 110–11). First, both Clarissa and Mrs Ramsay attain an
awakening of a self that is distinct from the roles of wife and mother. Both
undergo a purification of the self: Clarissa feels “blessed and purified,”
even reverting to a state of “virginity” ([1925] 2015, 26, 28); Mrs Ramsay,
as she ceases thinking and is silent: “All the being and the doing, expan-
sive, glittering, vocal, evaporated” ([1927] 1992, 85). Both figures go
through stages of illumination and darkness: Clarissa invokes specifically
mystic symbolism as she imagines “buds on the tree of life, flowers of
darkness” like “some lovely rose,” before entering “appalling night” (26,
27–28). Mrs Ramsay sits in front of the revolving beam of the lighthouse,
shrinking to a “wedge-shaped core of darkness,” and becoming aware that
everyone has hidden depths: “Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is
unfathomably deep” (85); and then, as she becomes aware of “this peace,
this rest, this eternity” losing herself in “her stroke” of the lighthouse, to
become “the thing she looked at – that light for example” (86). In both
these instances, the characters move towards what Underhill described as
the “unitive life” (1911, 3 ff.): for Clarissa, this comes to fruition later
with her feelings of empathy for the suicide of Septimus Warren Smith, as
she lives through the horror of his death, imagining the “suffocation of
blackness” (164) to see the sky beyond. Mrs Ramsay “leant to things,
inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they
became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one” (87). Significantly,
Woolf introduces a note of scepticism, for Clarissa practises an “atheist’s
religion” (70), while Mrs Ramsay proclaims that we are definitely not “in
the hands of the Lord” (87).
A series of three essays written in the period of time after finishing To
the Lighthouse, “On Being Ill” (1926), “The Sun and the Fish” (1928),
and “The Moment” (c. 1929), show that Woolf continued to reflect on
the nature of spiritual experience, specifically the spirituality of annihila-
tion. These provide a context for her moving towards her “mystical” novel
The Waves. Significantly, these essays span a particular progression in
Woolf’s relationship with Vita Sackville-West. In April 1926, Vita con-
fessed to Woolf that she was getting “more disagreeably solitary”; two
months later, Woolf responded that she was considering adopting a soli-
tary life at Rodmell. By October, Woolf’s thoughts coalesced into the
image of “a solitary woman musing … and endeavour at something mysti-
cal, spiritual” (1977–1984, 3: 114), and a month later, “some semi mystic
26 J. DE GAY
very profound life of a woman” (3: 118). All of these essays modulate
between fascination with, and scepticism about, mystical practice.
In “On Being Ill,” Woolf writes of illness as darkness and annihilation,
noting “how tremendous the spiritual change” illness brings, “how aston-
ishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that
are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of
influenza brings to light.” Illness escalates into a near-death experience:
“we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close
above our heads” (1986–2011, 4: 317). Although Woolf remarks, with
comic bathos, that this might simply be undergoing anaesthetic, so that
hearing the dentist on regaining consciousness at the surgery might be
confused with arriving in heaven and meeting God, this phrase also includes
a theological allusion to the idea of dying to sin in the waters of baptism
(Church of England [1928] 2004, 268). Woolf continues the theological
discussion by debating the relationship between body and soul, criticizing
writers who assume that the body is simply a “sheet of plain glass through
which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions
such as desire and greed, is null, negligible and non-existent” (4: 317–18).
The image makes a critical allusion to George Herbert’s observation that
“A man that looks on glass, /On it may stay his eye; /Or if he pleaseth,
through it pass, /And then the heav’n espy” (“The Elixir”). Woolf notes
that the body changes our perspective, so that mystic experience could have
a physical explanation, “this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into
mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of tran-
scendentalism” (318). Lying looking at the sky during illness can also be
dispiriting, as watching the play of light “this incessant making up of shapes
and casting them down … veiling the sun and unveiling it,” leads to a pes-
simistic sense of human insignificance: “Divinely beautiful it is also divinely
heartless” (321). Woolf’s attention therefore turns to the assurance that
can come from contemplating nature: “Wonderful to relate, poets have
found religion in Nature; people live in the country to learn virtue from
plants. It is in their indifference that they are comforting” (322). But she
concludes that it is poetry that provides the greatest relief, for “words seem
to possess a mystic quality” (324) during illness, and it is in the play of
meaning, not its reification, that true consolation is found.
Woolf continued to probe how mystical experience leads to contempla-
tion of annihilation and human insignificance in her essay “The Sun and
the Fish” (1928), where she recalls her experience of seeing the “sacred
twenty-four seconds” of the eclipse of 29 June 1927, in a party that
included Sackville-West (1986–2011, 4: 521). As the spectators gathered

before dawn, Woolf observes, senses “had orientated themselves differ-
ently” from usual. Invoking characteristics of mystical experience, she
describes a unity with something beyond the self, of being “related to the
whole world,” and sensed the loss of self: “we were come for a few hours
of disembodied intercourse with the sky … we had put off the little badges
and signs of individuality” (520). However, Woolf again pits a mystic sen-
sibility against profound scepticism, for throughout the essay she enter-
tains the argument of the British Empiricists that something ceases to exist
if it cannot be seen: if becoming invisible is therefore identical with anni-
hilation. The second part of the essay posits the idea that “immortality” is
possible for fish and reptiles, if not for humans. Watching lizards in the
London Zoo, she finds that “Time seems to have stopped and we are in
the presence of immortality” (4: 523), while fish tanks are “squares of
immortality.” The essay concludes, “The eye shuts now. It has shown us a
dead world and an immortal fish” (4: 524).
Woolf makes a similar interplay of mystic sensibility and scepticism in
“The Moment” (1929). As in “On Being Ill,” words have spiritual power,
for they “explode like a scent suffusing the whole dome of the mind with
its incense, flavour; let fall, from their ambiguous envelope, the self-
confidence of youth” (Woolf 1986–2011, 6: 510). In metaphors invoking
rituals of the Catholic Church, Woolf shows that it is words that have
power, but their “ambiguity” is important; their “envelope” recalling the
“luminous halo … semi-transparent envelope” of “Modern Fiction.” As in
the other essays, the natural world provides inspiration, as she watches an
owl and ponders:
Could we not fly too, with broad wings and with softness; and be all one
wing; all embracing, all gathering, and these boundaries, these pryings over
hedge into hidden compartments of different colours be all swept into one
colour by the brush of the wing; and so visit in splendour, augustly, peaks;
and there lie exposed, bare, on the spine, high up, to the cold light of the
moon rising, and when the moon rises, single, solitary, behold her, one,
eminent over us? (511)
This lyrical description of a bird’s flight echoes G.M. Hopkins’s “The

Windhover,” where the bird becomes the focus of his religious longing for
God, as “My heart in hiding/Stirred for a bird.” However, Woolf again
deals in harsh realities, this time more abruptly, as she reminds the reader
that the owl is a bird of prey, because its movement “reveals to the shaken
28 J. DE GAY
terrier its own insignificance,” and the essay ends with a scene of domestic
violence and a call to action: “Let us … end this” (512). As with Stephen,
Woolf’s mysticism was not detached but flowed back into action.
Ideas from these essays are picked up in Woolf’s diary entries on The
Waves, where she continued to develop her thinking on the nature of mys-
tical experience. Woolf is interested in the process of withdrawing into the
“mystical side” of solitude, and of venturing beyond the self, so that “it is
not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with” (1977–1984,
3: 113). The Waves was to be a “mystical eyeless book” (3: 203). Woolf
continues to engage with sceptical ideas in The Waves for she plans “an
endeavour at something mystic, spiritual; the thing that exists when we
aren’t there” (3: 114), again alluding to the philosophy of the British
Empiricists, echoing Andrew Ramsay’s pithy explanation of his father’s
philosophical project on “[s]ubject and object and the nature of reality,”
as “think of a kitchen table … when you’re not there” ([1927] 1992, 33).
This description alludes to Leslie Stephen’s research into the arguments of
the British Empiricists that nothing can be proven to exist unless it can be
observed: an argument he extended in his agnostic writings to disprove
the existence of God. Woolf, by contrast, leaves the question open, once
again taking up the position of “rational mysticism” by proposing to
explore the mystical and the spiritual in order to ascertain what does exist
when it is not being observed: what exists in an “eyeless” universe.
Woolf’s reflections on the nature of spiritual experience in The Waves
show how she shares the contemporary interest in combining mysticism
and psychoanalysis, as seen in the work of Richardson, Sinclair, and
Underhill. In particular, Woolf begins to explore her personal memories
that would become crucial to “A Sketch of the Past,” as she describes
Neville’s attempt to examine his experience of hearing about a violent
death. Significantly, the moment is narrated in retrospect, as Neville takes
an “hour of solitude” to deliberately recreate the situation in which he first
heard the news, seeking to “recover, if I can, by standing on the same stair
half-way up the landing, what I felt when I heard about the dead man”
([1931] 2011, 17). The reflection is traumatic rather than a source of sol-
ace, for Neville finds that the “apple-tree leaves became fixed in the sky; the
moon glared; I was unable to life my foot up the stair.” This statement
incorporates a biblical allusion to the Fall: unlike those who use the Bible
as a stimulus for contemplative prayer, Neville uses it to fix an image of
death: “but we are doomed, all of us by the apple trees, by the immitigable
tree which we cannot pass.” As with the reference to domestic violence in
“The Moment,” Woolf confronts painful experience rather than seeking to
occlude it. However, the transitory nature of this experience also enables
Neville to move on, as his thoughts shift from moonlit night to late after-
noon, “when the sun makes oleaginous spots on the linoleum, and a crack
of light kneels on the floor” (17). Neville revisits this memory on hearing
of the death of his friend Percival: “I will stand for one moment beneath
the immitigable tree, alone with the man whose throat is cut.” Again,
Woolf emphasizes the moment, and again, rather than providing solace, it
is an acknowledgement of pain: “For this moment, this one moment, we
are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs
in my flesh.” Now the tree of Eden merges with the crucifixion tree, but
there is no redemption: “We are doomed, all of us” (120).
Woolf drew on images from her essays as she planned The Waves. One
of these was aquatic life, as she uses the image of a fin to express a fleet-
ing glimpse of something profound: “One sees a fin passing far out”
(1977–1984, 3: 113). Woolf invokes the image of the fin in the novel
specifically in relation to Bernard who finds himself temporarily alone
on a visit to Rome. As a sociable man who finds solitude uncomfortable,
he counsels himself that such “moments of escape are not to be
despised.” And here, leaning over this parapet, he sees, “far out a waste
of water. A fin turns. This bare visual impression is unattached to any
line of reason, it springs up as one might see the fin of a porpoise on the
horizon” ([1931] 2011, 151). For observers of nature, the presence of
a fin is a sign to wait for the chance to see the whole animal; for Bernard,
this process of watching and waiting is essential to his vocation as a
writer: “Visual impressions often communicate thus briefly statements
that we shall in time to come uncover and coax into words.” He stores
away the image, waiting for a chance to explore it further, on “some
winter’s evening” (151). However, when Woolf next uses the image of
the fin, it is to remark on its absence. Bernard, now an old man, has
undergone a kind of seizure, described in terms very similar to Woolf ’s
description of the eclipse, and finds that: “No fin breaks the waste of
this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I
speak, no varied words” (227). This scene, which draws on Woolf ’s
experience of the eclipse, goes to the brink of a world described without
a self: though the individual may die (and indeed it seems that Bernard
is the last of the six friends to die), the world will continue in “the eter-
nal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again” (238).
Woolf clearly found writing the novel cathartic, and she declared on
completing it that she had succeeded in “nett[ing] that fin” (1977–1984,
4: 10). As the immortal fish had provided a measure of solace in her
30 J. DE GAY
essay on the eclipse, so the capturing of fleeting glances of spiritual

experience was sufficient in The Waves.
While Woolf explores the most traumatic of her “moments of being” in
The Waves, she also hints at the most positive, for Neville also has unbid-
den experiences, for which Woolf uses the word “mystic.” Witnessing an
ordinary scene of a workman with his mallet, a tea-urn boiling, and “banks
of blue flowers,” he has a sense of “the obscure, the mystic sense of adora-
tion, of completeness that triumphed over chaos. Nobody saw my poised
and intent figure as I stood at the open door. Nobody guessed the need I
had to offer my being to one god; and perish, and disappear. His mallet
descended; the vision broke” (39). Here, there is a moment of loss of
identity, completeness, with banks of flowers at the centre. Woolf would
revisit this image of the flower in her final novel, Between the Acts, where
she gives to George, a small boy, her own impression of looking at a flower
bed and experiencing it as a unity: “‘That is the whole,’ I said … it seemed
suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring
enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part
flower” (1985, 82). This is a glimpse of a system, of the pattern, that
Woolf later saw herself as uncovering through her writing practice.
When Woolf comes to “A Sketch of the Past,” then, she is returning to
analyse a series of images that she had already explored through the disci-
pline of writing fiction. Having delved more deeply into Freud than she
had done before, she sees them afresh with additional psychological
insight: “now that for the first time I have written them down, I realize
something that I have never realized before” (1985, 83). Although this
statement is disingenuous (as we have seen, she had written them in her
fiction before) this is the first time for her to write them in the first person.
The experience with the flower, she says, has a “reason”: it brings satisfac-
tion, it brought her hope that as a writer she could express things and
make sense of them. Here, then, Woolf’s rational mysticism reached its
logical conclusion: unbidden spiritual experience is important for inspira-
tion; explanation is helpful in making sense of experience; learning to
explain enabled her to become a writer.
Virginia Woolf’s engagement with contemporary ideas about mysti-
cism was one of dialogue and debate. She was interested in the possibilities
that mysticism offered as an alternative to institutional religion, and as a
chance to revisit that religion’s texts and ideas. Woolf used the mystical
techniques of solitude, contemplation, and reflection, and was intrigued
by the possibilities offered by psychoanalysis to explain spiritual experi-
ence. However, whilst her engagement with mystical ideas was often
marked by scepticism and resistance, debates about mysticism also
informed her understanding of the spiritual purpose of her own writing
practice.
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CHAPTER 3
A God “in process of change”: Woolfian

Theology and Mrs. Dalloway
Kristina K. Groover
In her autobiographical essay “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf

famously describes what she terms “moments of being”: episodes of
heightened experience or awareness that punctuate the long, unremark-
able stretches of “nondescript cotton wool” comprising much of ordinary
human life. “[I]t is a constant idea of mine,” she writes, “that behind the
cotton wool is hidden a pattern;”
that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole
world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a
Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world.
In her diary of December 1929, Woolf reflects on her adolescent writings: “I was
then writing a long picturesque essay upon the Christian religion, I think; called
Religio Laici, I believe, proving that man has need of a God; but the God
described was in process of change…” (1977–1984, 3: 271). While this youthful
essay is lost to history, I am intrigued by Woolf’s provocative reference to a God
“in process of change”—an idea I explore in this essay.
K. K. Groover (*)
Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, USA

34 K. K. GROOVER
But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically

there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing
itself…. (1985, 72)
In describing moments of being, Woolf voices a multifaceted “philoso-

phy”: of the mysterious and inexplicable; of art and creation; and of God.
Yet, rather than elucidating these subjects, Woolf’s language further com-
plicates them. She intuits a “pattern” behind the ordinary and visible
world, but cannot explain its origin. She connects her apprehension of this
pattern with her writing: “it is a token of some real thing behind appear-
ances; and I make it real by putting it into words” (72). She asserts that
“certainly and emphatically there is no God,” yet simultaneously claims
that “there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven….”
Presumably, Woolf is not denying either the existence or the authorship
of Shakespeare and Beethoven. Rather, she seems to suggest that these
artists are not the sole creators of their works; the reader or hearer also
participates in their creation: “we are parts of the work itself.…we are the
thing itself.” “God” thus becomes the fellow-artist of Shakespeare and
Beethoven, a co-creator of “this vast mass that we call the world.” And
God’s “art”—“the whole world”—is not only perceived but in some sense
created by “we.” In this declaration of her philosophy, Woolf casts human
beings, and particularly human relationships, as the vehicle of creation:
not just the creation of art but also the creation of the world. The aesthetic
pattern is not an end in itself, but points toward a hidden pattern of mean-
ing.1 Woolf thus blurs the distinction between art and theology, between
secular and sacred. And the sacred that she gestures toward is not fixed,
but is continually being created.
In “The ‘Religious Sense’ in a Post-war Secular Age,” Alex Owen
groups Woolf’s moments of being with other “less orthodox” spiritualities
1
Several critics have discussed this blurring of aesthetic and spiritual concerns in Woolf’s
work. In “Notes Toward Thinking the Sacred in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,”
Gabrielle McIntire writes that Woolf’s “protest against the existence” of God, Beethoven,
and Shakespeare “betrays an uncertainty about the relations between aesthetics, meaning,
human beingness, truth, identity, and the divine”; in probing the nature of her aesthetic
vision, she also considers “both the undecided possibility and the impossibility of the divine”
(2013, 8). James Wood writes that Woolf’s writing consistently seeks “‘something more’”
that “lay beyond or outside art.…At times she seems to have been looking not so much for
the aesthetic pattern behind reality as for a further metaphysical pattern behind the aesthetic
pattern” (2010, 116).
3 A GOD “IN PROCESS OF CHANGE”: WOOLFIAN THEOLOGY… 35
that arose in Europe in the wake of World War I. Devastated by the h orrors
of the war and the apparent inadequacy of mainstream religions to miti-
gate them, some post-war intellectuals sought alternative forms of spiritu-
ality more suited to “a fragmented, insecure, and seemingly hostile modern
world.” Owen characterizes these alternate spiritualities as “highly indi-
vidualistic, often solipsistic”; they focused on “the spiritual potential and
experiential immediacies of the ‘I’” (2006, 176). While I agree with Owen
that Woolf’s moments of being reflect her interest in “a spiritualized
world-view which did not require God,” I disagree with the characteriza-
tion of Woolf’s spiritual views as solipsistic. While the modernist spirituali-
ties Owen cites place self-discovery at the center of their explorations,
Woolf’s work frequently deplores such egoism.2 Rather, Woolf’s use of the
plural—“we are the thing itself”—suggests that her spiritual vision emerges
not from the quest for an I-centered, individualized truth but from an
intersubjective self that is inseparable from relationship and environment.
In Woolf’s work, moments of spiritual consciousness emerge not from the
egoistic self-contained subject, but through the interplay of self and other.
Like many of her modernist peers, Woolf has a long-standing critical
reputation as a writer focused on the life of the mind, rather than on
embodied experience. Phenomenological studies of Woolf’s work have
shifted this critical focus by exploring her characters’ engagement with the
world as rooted in the embodied self.3 These phenomenological approaches
are influenced in particular by the early work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
in which he argues that, as they interact, subject and object “are not only
intermingled; they also constitute a new whole” (1967, 45). More recently,
building on a phenomenological groundwork, post-cognitive theories of
enacted consciousness have challenged cognitive theories that separate the
thinking, computing brain from the embodied self. As philosopher Evan
2
Woolf repeatedly and mockingly represents this “egotistical self” as the letter “I.” In To
the Lighthouse, for example, Mrs. Ramsay recognizes Charles Tansley’s need “to assert him-
self, and so it would always be with him till he got his Professorship or married his wife, and
so need not be always saying ‘I--I--I’” ([1927] 1981, 106). In A Room of One’s Own, the
narrator describes “taking down a new novel by Mr. A, who is in the prime of life and very
well thought of, apparently, by the reviewers…. But after reading a chapter or two, a shadow
seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the
letter ‘I’.…One began to be tired of ‘I’” ([1929] 1981, 99–100).
3
See, for example, Lorraine Sim, “Ailing Dualisms: Woolf’s Revolt Against Rationalism in
the ‘Real World’ of Influenza” (2005); Justine Dymond, “‘The Outside of Its Inside and the
Inside of Its outside’: Phenomenology in To the Lighthouse” (2001); Laura Doyle, “‘These
Emotions of the Body’: Intercorporeal Narrative in To the Lighthouse” (1994).
36 K. K. GROOVER
Thompson argues, cognitivism “derives from taking what is in fact a socio-

cultural activity – human computation – and projecting it onto something
that goes on inside the individual’s head. The cognitive properties of com-
putation do not belong to the individual person but to the sociocultural
system of individual-plus-environment” (2007, 7). Theories of enacted
cognition undermine the cognitivist notion of a subject–object relation-
ship in which the thinking self apprehends an insentient world. If, con-
versely, cognition emerges from situated, embodied experience, then
relationship and intersubjectivity become central to the formation of
knowledge.
My argument stems from an understanding that religious thought, like
any other form of thought, is both situated and embodied. While this may
seem self-evident, such an assertion challenges pervasive theistic views that
regard the soul or mind as immaterial, separated from the body and the
world. As Drew Leder argues in The Absent Body, “a certain telos toward
disembodiment is an abiding strain of Western intellectual history. The
Platonic emphasis on the purified soul, the Cartesian focus on the ‘cogito’
experience, pull us toward a vision of self within which an immaterial ratio-
nality is central” (1990, 3). Theologian Rosemary Ruether points out that
this separation of mind and body is endemic in Western religious tradition;
“[T]he alienation of the mind from the body; the alienation of the subjec-
tive self from the objective world; the subjective retreat of the individual,
alienated from the social community; the domination or rejection of
nature by spirit – these all have roots in the apocalyptic-Platonic heritage
of classical Christianity” (1979, 44). Acknowledging that cognition itself
is a sociocultural activity requires a recognition that the embodied mind
constitutes the world and its experiences, including religious experience.4
Much as theories of enacted cognition regard consciousness as originat-
ing from the body in its environment, enactment theologies recognize the
divine as deriving from embodied human life, and from the relationship
between the self and an immanent or transcendent other. As religion
scholar Richard Grigg writes, enactment theologies regard the divine as “a
relation that human beings choose to enact. This does not entail reducing
4
As theologian Naomi Goldenberg writes: “Theologians are ignorant of what every
anthropologist knows – i.e., that the forms of our thought derive from the forms of our
culture” (1979, 115). Similarly, Rosemary Ruether writes that feminist theology “makes the
sociology of theological knowledge visible, no longer hidden behind mystifications of objec-
tified divine and universal authority” (1993, 13).
the divine…to an unconscious, alienating projection or dismissing it as a

mere imaginary entity….But neither is God conceived…as an independent
reality. Human beings do not simply enact a relation to the divine; they
enact the divine itself…” (1995, 51–52) This relationship between self and
other is “something more than the sum of its constituent elements. Indeed,
this relation is the divine…” (53). By suggesting that human beings con-
struct the real as they perceive and interact with the world, both enacted
cognition and enactment theologies challenge “one of the more entrenched
assumptions of our scientific heritage – that the world is independent of the
knower” (Varela et al. 1993, 150). Enactment theologies argue that divin-
ity is a part of this reality that human beings construct. Viewed in this way,
the “pattern” that Woolf discerns in “moments of being” is both some-
thing she creates and, simultaneously, something that is “given” (Woolf
1985, 72). The sacred is neither wholly internal nor wholly external, but in
the space between—in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, a “new whole.” “Theology’s
task, then, is not to gain access to and make claims about some objective
entity that it naively supposes is ‘out there,’” Grigg writes, “but to actualize
the divine” (1995, 55).
In the work of some modernist writers, loss of confidence in a pre-given
world leads to nihilism and other expressions of existential crisis. Woolf’s
work, however, seems enabled rather than hindered by the “groundless-
ness” of a phenomenological world (Varela et al. 1993, 144). As research-
ers Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch ask in their
study The Embodied Mind, “Why should it be threatening to question the
idea that the world has pregiven properties that we represent? Why do we
become nervous when we call into question the idea that there is some
way that the world is ‘out there,’ independent of our cognition, and that
cognition is a re-presentation of that independent world?” (1993, 133).
Instead, they argue, humans should regard this “context-dependent
know-how” as “the very essence of creative cognition” (148). In Woolf’s
writing, this “creative cognition” generates deeply imaginative portrayals
of human experience, including spiritual experience. Her work reclaims
the sacred from the inadequacy and corruption of religion while offering
a counter to meaninglessness in the modern world. Woolf’s 1925 novel
Mrs. Dalloway dramatizes her engagement with the sacred; as Woolf cri-
tiques religion and other controlling ideologies, she locates the sacred
elsewhere, in the relationship between self and other.
In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway articulates what Peter Walsh mock-
ingly calls her “transcendental theory” about how people are connected to
38 K. K. GROOVER
one another and to the spaces they inhabit. “It was unsatisfactory, they
agreed, how little one knew people,” he recalls. “But she said, sitting on
the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not
‘here, here, here’; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere…
So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who com-
pleted them; even the places” ([1925] 1981, 152). Clarissa thus evinces
her belief that people and places are interconnected, the boundaries
between them so thoroughly blurred that people are “completed” by one
another and by their environments. Woolf depicts seemingly ordinary
aspects of Clarissa’s experience—a walk through a London park, a kiss, a
party—as heightened moments formed by relationships between self and
other, self and the world.
In the opening scene of Woolf’s novel, Clarissa walks through an itera-
tion of London so specific that readers can readily map her journey as she
leaves her house in Westminster, crosses Victoria Street, walks through
Green Park, and emerges into Tottenham Court Road on her way to
shopping in Bond Street. Yet Woolf juxtaposes this realistic depiction of
shared public spaces with the extraordinary quality of Clarissa’s experience
as she traverses the city. In one respect, Clarissa’s walk—narrated almost
entirely through her private thoughts—seems a perfect illustration of the
“inward turn” that presumably characterizes and defines modernist litera-
ture.5 But Clarissa’s thoughts do not derive from a “private, interior
domain of cognition and contemplation,” as in the cognitivist model
(Herman 2011, 253); they are both embodied and contextualized.
Clarissa’s euphoria is mirrored in an ecstatic body that crosses streets and
thresholds, connecting her with people, memories, and the body of the
world. As she steps into the fresh June day, that movement invokes her
memory of “plunging” through the French doors into the summer air at
Bourton, her childhood country home; she is reminded of the fresh, early
morning air and the “kiss” of a wave against the body. Rather than emerg-
ing solely from her thoughts, these memories are located in the body and
expressed in Clarissa’s movements. Her extended consciousness is
imprinted by the scene around her, her body anticipating Big Ben’s chime
even before it sounds. The ringing of the hour signals her anxiety about
5
This view is so pervasive in literary studies that David Herman has termed it a “critical
commonplace”: that modernist texts reflect an “inward turn, innovating on previous narra-
tives by developing new means to probe psychological depths” (2011, 249).
aging and death, simultaneously reflected in her faltering heartbeat and in

the “irrevocable” toll of the bell.
As Clarissa observes and interacts with the scenes around her, she experi-
ences the London streets and parks as an expansive and enchanted world.
“Heaven only knows why one loves it so,” she reflects as she crosses Victoria
Street; “how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling
it, creating it every moment afresh” (4). As Matthew Mutter writes in
Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance, “as in Woolf’s
image of the world as a work of art, it is impossible to decide whether this
whole, this aesthetic unity, is something given or made…” (2017, 85).
Woolf’s language suggests that it is both, with Clarissa both observing and
constructing the London landscape; as she “sees” it, she is simultaneously
“building it” and “creating it every moment afresh.” Her engagement with
this cacophony of sights and sounds is intersubjective, exceeding the merely
sensory: “In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow
and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men
shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the
jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what
she loved; life; London; this moment of June” (4).6 Through her allusive
and playful language, Woolf creates a scene that transcends realism and
generates a linguistic euphoria belonging not solely to Clarissa, or to the
scene before her, but to the relation between the two. As Graham Parkes
points out, Woolf often creates scenes that are “[n]either subjectively inner
(peculiar to the particular consciousness whose perspective it is) nor objec-
tively outer (actually there in the thing itself),” but rather “arise from the
transpersonal imagination, the medium of participation between the inner
and outer worlds” (1982, 40). I would argue further that Woolf’s descrip-
tion elides the distinction between inner and outer, creating a relation
between the two that, in Richard Grigg’s terms, is “something more than
the sum of its constituent elements” (1995, 53).
6
Clarissa’s experience reads as a dramatization of the “ordinary mind on an ordinary day”
that Woolf describes in “Modern Fiction”: “The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial,
fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall…they shape themselves into the lives
of Monday or Tuesday…” (1986–2011, 4: 160). “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon
the mind in the order in which they fall,” she continues; “let us trace the pattern, however
disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the
consciousness” (161).
40 K. K. GROOVER
Clarissa’s firm resolve that “not for a moment did she believe in God”
(29) echoes Woolf’s assertion, in “A Sketch of the Past,” that “certainly and
emphatically there is no God” (1985, 72). Yet Woolf employs religiously
inflected language to characterize Clarissa’s experience as she enters her home:
…she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the
familiar veils and the response to old devotions.…It was her life, and, bend-
ing her head over the hall table, she bowed beneath the influence, felt
blessed and purified, saying to herself…how moments like this are buds on
the tree of life…not for a moment did she believe in God; but all the more…
must one repay in daily life to servants, yes, to dogs and canaries, above all
to Richard her husband, who was the foundation of it…one must pay back
from this secret deposit of exquisite moments… (29)
As in “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf combines a pointed denial of God

with language that nonetheless suggests spiritual experience: Clarissa’s
grateful response to the protective privacy and comfort of her home is a
sacred moment, a nun-like withdrawal marked by devotion, purification,
and thanksgiving. Here Woolf reclaims religious imagery and language to
characterize a ritual having nothing to do with traditional religious prac-
tice; rather, she uses that language to demarcate Clarissa’s recognition of
the ordinary as sacred. Even as her domestic life is grounded in pedestrian
details—the telephone message left on the hall table, the cook heard whis-
tling in the kitchen—these merge with Clarissa’s inner life to form a
“secret deposit of exquisite moments.” Clarissa’s home becomes an Edenic
garden, its domestic pleasures forming “buds on the tree of life.” Woolf
returns to this garden metaphor throughout the text; Peter comments
that life itself is an “unknown garden, full of turns and corners” (152), and
Clarissa’s party conjures an “enchanted garden” where characters form
unexpected connections.
Foremost among Clarissa’s “secret deposit of exquisite moments” is
her memory of a kiss shared many years earlier with her girlhood friend
Sally Seton. Clarissa recalls Sally’s kiss—“the most exquisite moment of
her whole life”—in terms both immanent and transcendent:
Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might
have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with
Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up…a dia-
mond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they w alked…
she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious
feeling! (35–36)
While this is not a “religious experience” in any common sense of the

term, it is an experience “deemed religious” by Clarissa, by virtue of its
singularity and perfection.7 The moment is not inherently sacred, but is
made sacred by Clarissa and Sally; their kiss and the intimacy of the
encounter evoke a “religious feeling” and a “revelation.” By co-opting the
language of religion, Woolf generates an expansive notion of the sacred,
with the authority to define sacredness located in Clarissa herself. Here the
notion of what is “religious” is not fixed, but fluid and contested.
Throughout her work, Woolf depicts connections among her charac-
ters that are simultaneously material and mysterious. In Mrs. Dalloway, she
employs a series of spatial and geographic metaphors to depict the extraor-
dinary nature of these connections. Reflecting on her love of everyday
life—“what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her”—Clarissa
regards herself as “part of people she had never met…laid out like a mist
between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she
had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself”
(9). Woolf’s metaphor blurs the distinction between seen and unseen and
between self and environment. Through her relationships, Clarissa is
transformed from a fixed body into a fluid and changeable self, a “mist”
that is shaped by its surroundings; the people she “knew best” are trans-
figured into trees with branches that “lifted her” (9).
Similarly, Woolf employs the recurrent image of a spider’s thread to
portray the connections among her characters as they traverse the city.
These light and malleable ties are broken and then reshape and remake
themselves throughout the day as characters meet one another, depart, and
engage in new meetings. When Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread
leave Lady Bruton napping after her lunch party, they remain “attached to
her by a thin thread…which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and
thinner as they walked across London; as if one’s friends were attached to
one’s body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread…” (112). Later, as
Richard walks across the city toward Clarissa, “as a single spider’s thread
after wavering here and there attaches itself to the point of a leaf, so
Richard’s mind…set now on his wife” (114); he was “eager, yes, very eager,
to travel that spider’s thread of attachment between himself and Clarissa….”
(115). Woolf’s metaphors manifest the unseen connections between her
7
In my introduction to this volume, I discuss religion scholar Ann Taves’ (2009) call for a
study of “experiences deemed religious” by people or groups in contrast to “religious experi-
ences” as defined by scholars, religious leaders, or other authorities.
42 K. K. GROOVER
characters as they move through the day, driven by the interplay among
self, other, and surroundings. These connections are emotional and mate-
rial, but also mysterious; they reflect a phenomenological view of extended
consciousness that Woolf represents in physical form.
While Woolf’s whimsical and malleable spatial metaphors reflect highly
individualized experiences of the city, these contrast sharply with her pre-
cise geographic mapping of the London streets, which impose conformity
with dominant nationalist and military ideologies. As Peter Walsh walks
through Trafalgar Square and up Whitehall, he encounters statues of the
Duke of Cambridge and of war heroes Nelson, Gordon, and Havelock. A
culture that valorizes militarism and that promotes itself as noble and vic-
torious in war has produced a series of prominent public spaces that signify
those ideals, effectively paving over the reality of the war’s incalculable
losses. Woolf’s description of a passing regiment carrying a wreath to the
Cenotaph suggests that this public display of patriotism is intended to
elicit compliance and limit dissent. Peter watches admiringly as the sol-
diers, “in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them,
marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters
of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude,
fidelity, love of England” (51). Through their practice of this patriotic rite,
the soldiers lose their distinct subjectivity, becoming living forms of the
statues that surround them; they march “as if one will worked arms and
legs uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid
under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet
staring corpse by discipline” (51). Woolf thus depicts this officially con-
structed post-war landscape as both deceptive and destructive. She rewrites
the soldiers’ display of unquestioning patriotism as a walking death; their
faces adopt the “marble stare” of “renunciation” from the statues that sur-
round them (51).
As a shell-shocked war veteran, Septimus Smith’s very presence on the
London street disrupts the dominant cultural narrative maintained by stat-
ues and military marches. Although Septimus inhabits the same city streets
as Clarissa and Peter, he experiences neither Clarissa’s euphoric enjoyment
of the day nor Peter’s reflexive patriotism. Like Clarissa, Septimus tra-
verses both time and space through his embodied memories. While
Clarissa is transported back to largely happy reminiscences of her girlhood,
Septimus relives the trauma of war, its scenes replaying before his eyes in
the midst of Regent’s Park. For Septimus, the streets of London appear
frightening and dangerous. When an official car, perhaps carrying a
ember of the royal family, brings traffic to a standstill, the crowd looks
m
on with curiosity and deference. The car, a physical manifestation of the
British regime, sends a shock wave through the crowd; responding to the
unseen “vibration,” strangers “looked at each other and thought of the
dead; of the flag; of Empire” (18). Septimus, however, shares no sense of
belonging and community with those around him, but fears that he is
“blocking the way” as the car tries to pass (15). Psychically destroyed by
the death of his beloved comrade Evans “just before the Armistice,”
Septimus congratulates himself on feeling “very little and very reasonably.
The War had taught him” (86). While Clarissa blithely asserts that the war
is “over; thank Heaven – over,” Septimus’s pain exposes the grotesque
fiction that silences and shames those still suffering the war’s effects (5).
For Septimus, all of the human practices that connect people to one
another—gestures, language, the ability to “read” faces and emotions—
have been destroyed by the trauma of war. As Drew Leder writes in The
Absent Body, embodied experience is “a profoundly social thing, arising
out of experiences of the corporeality of other people and of their gaze
directed back upon me…. My self-understanding always involves the see-
ing of what others see in me” (1990, 92). Septimus’s trauma renders him
unable to understand or be understood by those around him. His illness
poses both an obstacle and a threat, isolating him in a private hell defined
by the stares of strangers and by his wife Lucrezia’s shame. Lucrezia, hav-
ing been instructed by Septimus’s doctor to “make him notice real things,”
tries desperately to forge a connection between her husband and the world
around them (25). As a skywriting airplane draws the attention of other
characters, however, Septimus cannot join them in collectively puzzling
out its message; rather, he reads the letters as a private missive, both beau-
tiful and ominous, from an unknown sender. Septimus finds in the after-
math of the war that the great literature he had previously loved is reduced
to a message of hatred and despair. Although he believes that he is record-
ing “revelations,” his own writings are incomprehensible: “Men must not
cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs
of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make it known
(he wrote it down). He waited. He listened” (24). Septimus is thus iso-
lated both linguistically and geographically. While the rest of the city
carries on in a landscape that declares the war over and heroically won,
Septimus’s illness signifies a “failure” that must be “conceal[ed].” He
remains the “scapegoat” (25), unheard and unacknowledged by his fellow
Londoners.
44 K. K. GROOVER
Even as an obligatory and enforced patriotism silences Septimus, the

medical practice to which he is subjected similarly suppresses his voice and
denigrates his experience. Woolf offers scathing portraits of both Dr.
Holmes, the family physician who proclaims there is “nothing whatever
the matter” with Septimus, and Sir William Bradshaw, the Harley Street
psychiatrist whom Lucrezia seeks out in desperation. While not a conven-
tionally religious character, Bradshaw embodies the aspect of religious
practice that Woolf disdains most: the arrogant desire to convert others to
one’s own beliefs. Woolf adopts religious language to characterize
Bradshaw’s cultlike devotion to “Proportion, divine proportion, Sir
William’s goddess” (99). In a scathing denunciation, she likens Bradshaw’s
medical treatment to empire and religion in their shared desire to control
others under various innocuous and charitable guises:
Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made
England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised
despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they,
too, shared his sense of proportion….
But Proportion has a sister…a Goddess…even now engaged in dashing
down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern
countenance. Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the
weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on
the face of the populace.…[She] walks penitentially disguised as brotherly
love…offers help, but desires power…concealed, as she mostly is, under
some plausible disguise; some venerable name; love, duty, self sacrifice. (100)
Just as military statues and marches subjugate the voices and tragedies of
individual soldiers, Bradshaw’s practice mutes his patients’ experiences,
reducing them to a series of symptoms noted methodically on pink cards.
Caustically, Woolf specifies that “To his patients he gave three-quarters of
an hour” to address “this exacting science which has to do with what, after
all, we know nothing about, the human brain…” (99). While Septimus’s
illness has cut him off from meaningful human connections, Bradshaw’s
prescription finishes the job as he counsels “rest in bed; rest in solitude;
silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages; six
months’ rest…” (99). In prescribing this isolation, Bradshaw effectively
prescribes Septimus’s death.
Woolf portrays the novel’s only traditionally religious character, Miss
Kilman, as both pitiable and repugnant. An impoverished spinster depen-
dent on the Dalloways for employment, Miss Kilman cultivates her
r eligiosity within an attitude of seething resentment. Clarissa regards Miss

Kilman with contempt, grouping her with other “dominators and tyrants”
who, like Bradshaw, are bent on converting others (12). As tutor and
companion to Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth, Miss Kilman jealously vies
with Clarissa for her daughter’s love, using her professed piety as a weapon.
Claiming to “pity” Clarissa, she secretly despises her and longs to “ruin
her; humiliate her; bring her to her knees” in the name of a “religious vic-
tory” (125). Even as she struggles to divest herself of worldly desire, Miss
Kilman is consumed by her rage and frustrated yearning for Elizabeth; “If
she could grasp her, if she could make her hers absolutely and forever and
then die; that was all she wanted” (132). She is metaphorically connected
to Elizabeth not by the delicate and malleable thread that connects other
characters throughout the novel but, in a darkly comic image, by “the very
entrails in her body,” which stretch painfully as Elizabeth leaves her at the
tea table (132–33). Clarissa regards both Miss Kilman’s religious prosely-
tizing and her possessive lust for Elizabeth as manifestations of her desire
to control others: “Love and religion! thought Clarissa…How detestable,
how detestable they are!…The cruelest things in the world, she thought,
seeing them clumsy, hot, domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jeal-
ous, infinitely cruel and unscrupulous…love and religion. Had she ever
tried to convert any one herself? Did she not wish everybody merely to be
themselves?” (126). Like religion, a possessive and jealous love threatens
to “destroy…the privacy of the soul” (126–27).
Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, as religion, militarism, and the medical
profession threaten to crush individuals and destroy relationships, Clarissa’s
parties counter these destructive forces. Both Richard and Peter trivialize
her efforts, chiding her as “foolish,” “childish,” a “snob” (121). Aware of
their criticisms, Clarissa boldly defines her parties in terms both religious
and artistic, regarding them as an “offering” and a “creation”:
Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and

somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of
their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she
felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offer-
ing; to combine, to create; but to whom?
An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her
gift. (122)
Woolf’s playful and ambiguous language—“combine”, “create”, “offer-

ing”, “gift”—identifies Clarissa’s parties as both artistic and spiritual
46 K. K. GROOVER
ractice, characterized by weaving together diverse elements in an act of

p
creation. The absence of God, or of any clear recipient for this “offering,”
does not diminish its sacred quality. Woolf depicts an apprehension of the
sacred that, as Amy Hungerford writes, “is not constituted by faith in
something, but by faith itself, faith that there is something one may seek
and desire, the seeking and desiring limitless because of that Derridean
deferral of closure inherent in the sign as deconstruction understands it”
(2010, 20). The action of bringing people together—“An offering for the
sake of offering”—is sacred in itself.
Woolf employs a series of spatial metaphors to convey the almost mag-
netic force of Clarissa’s party as it draws people together from around the
city. While Peter generally disdains Clarissa’s role as hostess—she “frit-
tered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of
hers,” he thinks—he finds himself irresistibly drawn to the gathering (78).
Sitting alone in a hotel dining room, succumbing to the friendly overtures
of his fellow diners, he muses that the “soul,” which typically remains hid-
den and solitary, “shoots to the surface” on such occasions, conveying “a
positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping” (161). The
“soul,” then, is not entirely self-contained, but thrives by “brush[ing]”
and “scrap[ing]” with others. This desire for a meeting of souls draws
people toward Clarissa’s party with seeming inevitability:
Everybody was going out…it seemed as if the whole of London were

embarking in little boats moored to the bank, tossing on the waters, as if the
whole place were floating off in carnival….
…cabs were rushing round the corner, like water round the piers of a
bridge, drawn together, it seemed to him because they bore people going to
her party… (164)
Woolf, who so often characterizes doorways and windows as liminal spaces

of connection, writes that “Doors were being opened” all over the city in
preparation for Clarissa’s party; indeed, at Clarissa’s home, doors have been
“taken off their hinges” to facilitate the meeting and mingling of guests
(3). Clarissa’s party thus addresses the central concern that dominates so
much of Woolf’s writing: separate consciousnesses and the problem of how
to traverse them. Clarissa thinks of this as the “supreme mystery”: “here
was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?” (127). By
opening doors—removing barriers, creating connections—Clarissa’s party
forms a vehicle for “solving” what religion and love cannot.
While grounded in the immanent and the temporal, Clarissa’s party also
transcends ordinary experiences of space and time. Peter’s observation that
the whole city seems to be “floating off in carnival” (164) suggests a quasi-
religious celebration in which ordinary social barriers are momentarily dis-
regarded. The party brings together present and past as Clarissa is reunited
with beloved friends from her youth. An elderly guest, Mrs. Hilbery, char-
acterizes this transcendent space as an “enchanted garden” where “one
found old friends; quiet nooks and corners; and the loveliest views.…Just a
few fairy lamps, Clarissa Dalloway had said, in the back garden! But she was
a magician!…there were so many doors, such unexpected places, she could
not find her way” (191). Woolf’s garden metaphor conveys both the secret
and mysterious character of life and the potential for connection within it.
In this enchanted atmosphere, Clarissa and her guests are both “unreal”
and “more real”: “It was, she thought, partly their clothes, partly being
taken out of their ordinary ways, partly the background, it was possible to
say things you couldn’t say anyhow else, things that needed an effort; pos-
sible to go much deeper” (171). Clarissa’s party thus transforms her and
her guests into a heightened version of themselves in which they are able to
form deeper connections with one another. Her party—an effort “to com-
bine, to create” (122)—counters the forces that threaten the soul through
silencing, erasure, and conversion.
The most extraordinary connection that takes place at the party occurs
between Clarissa and Septimus, the shell-shocked war veteran whose death
is announced by the Bradshaws. Separated by social class, age, and geogra-
phy, Clarissa and Septimus have inhabited the same London streets through-
out the day without ever encountering each other. Yet, at her party, Clarissa
becomes the sole witness to Septimus’s life and the meaning of his suicide.
Septimus reflects the fear of mortality that Clarissa has been musing about
all day. She experiences his death in her own body and understands its mean-
ing: “A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter,
defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies,
chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt
to communicate…. There was an embrace in death” (184).
Critics have responded variously to the novel’s culmination, interpret-
ing Clarissa’s feeling of connection as mystical and transcendent or as
opportunistic and self-centered.8 I suggest a different reading of this
8
See, for example, Deborah Guth’s “Rituals of Self-Deception: Clarissa Dalloway’s Final
Moment of Vision.” Guth argues that, while Clarissa does indeed evoke mythic motifs, she
does so for purposes of “imaginative self-invention” rather than “self-discovery”; her
48 K. K. GROOVER
moment in light of enacted cognition. Philosopher Evan Thompson

regards empathy—“the primordial experience of another’s pain”—as fun-
damental to enacted cognition (2007, 387). Thompson depicts empathy
not as a charitable or even generous impulse, but as an openness to recog-
nizing the other “as a living bodily subject like oneself” (389). The lack of
this fundamental recognition is at the heart of Bradshaw’s medical prac-
tice, Miss Kilman’s religion, and Britain’s failure to acknowledge the post-
war suffering of Septimus and others like him. Clarissa, for all of her
limitations, recognizes this shared humanity—not with a detached intel-
lectualism, but in her embodied self: “Always her body went through it
first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her
body burnt” (184). Woolf’s language is visceral and startling, suggesting
a dramatic identification that seems the very definition of “primordial
experience of another’s pain.” Similarly, her intuitions about Bradshaw—
his capacity for “evil,” for “forcing your soul” (184), his “power”—lie
outside her rational knowledge of him as a “great doctor” (182),
“extremely sensible” (183), a man “absolutely at the head of his profes-
sion” (182). Despite Bradshaw’s public reputation, Clarissa knows instinc-
tively that such a man may have made his patient feel that life was
“intolerable” (185), and she recognizes Septimus’s choice of death as
“defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the
impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; close-
ness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone” (184).
Woolf’s language demarcates this moment as mysterious and n uminous—a
moment of being. As Richard Grigg writes, “That which is mysterious tran-
scends, by definition, our ability to conceptually plumb it. But surely there
is something radically mysterious about the encounter with the other, begin-
ning with the human other” (1995, 72). In this momentary connection,
Clarissa briefly transcends that barrier between self and other. She then
returns to her party, not out of carelessness or an unfeeling disregard for
Septimus’s tragedy, but because her parties create just those human connec-
tions that eluded Septimus: “She felt somehow very like him – the young
man who had killed himself…. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel
the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. And she came in from
the little room” (186). Even Peter recognizes the transformation in
Clarissa—what Elizabeth Gualtieri-Reed has called a “transubstantiation”
interpretation of Septimus’s suicide as “a glorious act of defiance” allows her to evade the
grim details of his death and the superficial hollowness of her party (1990, 36, 37).
(1999, 218): “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to him-
self. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?” (194). Woolf
locates the source of this mystery—“the divine itself,” in Richard Grigg’s
terms—in the relationship between self and other.
The sacred recurs again and again in Woolf’s writing, not in conven-
tional religious guise, but in the moments of insight and connection that
occur within human lives and relationships. These moments of being offer
the possibility of a world re-enchanted, not by God, but by encounters
between self and other. Woolf’s characters inhabit a world both immanent
and transcendent, in which the effort to form connections is in itself a
spiritual practice. “[W]e are the thing itself,” Woolf wrote (1985, 72). A
Woolfian vision of the sacred—fleeting, fragmentary, and in process—
emerges in that space between self and other.
Works Cited
Doyle, Jacqueline. 1994. ‘These Emotions of the Body’: Intercorporeal Narrative
in To the Lighthouse. Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical.
Journal 40 (1): 42–71.
Dymond, Justine. 2001. ‘The Outside of Its Inside and the Inside of Its Outside’:
Phenomenology in To the Lighthouse. In Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds: Selected
Papers from the Tenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jessica Berman
and Jane Goldman, 140–145. New York: Pace University Press.
Goldenberg, Naomi R. 1979. Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of
Traditional Religions. Boston: Beacon.
Grigg, Richard. 1995. When God Becomes Goddess: The Transformation of American
Religion. New York: Continuum.
Gualtieri-Reed, Elizabeth. 1999. Mrs. Dalloway: Revising Religion. Centennial
Review 43 (2): 205–225.
Guth, Deborah. 1990. Rituals of Self-Deception: Clarissa Dalloway’s Final
Moment of Vision. Twentieth Century Literature 36 (1): 35–42.
Herman, David. 2011. The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in
Narrative Discourse in English. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Hungerford, Amy. 2010. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion
Since 1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
To the Lighthouse. Modern Horizons 2013: 1–11.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1967. The Structure of Behavior. Trans. Alden L. Fisher.
Boston: Beacon.
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Mutter, Matthew. 2017. Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Owen, Alex. 2006. The ‘Religious Sense’ in a Post-War Secular Age. Past and
Present: A Journal of Historical Studies 1 (Supplement): 159–177.
Parkes, Graham. 1982. Imagining Reality in To the Lighthouse. Philosophy and
Literature 6 (1–2): 33–44.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1979. Motherearth and the Megamachine: A
Theology of Liberation in a Feminist, Somatic, and Ecological Perspective. In
Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol P. Christ and
Judith Plaskow, 43–52. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
———. 1993. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon.
Sim, Lorraine. 2005. Ailing Dualisms: Woolf’s Revolt Against Rationalism in the
‘Real World’ of Influenza. In Woolf in the Real World, ed. Karen V. Kukil,
88–93. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press.
Taves, Ann. 2009. Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach
to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of
Life. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University.
Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1993. The Embodied
Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wood, James. 2010. The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief.
New York: Picador.
Woolf, Virginia. 1925 (1981). Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harcourt Brace.
Woolf, Virginia. (1927) 1981. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt.
———. (1929) 1981. A Room of One’s Own. San Diego: Harcourt Brace.
San Diego: Harcourt Brace.
———. 1985. Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing, ed.
Jeanne Schulkind. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt.
———. 1986–2011. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie and
Stuart N. Clarke. 6 vols. London: Hogarth.
CHAPTER 4
“The thing is in itself enough”:

Virginia Woolf’s Sacred Everyday
Lorraine Sim
In their introduction to a 2011 issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany

dedicated to the topic of ‘Woolf and Spirituality’, Amy C. Smith and Isabel
María Andrés-Cuevas observe how Woolf, like many of her fellow mod-
ernists, engaged with ‘religious forms in unorthodox ways’ and explored
forms of spiritual experience ‘outside [of] organized religion’. Smith and
Andrés-Cuevas contend that Woolf’s conception of the spiritual entailed
an ‘impulse to surpass the material aspects of life and look towards an
intangible dimension of the latter’. They propose that Woolf sought to
‘transcend the ordinary and look for something spiritual in the world’ (1).
The view that the spiritual for Woolf is something that lies beyond the
ordinary, material realm and that her work betrays a desire to move beyond
(‘surpass’ or ‘transcend’) that realm—and that it is by implication some-
how insufficient—is one I want to challenge here. As I will discuss, one of
the hallmarks of conceptions of the spiritual and spiritual experience in
modernism is what Pericles Lewis describes as a ‘blurring of the lines
between the sacred and the profane’ (2010, 20). Many modernists sought
what Lewis terms a ‘secular sacred’, by which he means a ‘form of
L. Sim (*)
Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

52 L. SIM
transcendent or ultimate meaning to be discovered in this world, without

reference to the supernatural’ (2010, 21).
In exploring Woolf’s conception of a ‘secular sacred’, I will discuss the
relationship between ordinary life and her idea of a numinous reality, as
well as its revelation and apprehension. Woolf’s descriptions of an abstract
reality, which she sometimes refers to as ‘it’ or ‘the thing’, relate to her
conception of a unifying pattern underlying everyday life. This pattern or
special sense of reality is made manifest to her during ‘moments of being’—
experiences that are embedded in the everyday. During the course of this
chapter, I will propose that in addition to being central to her descriptions
and experience of the numinous, Woolf frequently affords the immanent
realm—ordinary things, daily routines and activities—attributes that are
traditionally associated with the divine: particularly ideas of plenitude,
bliss and sacredness. Far from being something to disavow or move
beyond, the ordinary and daily are, for Woolf, the home of the sacred,
happiness and value. While like many of her contemporaries, Woolf grap-
pled to articulate a personal philosophy and conception of the spiritual
within a linguistic framework that was shaped by 2000 years of Judeo-
Christian thought, repeatedly in her writing she puts forward the view that
the sacred and numinous reside within, and cannot be situated outside of,
the ‘immanent frame’ (Gordon 2011, 126). If the Romantics understood
the supernatural to inhere in nature (‘natural supernaturalism’), Woolf
along with other modernists such as James Joyce and Wallace Stevens,
substantially amplified the Romantics’ regard for the commonplace and
ordinary, elevating it to the status of the sacred.1 Thus, in novels such as
Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a ‘sacramental quality’ is
conferred onto ‘mundane tasks’, experiences of social connection and inti-
macy, and ordinary things (Lewis 2010, 14).
A Secular Sacred
In Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, Pericles Lewis interro-
gates the secularization thesis as one of the dominant narratives of moder-
nity and argues for the importance of religious experience to the modern
novel. He argues that modernists ‘were not the devout secularists that
most critics portray; rather, they sought, through formal experiment, to
1
On the Romantics’ ‘natural supernaturalism’, see Abrams (1971, ch. 6).
4 “THE THING IS IN ITSELF ENOUGH”: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S… 53
offer new accounts of the sacred for an age of continued religious crisis’
(2010, 24). For many modernists, including Virginia Woolf, such accounts
of the spiritual were developed outside of institutional religious f rameworks
and defined in ‘personal terms’ (Lewis 2010, 29).2 As Lewis and other
critics have observed, many modernists described experiences of the tran-
scendent or sacred that ‘originated in the ordinary world, not the super-
natural, but … opened some sort of insight beyond the realm of the
ordinary’ (Lewis 2010, 20). The modernist epiphany—iterations of which
can be found in the work of Woolf, Joyce, Stevens, Marcel Proust and
others—is one well-known example of this.3 The modernist epiphany evi-
dences the period’s continued engagement with forms of spiritual
experience but also the ‘blurring of the lines between the sacred and the
profane’ that characterizes modernism’s ‘secular sacred’ (Lewis 2010,
20).4 Given that the early twentieth century was a period of religious crisis
and searching, one that Lewis argues was particularly marked in the intel-
lectual elite, modernists sought forms of spirituality outside of the church
and synagogue (2010, 3).5 For example, some of the alternative spiritual
traditions and sources that modernists turned to included occultism and
magic, myth, Eastern religion (particularly Hinduism, Buddhism and
Taoism), various instantiations of mysticism (both Eastern and Judeo-
Christian), the sublime and, for the likes of Woolf, Joyce and Stevens, the
sacred potential of the mundane and ordinary.6
One issue that critics have observed in discussions of modernism and
spirituality, and that is important to the topic in terms of Woolf, is lan-
guage. Many modernists continued to draw upon the language of reli-
gious experience—and sometimes Christian symbolism—whilst trying to
2
Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was an agnostic and her mother, Julia Stephen, was a
lapsed Christian; see Woolf’s memoir ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1985, 90).
3
One of the first studies on this topic was Morris Beja’s Epiphany in the Modern Novel
(1971).
4
Lewis proposes that while Romantics proposed a ‘natural supernaturalism’ modernists
saw such power to reside in the social; ‘Theirs was a social supernaturalism’ (2010, 4).
Indeed, the mystery of human relationships and sacred experiences that have their ground in
social communion certainly find their expression in Woolf’s novels, as critics such as Kristina
K. Groover have demonstrated (2014).
5
This is a view echoed by many other modernist critics, for example, Douglas Mao: ‘[A]
baseline assumption of a secular point of view (among the educated) coexisted with lively
memories of an age when religious piety was at least a putative form’ (1998, 17).
6
For a discussion of some of these sources, see Carpentier (2013), Ingman (2010) and
Lewis (2010).
54 L. SIM
formulate conceptions of the spiritual and sacred outside of orthodox reli-

gion. Lewis frames the issue as follows:
If the modernists’ uses of words like “sacred,” “reverence,” “sanctity,”

“magic,” and “soul,” are not quite orthodox, they are nonetheless more
than merely metaphorical. This was the language available to them for speak-
ing about ultimate truths, human truths for which supernatural explanations
might no longer seem adequate, but for which a sheer materialism or reduc-
tivism also seemed suspect. (2010, 30)
Thus, writers and artists of the period were often articulating personal
philosophies through a set of terms that had long been aligned with sys-
tems of thought that did not correspond with their broader beliefs or
worldview. The issue of terminology is particularly complex in the case of
Woolf because she actively resisted expressing her philosophical ideas in a
systematic way.7 As I have discussed elsewhere, throughout her writing,
Woolf explores the limitations and negative effects of singular models of
truth, philosophical systems and dogmatism (2010, 25–6; 29–53). Here is
one example from Woolf’s 1928 diary in which she is discussing her close
friend, Desmond MacCarthy:
His eye more than ever dubious. He has a hole in his blue sock. Yet he is
resolute & determined – thats [sic] what I find so depressing. He seems to
be sure that it is his view that is the right one; ours vagaries, deviations. And
if his view is the right one, God knows there is nothing to live for: not a
greasy biscuit. And the egotism of men surprises & shocks me even now.
(1980, 3: 203–4)
As I will explore further through the course of this chapter, for Woolf
experience of the sacred resists definition or systematic explanation. As
Donna Lazenby has noted, the apophatic is an important aspect of Woolf’s
treatment of the transcendent, one Lazenby discusses in relation to ‘the
mystical dialectics of Pseudo-Dionysius’ and Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenol-
ogy (2014, 180–212). Woolf maintains that an attitude of curiosity, open-
mindedness and searching are essential for a person’s spiritual and
7
Her well-known discussion in her unfinished memoir, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, of ‘moments
of being’ and her philosophy of a ‘pattern’ is perhaps the closest that Woolf comes to articu-
lating her personal philosophy (1985, 71–3). But these accounts are allusive and open-ended
and lend themselves to a range of philosophical interpretations.
intellectual development and evolution. As she states in the same diary

entry that I have quoted from above:
after all, that is my temperament, I think: to be very little persuaded of the

truth of anything – what I say, what people say – always to follow, blindly
instinctively with a sense of leaping over a precipice – the call of – the call
of – now, if I write The Moths I must come to terms with these mystical
feelings. (1980, 3: 203)
However, as a wide-ranging reader of philosophical and religious texts, the

daughter of a philosopher and the friend of several influential philosophers
of her time (e.g. G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell), Woolf’s approach to
philosophical and spiritual topics was anything but uninformed or naïve.8
While rejecting orthodox religion and philosophical systems, Woolf
deploys many key philosophical and religious terms in her fiction and non-
fiction, such as ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ‘spiritual’, ‘reality’, ‘the thing’, ‘the thing
itself’ and ‘mystical’. However, she never defines them and often uses
them in varied ways. As Kristina Groover observes, and as the previous
passage from her 1928 diary illustrates, when it comes to metaphysical
questions and topics Woolf’s writing is replete with ‘textual lacunae’
(2014, 208). She deliberately evades pinning such terms and ideas down
in part because of her rejection of philosophical system-building and fixity,
but also because her worldview and writing are replete with ‘a deep sense
of mystery’ (Groover 2014, 218). Through her preference for open-
endedness and use of textual lacunae, Woolf seeks to honour that sense of
mystery: what she refers to in her essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ as the
meaning ‘just on the far side of language’ (1994, 45). This kind of philo-
sophical temper sat in stark opposition to many of her Bloomsbury peers
who were steeped in the analytic climate of early twentieth-century British
philosophy, particularly the ideas of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore.9
8
Woolf’s reading in the philosophical tradition was eclectic and extensive, ranging from
Greek philosophy (particularly Plato) to British Empiricism (David Hume, Bertrand Russell,
G. E. Moore), British and German Idealism (Bishop Berkley) and the mystical writings of her
Quaker aunt, Caroline Emilia Stephen. For a discussion of some of these intellectual back-
grounds, see Banfield (2000), Dalgarno (2001), Ingman (2010), McNeillie (2000), Sim
(2010) and Marcus (1983).
9
As Mark Hussey argues, ‘The Moorean universe, endorsed by such as [Bertrand] Russell
and [Maynard] Keynes, is continually questioned by [Woolf’s] novels’ (1986, 99).
56 L. SIM
It is with these comments in mind that I find attempts to align Woolf

with a specific religious tradition or school of philosophy to be problem-
atic: terms such as ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ‘reality’, ‘truth’ and ‘mystical’ are always
used by Woolf in non-prescriptive, self-reflexive and sometimes
interrogatory ways. For example, critics who have drawn on examples of
Christian symbolism and imagery in the novels as evidence of latent
Christian belief or morality in Woolf’s thought cannot reconcile this with
her atheism and disavowal of Christianity.10 Similarly, critical appraisals of
Woolf’s engagement with mysticism struggle to square a Woolfian mysti-
cism with her unbending commitment to the everyday, material realm.
Woolf refuses to step ‘right over into the transcendental’ (H.D. 1998, 50).
Coinciding with what Charles Taylor, following Karl Jaspers, describes as
‘pre-Axial’ or ‘early religion’, there is no version of a transcendent in
Woolf’s personal philosophy that exists above or beyond the immanent
frame (2007, 146–58).11 Rather, as H.D. suggests in her memoir The Gift,
for Woolf ‘we must crouch near the grass and near the earth that made us.
And the people that created us’ (1998, 50). Even very insightful studies of
Woolf and mysticism, such as Donna Lazenby’s A Mystical Philosophy,
which situates Woolf in a tradition of mystical philosophy that can accom-
modate her valuing of the immanent and everyday, cannot side-step the
fact that Woolf’s ambivalence regarding the mystical centres on her con-
cern that it entails a stepping ‘right over into the transcendental’. This is
something that Woolf cannot reconcile with her commitment to the imma-
nent realm and daily life. For example, in her diary entry for 7 November
1928 in which she reflects on her plan for ‘The Moths’ (which will in time
become The Waves), Woolf associates mysticism with abstraction: ‘Yes, but
10
This antipathy is clearly expressed in Woolf’s letter to her sister Vanessa Bell on 11
February 1928, in which she despairs at T. S. Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in
1927 (1975–1980, 457–58). For one such analysis that claims Mrs Dalloway remains ‘open
at some level to Christian beliefs and values’, see Griesinger (2015, 438).
11
On Taylor’s account, Jaspers theorized that an ‘Axial revolution’ occurred between the
fifth century BC and the start of the Common Era in which many civilizations around the
globe re-imagined the locus of the sacred (2007, 146–58). As Gordon explains: ‘Whereas the
sacred was previously understood as a phenomenon that attached to entities or persons or
places within the world, the Axial revolution introduced a metaphysical and normative rup-
ture between the profane sphere of everyday existence and the higher realm beyond the
world, a transcendent realm toward which human beings now directed their moral striving
and their spiritual devotion’ (2011, 128). Gordon’s article questions if the split between the
sacred and the immanent was as absolute and irreversible in the ‘post-Axial’ age as Taylor’s
study assumes.
The Moths? That was to be an abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem.

And there may be affectation in being too mystical, too abstract’ (1980, 3:
203). Here, Woolf aligns the mystical with abstraction, the unnatural
(‘affectation’) and a loss of sense perception (‘eyeless’). While she may be
using the term ‘eyeless’ to describe a narrative that is visionary in tone or
perspective, it also alludes to a transcending of the sensory and material
(specifically the visible realm). Thus, even if a critic aligns Woolf with a
tradition of mysticism that can accommodate her commitment to the
immanent, it does not circumvent the fact that in Woolf’s own use and
explicit framing of the term, both in her diaries and novels such as To the
Lighthouse, mysticism is associated with the risk of abstraction and a turn-
ing away from the concrete and particular.
Immanent Revelations
Writing in her diary on 27 February 1926, Woolf ruminates on the ‘soul’:
As for the soul: why did I say I would leave it out? I forget. And the truth is,
one can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes: but look at
the ceiling, at Grizzle, at the cheaper beasts in the Zoo which are exposed to
walkers in Regents Park, & the soul slips in. It slipped in this afternoon. I
will write that I said, staring at the bison: answering L. absentmindedly; but
what was I going to write? (1980, 3: 62)
This passage reveals a number of things about Woolf’s conception of the

spiritual. First, a curious off-handedness is expressed by Woolf in discuss-
ing what, traditionally, is a topic of great gravity: the soul, no less. She
claims to forget why she was going to ‘leave it out’ (presumably of her
diary), and also claims to having forgotten what she was going to say
about it (the thought that entered her mind as she answered Leonard
‘absentmindedly’ while looking at the bison). This reiterates the point I
made earlier that, for Woolf, the spiritual, the numinous, or ‘reality’, is
elusive and even apophatic, resisting representation through language and
efforts to pin it down: ‘one can’t write directly about the soul’. In this pas-
sage, the soul is presented as fugitive and mysterious: it ‘slips in’ during an
afternoon strolling around Regent’s Park; when she tries to write about it,
she cannot; when she attempts to look at it directly it ‘vanishes’. This pas-
sage also reveals Woolf’s sense of the intimate relationship between the
sacred and the profane, suggesting that the latter is the only place within
58 L. SIM
which the soul can be apprehended or known. If she attempts to look at

the soul directly it ‘vanishes’, but if she looks at the ‘ceiling’, their dog
Grizzle or the ‘cheaper beasts at the zoo’, ‘the soul slips in’. Thus, Woolf
not only situates the spiritual within the everyday, material realm (part of
the structure of her home, a walk in a park, her dog and other animals) but
with the commonplace and ‘lowly’. Indeed, her experience of it on this
occasion is predominantly in relation to the animal (a dog, ‘cheaper
beasts’, bison).
Later in the same diary entry Woolf reflects on her constant searching
for ‘it’ and how this ‘it’ is made manifest in everyday life. These thoughts
arise in the context of her reflections on the life of Beatrice Webb, the
English social and economic reformer and Fabian. At the time, Woolf was
reading Webb’s My Apprenticeship (1920) and reflects on the fact that
while Webb’s life was shaped around particular ‘causes’ and beliefs (‘prayer;
principle’) hers has ‘[n]one’ (1980, 3: 62):
I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is
there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on & say “This
is it?” My depression is a harassed feeling – I’m looking; but that’s not
it – thats [sic] not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? Then (as I
was walking through Russell Sqre last night) I see the mountains in the
sky: the great clouds; & the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great
and astonishing sense of something there, which is ‘it’ – It is not exactly
beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory;
achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there
too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; trotting along Russell
Sqre with the moon up there, & those mountain clouds. Who am I, what
am I, & so on: these questions are always floating about in me; & then I
bump up against some exact fact – a letter, a person, & come to them
again with a great sense of freshness. And so it goes on. But, on this show-
ing which is true, I think, I do fairly frequently come upon this ‘it’; & then
feel quite at rest. (1980, 3: 62–3)
This passage says a number of instructive things about Woolf’s sense of

what Mark Hussey terms an ‘immanent beyond’ and its relationship to the
empirical realm and daily life (1986, 97). Woolf characterizes her experi-
ence of coming upon some kind of ‘discovery in life’ as a perpetual search-
ing and process (‘And so it goes on’), but one that does periodically result
in revelation: ‘I do fairly frequently come upon this “it”’. Like the previous
example, the revelation or discovery comes to her seemingly spontaneously
and in an everyday situation—as she is walking through Russell Square in
the evening, looking at the clouds and the moon in the sky. This special
sense of ‘it’ is something that she differentiates from ‘beauty’ and instead
aligns with an experience of the sufficiency and plenitude in what is, of
things as they are: ‘It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory;
achieved’. This is not an experience of ecstasy or bliss, but rather ontic full-
ness and satisfaction. As the experience of this ‘it’ gives rise to a conviction
in the adequacy of things (‘the thing is in itself enough’), this ‘showing’
(again, the language of revelation) serves to enrich her pleasure and pres-
ence in the everyday: ‘& then I bump up against some exact fact – a letter,
a person, & come to them again with a great sense of freshness’. Thus,
Woolf’s ‘great and astonishing sense’ of this ‘it’, both arises within and
leads to a sense of the sufficiency of the everyday, immanent realm. Woolf’s
conception of the immanent–transcendent relation could be understood to
take not a vertical or horizontal12 but rather a circular form. That is, her
experience progresses from the everyday and commonplace (as the site of
manifestation), to the sacred (‘it’, ‘the thing’, ‘reality’), which in turn leads
to a recognition of the plenitude and sufficiency of this life and world (in
those moments in which the immanent and sacred are apprehended in
their proper relation). Woolf characterizes this awareness as an ongoing,
recurring process: ‘And so it goes on’; ‘I do fairly frequently come upon
this ‘it’. Thus, rather than transcending or going beyond ordinary experi-
ence to find ‘it’, the sacred inheres in the quotidian.
Woolf’s diary entry from 10 September 1928, in which she reflects on
her special sense of ‘reality’, reiterates many of these ideas. The entry
describes her experience of a reality which she characterizes as ‘abstract’
and singular (‘one thing’), but which is fundamentally related to and, once
again, made manifest in the particular, named world (the ‘downs or sky’).
She also comments on the difficulty and risk of attempting to describe this
‘reality’ in words, as well as its central importance to her personal
philosophy:
That is one of the experiences I have had here in some Augusts; & got then
to a consciousness of what I call “reality”: a thing I see before me; something
abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in
12
Lazenby suggests that Woolf’s vision and theological temper are horizontal or ‘latitudi-
nal’ rather than vertical (i.e. it is not a theology of ascension from the immanent to the
divine): ‘Woolf offers to theology a latitudinal appreciation of life in its brokenness, of life
lived in “landscape-view”, as often appearing out of juncture with the possibility of resolu-
tion and unity offered by transcendent point (or arc) of reference’ (2014, 3).
60 L. SIM
which I shall rest & continue to exist. Reality I call it. And I fancy sometimes
this is the most necessary thing to me: that which I seek. But who knows –
once one takes a pen & writes? How difficult not to go making “reality” this
& that, whereas it is one thing. (1980, 3: 196)
She surmises that her capacity to apprehend this ‘reality’ may be her ‘gift’:
‘I think it may be rare to have so acute a sense of something like that’
(1980, 3: 196). And while she would like to ‘express it too’, she is aware
of the challenge of that task because ‘the process of language is slow &
deluding’—breaking up the unity of ‘reality’ into the particularity of being
(1980, 3: 196; 3: 102).
Woolf’s description in this diary entry of an abstract principle or modal-
ity which underlies and connects the multiplicity of being coincides with
her description of a ‘pattern’ in her memoir ‘A Sketch of the Past’. This
concept of pattern recurs throughout her fiction and non-fiction:
From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant
idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I
mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a
work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven
quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is
no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is
no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I
see this when I have a shock [a moment of being]. (1985, 72)
I have previously discussed Woolf’s idea of a ‘pattern’ as it is presented in her

novels and non-fiction as aesthetic, social and lived form, and the correspon-
dences between Woolf’s pattern, Classical theories of logos and Platonic phi-
losophy (2010, 163–73). The point I want to emphasize in the context of
the present discussion is that in all of its iterations, Woolf’s conception of
the spiritual or numinous—a ‘pattern’ subsisting behind appearances, an
abstract ‘reality’, ‘it’, ‘the thing’, the soul—is always understood as inhering
in and inseparable from the immanent realm. In a similar vein, Mark Hussey
suggests that ‘Reality’ in Woolf’s sense is ‘not bound by the particular,
named world, and yet inheres in that world’ (1986, 106). And yet, Woolf at
times presents the numinous as having its ground in the immanent realm.
For example, in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ she explicitly rejects the idea of a
personal god or intelligent design maintaining that ‘we are the words; we
are the music; we are the thing itself’—the source of pattern.
Mark Hussey observes that in her fiction and non-fiction Woolf often
associates the experience of ‘reality’ with ‘rest’ (1986, 76; 105). I would
suggest that this rest assumes the form of an existential contentment that
centres on a sense of the absolute sufficiency, and at times plenitude, of
this life, something that she realizes through states of presence or ‘being’
in the moment. Hence her suggestive phrase ‘moments of being’ expresses
both her sense of the presencing of being (‘the real thing’ which reveals
itself in such moments), what Martin Heidegger terms the ‘unconcealed-
ness’ or ‘disclosure’ of being/s (1975, 56–7); and being present in the
moment, the state that is necessary for such disclosure/revelation to be
possible.13
As with her conception of an abstract ‘reality’, Woolf’s ‘moments of
being’, like other iterations of the modernist epiphany, are fundamentally
connected to the everyday, material world. They comprise what Pericles
Lewis has termed a ‘sublime of the quotidian’, experiences which can lead
to ‘the re-enchantment of the world’ and offer ‘a type of sacrament appro-
priate for a world in which no single measure of the sacred obtains’ (2010,
160). Moments of being arise within everyday contexts: for example, in
relation to commonplace objects or typically unremarkable activities. The
childhood ‘moments of being’ recalled in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ illustrate
this and include Woolf’s recollections of lying in her nursery bed at St Ives
as a young child and listening to the sound of the waves on the beach;
looking at a flower in a garden bed; fighting with her brother Thoby; sit-
ting in a bath with her sister Vanessa; and trying to cross a puddle in the
street. Here is one illustrative example, which is also Woolf’s first memory:
It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of

hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of
water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yel-
low blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as
the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing
this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling
the purest ecstasy I can conceive. (1985, 64–5)
13
This coincides with Woolf’s comments in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ that some ‘moments of
being’ were accompanied by the erasure of the ‘I’, in the sense of the egoistic ‘I’; ‘I am hardly
aware of myself, but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy,
of the feeling of rapture’ (1985, 67).
62 L. SIM
These particular moments led to a range of different insights, for example,

of ontological unity or the problem of violence, and also feelings, ranging
from ecstasy to terror and overwhelming sadness. But all struck her with
the force of a ‘revelation’ (1985, 72).
In addition to arising in everyday contexts, both her autobiographical
and fictional accounts of moments of being describe intensely embodied
experiences—another way in which any conception of the spiritual in
Woolf ’s personal philosophy is intimately related to the physical realm:
‘these exceptional moments brought with them a peculiar horror and a
physical collapse’ (1985, 72).14 While as a child such moments were
often dramatic and overwhelming, in adulthood moments of being often
give rise to more prosaic feelings of happiness, content and satisfaction
(Sim 2010, 15–16; 140–41). These experiences and the apprehension of
‘reality’ and ‘pattern’ to which they gave rise, fundamentally depend
upon the mundane in other ways too—what she describes in ‘A Sketch
of the Past’ as ‘non-being’:
Every day includes much more non-being than being. Yesterday, for exam-
ple, Tuesday 18th of April, was [as] it happened a good day; above the aver-
age in “being”. It was fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages; my head was
relieved of the pressure of writing about Roger; I walked over Mount Misery
and along the river; and save that the tide was out, the country, which I
notice very closely always, was coloured and shaded as I like … These sepa-
rate moments of being were however embedded in many more moments of
non-being. I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at
lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded
in a kind of nondescript cotton wool. This is always so. A great part of every
day is not lived consciously. (1985, 70)
Here, Woolf describes many moments of being that are far from heightened
or dramatic. She also observes that much of our day-to-day lives are lived in
ways that are automatic or inattentive—part of the vital function of percep-
tual and cognitive habit. Hence, her metaphor for non-being as a kind of
‘nondescript cotton wool’ connotes homogeneity and indistinction, but
also the cushioning and safety that familiarity and routine provide. As she
explains in relation to a different context—that of marriage—moments of
being depend upon non-being (the habitual, the familiar):
14
I discuss the embodied dimension of Woolf’s moments of being in Virginia Woolf: The
Patterns of Ordinary Experience (2010, 141–55).
The Married Relation

Arnold Bennett says that the horror of marriage lies in its “dailiness”. All
acuteness of relationship is rubbed away by this. The truth is more like
this. Life – say 4 days out of 7 – becomes automatic; but on the 5th day a
bead of sensation (between husband & wife) forms, wh. is all the fuller &
more sensitive because of the automatic customary unconscious days on
either side. That is to say the year is marked by moments of great intensity.
Hardy’s “moments of vision”. How can a relationship endure for any
length of time except under these conditions? (1980, 3: 105)
Thus, as with her conception of a special ‘it’ or ‘reality’, moments of
being—the category of experience which gives rise to this special sense of
reality—also have their ground in the daily and profane.
Sacredness, Happiness and the Everyday

In the opening scene of Woolf’s fifth novel, To the Lighthouse, the young
child James Ramsay has an experience of ordinary, domestic objects which
draws closely on some of Woolf’s childhood experiences of bliss as
recounted in ‘A Sketch of the Past’, and presents another example of a
secular sacred. As he carefully cuts out pictures of utilitarian objects and
domestic appliances from the illustrated Army and Navy Stores catalogue,
this activity assumes the status of a sacred ritual and religious experience:
[James] endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heav-
enly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawn-mower, the
sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms
knocking, dresses rustling – all these were so coloured and distinguished in his
mind that he had already his private code, his secret language. (Woolf 2006, 7)
James apprehends the ecstasy of the ordinary and sacralizes the profane.
With a child’s distinctive capacity for wonder, he is fully immersed in the
moment and receptive to the sights and sounds around him—his mother’s
voice, brooms knocking, dresses rustling. James’ capacity for revelation
and special insight is contrasted with his father, the philosopher Mr
Ramsay, and his father’s avid disciple, Charles Tansley, neither of whom
can access such bliss or insight due to their rational and positivist worldviews
(Sim 2010, 33–40; Sim 2016, 80–3). The narrator suggests that James’
experience of the sacred is a private one which neither draws on nor
requires orthodox religion or dogma: as a small child, he already has ‘his
private code, his secret language’.
64 L. SIM
James’ experience of the ordinary as a source of ‘bliss’ and joy recurs

throughout Woolf’s writing. On many occasions in her fiction and non-
fiction Woolf sacralizes the ordinary and daily and figures them as sites of
sufficiency, plenitude, happiness and ultimate value. The following exam-
ple from her diary entry for 14 June 1925 illustrates this. The below pas-
sage follows on directly from Virginia’s reflections on the happiness that
she enjoys in her married life with Leonard—‘the core of my life, which is
this complete comfort with L’:
The immense success of our life, is I think, that our treasure is hid away; or
rather in such common things that nothing can touch it. That is, if one
enjoys a bus ride to Richmond, sitting on the green smoking, taking the
letters out of the box, airing the marmots, combing Grizzle, making an ice,
opening a letter, sitting down after dinner, side by side, & saying, “Are you
in your stall, brother?” – well, what can trouble this happiness? And every
day is necessarily full of it. (1980, 30)
Here, the sacred is again framed as a private affair—not only is it embed-

ded in the everyday and domestic but it is ‘hid away’. Woolf’s account of
the ‘treasure’ that is hidden in ‘common things’ not only recalls the senti-
ments of Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, but also aligns
with Buddhist philosophy and practice. To my knowledge, Woolf did not
read any Buddhist philosophy but she was close friends with people who
did, such as T. S. Eliot. What Woolf is essentially describing here is mind-
fulness, being present in the moment, and finding pleasure in simple,
mundane activities such as ‘taking … letters out of the box’ and ‘making
an ice’. Earlier in this chapter, I discussed how Woolf finds the soul in the
commonplace (her dog, the ceiling): so too, she elevates the most mun-
dane of activities to the status of a sacred ritual, finding in them both hap-
piness and value. Rather than demeaning the idea of the sacred, Woolf,
like many of her contemporaries, is committed to a revaluation of the
quotidian. Indeed, in The Making of Buddhist Modernism, David
L. McMahan argues that recent articulations of mindfulness in contempo-
rary modernity, including Buddhist mindfulness, are ‘informed by modern
literature’s valorization of the details of everyday life, its finely tuned
descriptions of the flow of consciousness, and its reverence for ordinary
objects and their capacity to reflect the universal’ (2009, 218). He argues
that modernist literature was an important precursor to, and context for,
the flourishing of ‘modern reinterpretations of mindfulness’ which seek
ways of ‘resacralizing the world without resort to the supernatural’ (2009,

215; 218). As the above passage from Woolf’s 1925 diary suggests, for
her, value, the good life and happiness are located in the everyday and
ordinary, but an everyday embedded in human connection and relation-
ship: ‘The immense success of our life, is I think, that our treasure is hid
away’ (my italics). Experiencing that hidden potentiality and ‘treasure’ is
not a given—it depends upon the capacity for full presence in the moment
and receptivity to the extraordinary in the ordinary. Lily Briscoe describes
this dual mode of attunement in To the Lighthouse: ‘One wanted, she
thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary
experience, to feel simply, that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same
time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy’ ([1927] 2006, 164).
As for most of us, there were of course periods in her daily life that
Woolf found dreary, difficult and sometimes agonizing. I would venture
that her experience of mental illness, particularly depression, played an
important role in Woolf’s reverence for the natural world, ordinary things
and daily routine.15 This is because after experiencing a complete estrange-
ment from the physical world, ordinary patterns of daily life and human
relationships—as Woolf did during periods of depression and mental
breakdown—the gradual return to normal life is accompanied by an inten-
sified awareness and sense of gratitude. During her periods of acute
depression, she describes her ‘mystical feelings’ (1980, 3: 203) and experi-
ences in which she psychologically and spiritually travelled ‘leagues’ (3:
174). Upon sinking down to the ‘bottom of the vessel’ (3: 196), she dis-
covered that ‘it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left
with’ (3: 113). These solitary, ‘religious retreat[s]’ were sometimes marked
by ‘great agony’, ‘terror’ and fear of ‘loneliness’ (3: 196). The fear that she
experienced upon ‘seeing to the bottom of the vessel’ (3: 196) and finding
herself cut off from the everyday world and human relationships, is poi-
gnantly captured in the character of the shell-shocked soldier, Septimus
Warren Smith, in Mrs Dalloway: ‘He would not go mad. First he looked
at the fashion papers on the lower shelf, then gradually at the gramophone
with the green trumpet. Nothing could be more exact. And so, gathering
courage, he looked at the sideboard … at the jar of roses. None of these
things moved. All were still; all were real’ ([1925] 2004, 125). What these
strange and often overwhelming and frightening experiences affirmed for
15
For an account of Woolf’s illness, its symptoms and methods of treatment, see Lee
(1999, ch. 10).
66 L. SIM
Woolf was her desire to return to the surface, to life itself. I would suggest
that her experiences of ‘seeing to the bottom of the vessel’ enabled Woolf
to better appreciate the richness, sanctity and value of this life and this
world: ‘More & more do I repeat my own version of Montaigne “Its life
that matters”’ (1980, 3: 8). In the popular imagination, Woolf has long
been figured in terms of her mental illness and is best known for her pow-
erful literary portrayals of existential angst and modern alienation.
However, she was a person who was, much of the time, very happy and
who reflected a good deal on happiness:
Nobody shall say of me that I have not known perfect happiness, but few
could put their finger on the moment, or say what made it. Even I myself,
stirring occasionally in the pool of content, could only say But this is all I
want; could not think of anything better. (1980, 3: 9)
Happiness is to have a little string onto which things attach themselves.
(1980, 3: 11)
But we are very happy – seldom more so, I think. (1980, 3: 158)
Always Adventure
Woolf maintained a dual sense of the sufficiency of the immanent realm cou-
pled with an ongoing perception of its mystery and potentiality, an ‘immanent
beyond’ (Hussey 1986, 97). Her belief in the mystery at the heart of life, ‘the
extreme obscurity of human relationships’ (Woolf [1927] 2006, 141) and
being, and the inability of language to adequately express ‘reality’, undergird
her treatment of spiritual and metaphysical topics. She rejects ‘inscriptions on
tablets’ (Woolf [1927] 2006, 44), philosophical and religious dogma, and the
‘invention of unifying systems’ (Hussey 1986, 99). As Mark Hussey observes,
‘From The Voyage Out onwards, [Woolf] sees religion as a deadening restric-
tion that cuts people off from the very “invisible presences” it pretends to
reach’ (1986, 99). Thus, while there is an ongoing engagement in her writing
with religious and spiritual topics, and ideas which can ‘be construed as theo-
logical’ (Hussey 1986, 97), Woolf never endorses a metaphysics that places
transcendence above immanence. According to Mark Hussey, her concept of
an ‘abstract “reality”’ is ‘not bound by the spatiotemporal horizons of actual
human life’ but is nevertheless ‘distinguished from mysticism by its rootedness
in lived experience’ (1986, 97). Similarly, while descriptions of the ‘soul’ in
Woolf’s diaries and novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse point
to a mode of being beyond the mortal, embodied self, they bear ‘no resem-
blance to the Christian idea of the immortal breath of God informing human
life’ (Hussey 1986, 104).
Describing herself as a ‘restless searcher’ (1980, 3: 62) who was always
‘seeking … some little nugget of pure gold’ (1980, 3: 141), it is the desire
to keep seeking which forms the core of Woolf’s philosophical temper:
‘Always adventure: with that sense to guide me, I shant [sic] stagnate now’
(1980, 3: 240). Adventure and experimentation were as central to her
philosophy of life as to her practice as a creative writer: ‘To upset every-
thing every 3 or 4 years is my notion of a happy life. Always to be tacking
to get into the eye of the wind’ (1980, 3: 70); ‘At 46 … still feel as experi-
mental & on the verge of getting at the truth as ever’ (1980, 3: 180).
Woolf wanted to remain on that ‘verge’ or ‘precipice’ (1980, 3: 203)
rather than settling on fixed truths or conclusions. Maintaining an attitude
of possibility and curiosity was, for her, essential not only to spiritual and
intellectual growth, but the condition necessary to remain receptive to the
mystery at the heart of life: ‘Life is, soberly & accurately, the oddest affair;
has in it the essence of reality’ (1980, 3: 113). And, as Lily Briscoe muses,
for Woolf also that ‘reality’ is made manifest not in one ‘great revelation’,
but rather through ‘little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck
unexpectedly in the dark’ ([1927] 2006, 133).
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Woolf, Virginia. (1925) 2004. Mrs Dalloway. London: Vintage.
———. (1927) 2006. To the Lighthouse, ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Trautmann. London: Hogarth.
———. 1980. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier
Bell. Orlando: Harcourt.
———. 1985. A Sketch of the Past. In Moments of Being: A Collection of
Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed., 61–159. San
Diego: Harcourt.
———. 1994. On Not Knowing Greek. In The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4,
1925–1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie, 38–53. Orlando: Harcourt.
CHAPTER 5
Virginia Woolf Reads “Dover Beach”:

Romance and the Victorian Crisis of Faith
in To the Lighthouse
Amy C. Smith
Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse is widely recognized as her

most autobiographical.1 But Woolf’s reflection on her family of origin in
this novel goes beyond the personal, or even the patriarchal, to engage in a
specific conversation with the Victorian crisis of faith, a phenomenon that
shaped her parents’ marriage. Because Woolf came to view her parents’
1
On May 14, 1925, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary about a novel she was planning, To
the Lighthouse, in which she planned “to have father’s character done complete in it; & moth-
ers; & St Ives; & childhood.” On November 8, 1928, Virginia Woolf wrote of her parents,
“I used to think of him and mother daily; but writing the Lighthouse laid them in my
mind…(I believe this to be true – that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; and writing
of them was a necessary act)….” (1977–1984, 3: 18, 208). Indeed, as Jane Lilienfield and
Anne Fernald argue, Woolf fictionalizes herself and her parents in the novel; Mr. Ramsay
shares much with Leslie Stephen, Mrs. Ramsay with Julia Stephen, Cam occupies the same
position in the Ramsay family that Virginia did in her own, and Lily Briscoe suggests an
analogue for Virginia herself, albeit in the form of an adult artist looking at the parents who
died in Virginia’s childhood. See Lilienfield (1977), Fernald (2014), and Hussey (1996).
A. C. Smith (*)
Lamar University, Beaumont, TX, USA

70 A. C. SMITH
marriage within its cultural context, she developed a sophisticated feminist

response to the role of romantic love in a secular age, and she expressed
that response by engaging with Victorian poetry. Steve Ellis has character-
ized Virginia Woolf as “post-Victorian” and argued that in the Victorians
she recognized “an inheritance that can be serviceable to modernity in vari-
ous ways” (2007, 4). Quotations of Victorian writers, including Sir Walter
Scott, Alfred Tennyson, and Charles Isaac Elton, pervade To the Lighthouse.2
While Woolf makes clear her conversation with Victorian poetry, she studi-
ously avoids quoting from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” one of the
most famous Victorian poems. But Woolf weaves references to the poem
throughout To the Lighthouse to construct a critical commentary on the
relationship between the Victorian crisis of faith and marriage.3
As Matthew Mutter asserts, “Woolf’s instincts are characterized by an
ambivalent secular translation, in which a property of the world that was
once theological is preserved in secular perspective” (2017, 76). The mar-
riage of Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth, in which, according to Mark
Gaipa, “[d]omesticity essentially replaced religion,” may represent one
particularly troubling version of the translation of the theological into the
secular that motivated Woolf’s treatment of this phenomenon in To the
Lighthouse (2003, 18). Examining historical documents and Leslie
Stephen’s writings, Gaipa attests that, to understand the Ramsays’ mar-
riage, we must attend to “how the peculiar dynamic of the Ramsay house-
hold – and the angel at its center – are also a response to the disappearance
of god” (2003, 3). As an agnostic, Leslie Stephen fell prey to the “empti-
ness of the materialist universe” (2003, 7). He wrote to his fiancé, Julia
Duckworth, “I have not got any Saints and you must not be angry if I put
you in the place where my Saints ought to be” (Stephen [1977] 2001,
53). Woolf experienced first-hand the tragedies of a marriage shaped by
secularization in which the angel in the house “fill[s] the hole left by the
2
Roger Lund (1989) discusses the significance of Woolf’s references to William Cowper’s
“Castaway” in the novel and C. Anita Tarr (2001) examines her references to Thomas
Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.
3
Woolf’s engagement with Arnold has been discussed by a few scholars, usually focusing
on Arnold as a critic. Mary Schneider analyses Woolf’s references to Arnold’s criticism and
poetry in The Waves; Donald Childs explores Woolf’s revisions of Arnold’s critical precepts
in Mrs. Dalloway; Eleanor McNees elaborates on Woolf’s critical adaptation of Arnold’s criti-
cal precepts in her own essays; and Emily Dalgarno briefly touches on Arnold’s and Woolf’s
attitudes towards Socrates. See Childs (1997), Dalgarno (2016), McNees (2015), and
Schneider (1983).
5 VIRGINIA WOOLF READS “DOVER BEACH”: ROMANCE… 71
retreat of god” (Gaipa 2003, 18). This aspect of her parents’ marriage led
her, in “A Sketch of the Past,” to describe her experience of the decade
between her parents’ death as “tortured…made numb with non-being”
(Woolf 1985, 136).
In this chapter, I argue that throughout To the Lighthouse Woolf engages
in a conversation with “Dover Beach” about the dangers of viewing mar-
riage as consolation for the existential anxiety associated with a godless
universe. While Mr. Ramsay explicitly expresses the views and mood of
Tennyson’s poetry through his repeated quotations of “The Charge of the
Light Brigade,” and, as C. Anita Tarr argues, shares much with Thomas
Carlyle, Mrs. Ramsay exhibits the mood and viewpoint of the speaker of
“Dover Beach” (Tarr 2001, 265). Woolf reverses the typical gendering of
Victorian anxiety by having Mrs. Ramsay echo the male speaker of Arnold’s
poem, expressing the same pessimism and actively seeking consolation and
imposing patriarchal order on the people under her influence. While Mrs.
Ramsay takes up the position that Arnold relegates to men, she inhabits a
social world in which women are viewed as sources of symbolic consola-
tion for a lost God. However, Mrs. Ramsay is quite different from Arnold’s
passive female addressee in that she actively wishes to become God, a sen-
timent that is echoed in the fairy tale, “The Fisherman and His Wife,” that
she reads to her son. By suggesting both Arnold’s lost and seeking male
speaker and the consoling figure of divinity in Mrs. Ramsay, and by grant-
ing her female character a subjectivity that Arnold’s poem reserves for his
male speaker, Woolf responds to one of the most representative poets of
the Victorian crisis of faith, a crisis that played out in her parents’ mar-
riage, critiquing the use of romance as consolation for Victorian anxiety
and loss of faith.
* * *
“Dover Beach,” the most anthologized poem in the English language,

has often served as a source of inspiration for other writers and artists. It
is commonly read as the quintessential expression of Victorian angst in
the wake of threats to Christian faith from the New Science of the mid-
nineteenth century, a view most famously expressed in Ruth Pitman’s
1973 essay, “On Dover Beach” (1973). Arnold is now generally thought
to have written the poem in 1851, but like Charles Darwin, he delayed
publication of what he expected would be a disturbing poem for his
audience until 1867. However, decades later, it was precisely Arnold’s
72 A. C. SMITH
expression of pessimism, seen as emblematic of Victorian intellectual

culture, that, in Dorothy Mermin’s words, “the twentieth century has
found the most ‘modern’ and congenial aspect of Victorian art” (1983,
108). Indeed Arnold’s sense of the loss at the heart of modernity is
echoed in modernist poems like W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” and
T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
Arnold has sometimes been seen as “a harbinger of modernism; more
than just a man concerned by science and ‘progress’, he serves as a van-
guard for that disillusioned movement” (Caldwell 2007, 429–430). While
modernist writers do not necessarily struggle with the same crisis of reli-
gious faith as their Victorian counterparts, the general loss of a stable sense
of meaningfulness and humanity’s place in the universe pervades much
modernist work of the interwar period, especially by male authors. Thus,
while commenting on the Victorian religious malaise expressed so explic-
itly in “Dover Beach,” Virginia Woolf is responding not only to her par-
ents’ marriage but also to a pessimism that is relevant to her interwar
context. One of the appealing aspects of Woolf’s writing is that, despite,
or perhaps because of, her personal struggles with mental illness and
despair, she refuses to embrace the pessimism that characterizes Arnold.
Rather, she persistently maintains, with great care and attention, an exami-
nation of the highs and lows of life, refusing to simplify human experience
or character. She is especially interested in the complexities of human rela-
tionships and the ways that we seek consolation for hopelessness and emp-
tiness by objectifying and exploiting other people. Woolf explores these
themes particularly effectively in To the Lighthouse, and in the process she
crafts a critical and complex response to Victorian angst, a mood that also
held sway in the interwar years, and to dangerous masculine fantasies of
finding substitutes for inspirited Creation in fetishized feminine objects.
The speaker of “Dover Beach” expresses a pessimistic view of life that
responds to scientific threats to Christian faith in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury. Like Tennyson’s speaker in “In Memoriam,” who fears that Nature
without divinity is indifferent, even hostile, to life, Arnold’s speaker sees
only a nightmare when he looks upon the world stripped bare of Christian
faith. Where once the Sea of Faith was “at the full, and round earth’s
shore/Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled,” now he hears only the
“melancholy” withdrawal and retreat of this encircling Sea “down the vast
edges drear/ And naked shingles of the world.”4 Once encircled in a
4
All references are to the Macmillan edition of New Poems (1867).
bright girdle, now the world lies naked. But worse, in the poem’s final
stanza, Arnold’s speaker finds that “the world, which seems/ To lie before
us like a land of dreams,/ So various, so beautiful, so new” in fact “hath
really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help
for pain.” He offers instead a hopeless vision of life “on a darkling plain/
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/ Where ignorant
armies clash by night.” Alone in a naked universe without the certitude
and peace of Christian faith, humanity is reduced to violence and igno-
rance. Where can the speaker take refuge from such a desolate vision of the
world? For Arnold’s speaker, refuge from this terrifying modern truth lies
in romantic love, as he proclaims at the beginning of the final stanza, “Ah,
love, let us be true/ To one another!,” in the face of the terrifying reality
of the world.
Though Arnold does not present this dynamic as exploitative or dis-
turbing, his poem has come to be read that way. For instance, Anthony
Hecht’s satiric poem, “The Dover Bitch,” reveals the dark side of this
romantic quest when he gives voice to the resentment of Arnold’s listener
at being “addressed/ As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort” (1967, 17).
Long before Hecht’s poem, Woolf recognized the disturbing potential of
Arnold’s portrayal of romance in the secular age. Witnessing the exploita-
tion of women for spiritual sustenance in her parents’ marriage, and rec-
ognizing the influence of nineteenth-century agnosticism and the
Victorian cult of domesticity on that marriage, Woolf was prepared to
examine Victorian notions of romance and marriage through Arnold’s
poem in To the Lighthouse. Far from a wholesale rejection of Arnold as sex-
ist, Woolf’s conversation with Arnold’s poem indicates her respect for
Arnold as a worthy interlocutor, a respect she expresses in a 1924 review
of a new volume of his letters.
* * *
At first glance, it might appear that Woolf is simply reproducing the sce-
nario of Arnold’s poem as she fictionalizes aspects of her parents’ relation-
ship. Both texts are set in coastal locales, Arnold’s on the coast of Dover
and Woolf’s in the Hebrides, and the sea is symbolically important in
both. As in Arnold’s poem, the Ramsays inhabit a world in which women
fill the hole left by god’s absence. Woolf demonstrates this early in the
novel when, as Mrs. Ramsay sits reading “The Fisherman and His Wife”
to her youngest son James, Mr. Ramsay approaches her looking for
74 A. C. SMITH
c omfort and consolation for his intellectual insecurity. This passage con-
tains some of the most disturbing imagery of sexual violence and exploita-
tion in the novel. Mrs. Ramsay clearly functions as a substitute for both
the lost deity and His inspirited Creation. Mr. Ramsay demands more than
sympathy for his failures; he demands “to be taken within the circle of life,
warmed and soothed, to have…his barrenness made fertile” ([1927]
1981, 37). When Mr. Ramsay objects that the rooms she “create[s]” and
“set[s]…aglow” (37), the transcendental home she creates for him, are
not enough to overcome his failure, she assures him that “[i]f he put
implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried
himself or climbed high, not for a second should he find himself without
her” (38). In this passage, Mrs. Ramsay embodies the attributes of God
the Creator, feeling afterward “the rapture of successful creation,” and
echoes the Christian doctrine that Christ will never forsake his true believ-
ers. This focus on the soteriological, enfolding aspect of God—Mrs.
Ramsay’s “boasting of her capacity to surround and protect” (38)—evokes
Arnold’s description of the Sea of Faith, which was once “at the full, and
round earth’s shore/ Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.”
Throughout the novel, Mrs. Ramsay is linked not to the Christian Father
God but to ancient fertility goddesses, including Demeter and Themis, as
well as Hera, Aphrodite, and Artemis.5 Because of the multitude of god-
desses that Woolf references in her characterization of Mrs. Ramsay, the
most appropriate analogue is Jane Ellen Harrison’s Great Goddess, a uni-
fying pre-Olympian ancestress to the more familiar Olympian goddesses
listed above. While Mr. Ramsay is repeatedly linked to the rationalist and
individualistic heroic culture that Harrison associates with patriarchal
Olympian religion, Mrs. Ramsay evokes the collectivism of goddess-
worshipping societies, which Harrison characterizes as valuing fertility and
the life of the group over individual freedom or identity.6 However, despite
Woolf’s preference for a Harrison-inspired version of archaic religion, with
its clear feminist potential, over Christianity, the details analysed in the
previous paragraph suggest that, for her husband, Mrs. Ramsay substitutes
for the divine, and for God the Creator in particular.
5
For instance, on Mrs. Ramsay as Demeter, see Barr (1993), Hoffman (1984), Love
(1970), Blotner (1956), Marcus (1988), Tyler (1994), and Richter (1970). On Mrs. Ramsay
as Themis, see Carpentier (1988). While not explicitly identifying Mrs. Ramsay as Demeter,
Lise Weil reads her relationship with Lily through the lens of the Triple Goddess and the
mother–daughter relationship celebrated at Eleusis. See Weil (1997).
6
See Harrison (1924, 63) and Harrison (1912, 48).
The parallel between Mr. Ramsay and Arnold’s speaker continues.

Shortly after this moment with his wife, Mr. Ramsay expresses pessimism
about his fate in distinctly Arnoldian imagery, and like Arnold’s speaker,
he turns to the domestic feminine for comfort. Walking to the edge of
the lawn and looking out at the ocean, he thinks that it is “his fate, his
peculiarity, whether he wished it or not, to come out thus on a spit of land
which the sea is slowly eating away,…and so to stand on his little ledge fac-
ing the dark of human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats
away the ground we stand on” (44). A spit of land, a little ledge upon
which we stand, being eaten away by the sea; this image, repeated twice
in variation, recalls Arnold’s vision of an island assaulted by “pebbles
which the waves draw back, and fling,/ At their return, up the high
strand.” More striking than this, however, is the more explicit allusion to
“Dover Beach”: Mr. Ramsay “facing the dark of human ignorance,” a
line that mirrors Arnold’s closing image, “we are here as on a darkling
plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/ Where igno-
rant armies clash by night.” The reference to ignorance is repeated a few
lines later, when Mr. Ramsay, breaking off his melancholy vigil, seeks
“the figure of his wife reading stories to his little boy…He turned from
the sight of human ignorance” (44). Repeating the movement of Arnold’s
speaker, who seeks consolation for his apocalyptic vision in the domestic
feminine, Mr. Ramsay turns from his vision of “the dark of human igno-
rance” to seek “consolation in trifles…in a world of misery…he had his
wife; he had his children” (44) This moment conveys the dynamics of the
Stephens’ marriage that Gaipa emphasizes when he writes that “[d]omes-
ticity essentially replaced religion for [Leslie] Stephen” (2003, 18).
However, Mrs. Ramsay, not her husband, is the character in To the
Lighthouse who most clearly embodies the pessimism and need for conso-
lation in Arnold’s poem. While Arnold’s speaker, seeking consolation for
the horrors of naked reality, is presumably a man addressing his female
lover, Woolf reverses the gender dynamics of Arnold’s poem. Mrs. Ramsay
shares with Arnold’s speaker a worldview evoked through imagery that
closely resembles the imagery of “Dover Beach.” Early in the novel, Mrs.
Ramsay sits reading to James and suddenly notices that the soothing mur-
mur of her husband and Charles Tansley talking has stopped. She is struck
by “an impulse of terror” because the sound of the waves falling on the
beach “which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds
suddenly thunder[s] hollow in her ears” (16). The emphasis on aurality,
and particularly on the sound of waves falling, as the source of Mrs.
76 A. C. SMITH
Ramsay’s terror recalls the shift, in the first stanza of “Dover Beach,” from
the visual to the auditory, which marks the very moment when the tone
shifts from one of peaceful enjoyment of a beautiful seascape to one of
pessimism: “Listen! You hear the grating roar/ Of pebbles which the
waves draw back, and fling…”
Further, in this passage, Mrs. Ramsay hears two very different messages
in the sound of the falling waves. The first, a “soothing,” “consoling”
“cradle song, murmured by nature, ‘I am guarding you—I am your sup-
port’” (16), recalls Arnold’s language of the once-full Sea of Faith, which
“round earth’s shore/ Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled,” sur-
rounding earth and humanity in its embrace. Arnold’s speaker follows up
this consoling image with a transition to one of the most terrifying audi-
tory passages in the poem: “But now I only hear/ Its melancholy, long,
withdrawing roar,/ Retreating, to the breath/ Of the night-wind, down
the vast edges drear/ And naked shingles of the world.” Likewise, Mrs.
Ramsay’s experience of the sound of the waves changes so that “at other
times, suddenly and unexpectedly,” the waves on the beach “had no such
kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the
measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its
engulfment in the sea” (16). The waves on the beach, which Arnold’s
speaker twice describes as a “roar,” remind Mrs. Ramsay of the vulnerabil-
ity and mortality of human life and of the earth, an island doomed to
destruction and engulfment in the sea. For both, the sea shifts from a
comforting protector to a source of terror, and this shift is effected through
sound. Woolf reinforces the parallels with “Dover Beach” in this passage
through her consistent use of musical words in this passage—“beat a mea-
sured and soothing tattoo,” “cradle song, murmured by nature,” “a
ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beating the measure of life”—to echo
Arnold’s auditory poem.
Woolf strengthens Mrs. Ramsay’s links to Arnold’s speaker by drawing
a contrast with other characters’ experiences of the sea. Lily Briscoe and
William Bankes, for instance, feel “excited by the moving waves”; the
water provides “some sort of physical relief,” and “the heart expand[s]
with it” (20). Woolf reinforces this contrast by using visual imagery in her
description of Lily and William’s experience of the sea, which, coming so
soon after the predominantly auditory description of Mrs. Ramsay’s reac-
tion to the sea, aligns Mrs. Ramsay even more clearly with Arnold’s speaker.
She also introduces, then reverses, an apparent similarity between “Dover
Beach” and the sadness Lily and William feel when gazing upon the sea.
When Lily and William Bankes look at the dunes far away, “instead of mer-
riment [they] felt come over them some sadness…partly because distant
views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be
communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest”
(20). On the surface, Lily and William’s sadness recalls Arnold’s “eternal
note of sadness,” brought in on the waves. But, unlike Arnold’s sense of
sadness, which comes from the desolation of a naturalistic view of the uni-
verse and the supposedly eternal “turbid ebb and flow/ Of human mis-
ery,” Lily and William’s sadness conveys a fundamentally spiritual vision of
the world; they are sad because they are left out of a sacred communion
between the sea and a sky that gazes upon an earth in peaceful repose.
This contrast of Lily and William with Mrs. Ramsay and Arnold’s
speaker calls into question Mrs. Ramsay’s worldview. Despite how unusual
Woolf shows Mrs. Ramsay’s perspective to be, Mrs. Ramsay projects it
onto the lighthouse keeper and his son, whom she imagines as captives on
an island engulfed by a hostile ocean. When Mrs. Ramsay imagines the
lighthouse keeper and his little boy, for whom she knits a stocking, on
their island, she cannot help imagining the worst. She thinks of them as
“those poor fellows…shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly
more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn.” She imag-
ines that they are “bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do”
while “the same dreary waves [break] week after week,” and projects her
own “fear of being swept into the sea” (5). The passion and hyperbole of
Mrs. Ramsay’s image of the suffering lighthouse keeper and his son sug-
gests that much more than individual lives is at stake for her. It seems
more likely that this is Mrs. Ramsay’s view of the world, that the rock
battered by hostile waves metonymically represents a naturalistic vision of
earth hurtling through pitiless space, given that her language here antici-
pates her language when she is terrified at the sound of the waves. Echoing
her language of “a rock the size of a tennis lawn” battered by dreary waves
from which one may be “swept into the sea,” she later imagines an island
at constant risk of “destruction…and engulfment in the sea” (16). Like
Mrs. Ramsay, Arnold’s speaker metonymically links the island to the earth
and the fragility of one suggests the terrifying fragility of the other and of
all human life. In both cases, the observer cannot withstand the view.
Arnold’s speaker seeks comfort in his lover, hailing her, “Ah, love, let us
be true/ To one another!,” the only comfort imagined in the poem to
compensate for the grim reality he imagines modern life to be. Like
Arnold’s speaker, Mrs. Ramsay believes that the human misery of which
78 A. C. SMITH
the waves are a constant reminder is unbearable and requires consola-

tions, most notably the consolation of romantic love. This sentiment
informs her treatment of the lighthouse keeper and his son, to whom
“one must take…whatever comforts one can” (5).
But Mrs. Ramsay is most like Arnold’s speaker in her obsession with
marriage as an answer to existential dread. While Arnold’s turn to human
relationships as respite for the merciless barrage of naturalistic truth can be
read as a sincere and realistic humanist response to the nihilistic elements
of a materialist worldview, Woolf’s response to the poem emphasizes the
problems inherent in viewing romance as an answer to metaphysical ills.
Going beyond the private world of Arnold’s poem, Woolf portrays Mrs.
Ramsay as enforcing marriage upon all men and women. As Mrs. Ramsay
thinks in a moment of clarity, “she was driven on too quickly she knew,
almost as if it were an escape for her too, to say that people must marry;
people must have children” (60). Woolf draws attention to the oppressive
element of Mrs. Ramsay’s consoling vision of marriage through the resis-
tance of younger women to the “universal law” of marriage she imposes.
As the Ramsay daughters “sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed
for themselves of a life different from hers…not always taking care of some
man or other” (6–7), Lily seeks a life of solitude in which she may paint.
In reaction to Mrs. Ramsay’s single-minded conviction that marriage gives
life meaning, Lily laughs hysterically at “the thought of Mrs. Ramsay pre-
siding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to
understand” (50)
The metaphysical significance of romantic love, which serves for Mrs.
Ramsay and for Arnold’s speaker as, in Mrs. Ramsay’s words, “an escape,”
may help explain why Mrs. Ramsay has such a different experience of the
sea than Lily and William Bankes. Despite Mrs. Ramsay’s conviction that
they would make a perfect romantic match and must marry, Lily and
William Bankes share a platonic companionship and understanding that
seems to protect them from the emotional dependency and pessimism that
both Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay experience with one another. While Mrs.
Ramsay feels, in the presence of her husband, “that solace which two dif-
ferent notes, one high, one low, struck together, seem to give each other
as they combine” (39), this harmony is short-lived. Embarrassment over
her husband’s desperate and very public need for sympathy and the bur-
den of hiding “small daily things” “diminished the entire joy, the pure joy,
of the two notes sounding together, and let the sound die on her ear now
with a dismal flatness” (39). In this passage, Woolf once again turns to
auditory language, aligning Mrs. Ramsay with Arnold’s preference for the
auditory over the visual in “Dover Beach.” It is clear, at least in this
moment, that her marriage, and perhaps all marriages lived day in and day
out, do not offer the escape she seeks from “the turbid ebb and flow of
human misery.” Indeed, far from escape, marriage reminds her “of the
inadequacy of human relationships” (40). However, as we have seen with
Lily and William Bankes’ platonic friendship, Woolf does not portray all
human relationships as so corrupted and inadequate. Lily and William find
between themselves mutual understanding and respect without, as Lily
puts it, “any sexual feeling” (24). How are human relationships inade-
quate, as Mrs. Ramsay feels? Perhaps because they are not up to the task
that Arnold’s speaker sets them, to compensate for the imagined over-
whelming misery of modern life.
In a rare moment of peace and solitude, Mrs. Ramsay, prompted by the
same sense that modern life is misery, exemplifies the atheism to which
Arnold’s poem responds. When the thought “We are in the hands of the
Lord” comes unbidden into her mind, she is instantly “annoyed with her-
self for saying that” (63). Searching to find the source of the phrase in
herself and sure that she did not say it, she feels she has been “trapped into
saying something she did not mean” (63). Like Arnold’s speaker she con-
nects her inability to believe in God to her sense that human life is misery,
asking: “How could any Lord have made this world?” (64). Echoing
Arnold’s sentiment that the world “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor
light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,” Mrs. Ramsay asserts
that “there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor…No
happiness lasted” (64). And, like Arnold’s speaker, she seeks in her hus-
band, whom she describes just two pages later as “so sensible, so just,” the
qualities the world seems to lack (66).
However, despite the similarities between Mrs. Ramsay and the speaker
of Arnold’s poem, this passionate rejection of a traditional Christian
phrase of consolation, “We are in the hands of the Lord,” occurs within
Chap. 11, one of the most mystical in the novel. In this chapter, Woolf
opens a tension between a rejection of religion and a spiritual experience
that is shaped by the language of medieval Christian mysticism. This rep-
resents a radical turn from the world of “Dover Beach,” in which tradi-
tional faith has fled the modern world. Free of the burden of “the being
and the doing” for others, Mrs. Ramsay sheds her public persona and
rests in “being [her]self, a wedge-shaped core of darkness” (62). In this
mystical loss of “personality” and entrance into “eternity,” Mrs. Ramsay
80 A. C. SMITH
feels her oneness with the lighthouse, merging with “the thing she looked
at” (63). Mrs. Ramsay’s unity with the lighthouse, a powerful symbol of
truth that Woolf borrows from Thomas Carlyle, suggests the transforma-
tion of the profane into the sacred; the mundane personality falls away
and the perceiver merges with the wonder of the object perceived.7 Woolf
intensifies the religious references in this passage by closing the passage
with a reference to medieval Christian mysticism: “There rose, and she
looked and looked with her needles suspended, there curled up off the
floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one’s being, a mist, a bride to
meet her lover” (64). This line is densely packed with mystical Christian
imagery: a mist, a sort of spiritual essence that emerges from the depths
of one’s being, rises like a bride meeting her lover. Medieval nuns fre-
quently employed this image of feminine spirituality, identifying as
“brides of Christ” whose marriages would be consummated in heaven.
Mrs. Ramsay’s ambivalence about religion in Chap. 11 aligns with
Matthew Mutter’s description of Woolf’s characters as simultaneously com-
pelled by and critical of their mystical experiences of beauty, which “seems
irresistibly to create a sense or promise of transcendent order that must
nevertheless be rejected” (2017, 77). Mrs. Ramsay’s simultaneous religious
experience and rejection of Christian dogma distance spirituality from
Christianity, a strategy we might expect from an agnostic feminist who
rejected patriarchal Christianity. But it is striking that in this chapter Woolf
codes spiritual experience in traditional Christian imagery. By returning us
to the Father God, Woolf introduces a commentary on gender and religion
in the Victorian period that takes Arnold’s poem in new directions. Mrs.
Ramsay’s unwillingness to believe in the Lord goes beyond disappointment
in Creation and suggests instead an attempt to wrest patriarchal power from
the Father. Woolf was interested in women’s attempts to occupy the empty
place left by the Father God in the modern world and explored this in The
Waves through Rhoda (Sullivan 2011). Like Rhoda, Mrs. Ramsay seeks to
fill the role of God. To the extent that Mrs. Ramsay is placed in the role of
God the Creator and Saviour by those around her, who envision her as a
goddess and rely on her for spiritual sustenance, she resembles the addressee
of “Dover Beach.” However, far from being a passive victim of such projec-
tions, Mrs. Ramsay is more than happy to take up this role, claiming her
powers as Creator and Saviour despite the costs of such grandeur. Mrs.
Ramsay seems eager to “play God” in the restricted ways available to her as
7
On the association of Thomas Carlyle with the lighthouse, see Tarr (2001).
a Victorian woman, relishing the attention she receives from men and treat-
ing men like adoring worshippers who require her protection. Even the
self-sacrificing attention she showers upon her husband, which Lily views as
the cause of her death, is framed by Mrs. Ramsay as a way of claiming the
powers of Saviour and Creator. Mrs. Ramsay’s desire to be God strikes me
as a particularly poignant example of Woolf’s “insight into the psychology
that attends particular efforts of secularization” (Mutter 2017, 69). Mrs.
Ramsay’s social location as a deified Victorian woman suggests that this
desire to be God develops out of Victorian restrictions on women’s inde-
pendent identity and self-determination combined with the ideology of the
angel in the house. She hopes to become God in the sense of occupying the
hole left by the mid-nineteenth-century death of God, the very absence
that Arnold’s poem mourns and seeks to fill with romantic love. Mrs.
Ramsay gives voice to what remains silent in “Dover Beach,” a woman’s
response to being placed in this role. In a world where men seek substitutes
for a lost Father God in romantic love, as Leslie Stephen and Arnold’s
speaker do, and where women’s opportunities are restricted, it is reasonable
that a woman like Mrs. Ramsay might satisfy the natural human desire to
“be somebody” by translating her subjugation to her husband into a form
of grandiosity.
Mrs. Ramsay’s desire to be God can help make sense of an aspect of the
novel that sometimes puzzles critics, Woolf’s choice of “The Fisherman
and His Wife” as the story that Mrs. Ramsay reads to her son James in
Chaps. 7, 8, 9 and 10 of “The Window.” Luisa Rubini questions Woolf’s
rationale in choosing “the most misogynist tale, featuring a totally dissatis-
fied and insatiable wife and a husband completely dependent on her,”
given that Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen, had written an apparently more
suitable children’s story that contained elements of the tale (Rubini 2006,
289, 294). Rubini asserts that the self-sacrificing Mrs. Ramsay is nothing
like the fisherman’s wife, whose demands increase without end until she
asks to become God. However, as we have seen, Mrs. Ramsay can be read
as wishing to be God and her husband as dependent on her. In fact, in
contrast to Rubini, I would argue that “The Fisherman and His Wife” is
uniquely suited to one of Woolf’s key aims in the novel, revealing through
revisions to “Dover Beach” the messy consequences of casting women as
substitutes for a lost Father God. Woolf extends the links between “The
Fisherman and His Wife” and “Dover Beach” when Nancy enacts elements
of the tale by imaginatively enlarging and shrinking a tidal pool as she
seeks some escape from the budding romance of Paul and Minta:
82 A. C. SMITH
“Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made minnows into
sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her
hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God
himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures” (75). This move-
ment from large to small, “that vastness and this tininess” (75), echoes the
structure of the fairy tale, in which the fisherman and his wife move from
a shack to a cottage to a castle, from being ordinary folk living in poverty
to becoming king, emperor, pope, and finally God, and back again to poor
people living in their filthy shack at the end of the tale.8 This moment, the
only glimpse we get into Nancy’s inner world, parallels not just the fairy
tale, but also “Dover Beach.” Like Arnold, Woolf emphasizes the ebb and
flow of the waves in this section, a feature of the sea to which she does not
often draw attention in the novel, when “she became with all that power
sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing, hynotized” (75). And, as
in “Dover Beach,” Nancy experiences intense and existential emotions in
response to this movement: “she was bound hand and foot and unable to
move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own
life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever, to nothingness”
(75–76). Nancy’s reductionist view of human life as everlasting nothing-
ness is akin to the reduction of human life and the earth to insignificance
in the vast span of geological time and astronomical space. In part, this
revisioning of the scale of human life engenders the Victorian angst expe-
rienced by Arnold’s speaker and Mrs. Ramsay and prompts the search for
a consoling substitute for the lost Father God and his inspirited Creation
in both texts.
In Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Jane Harrison writes, “…
religious presentation, mythology or theology, as we like to call it, springs
like ritual from arrested, unsatisfied desire. We figure to ourselves what we
want, we create an image and that image is our God” (1921, 28). In To the
Lighthouse, Woolf seems to have this conception of religion in mind. In
Woolf’s revision of “Dover Beach,” Arnold’s poem appears as part of a
long modern tradition, starting in the late eighteenth century, of theolo-
gizing or mythologizing the feminine, creating an image of God that
figures our unsatisfied theological desire in a secular age. By echoing
Arnold’s poem, Woolf examines the consequences of fetishizing women to
8
The original German word is pissput, literally a “piss pot,” but most translations euphe-
mistically translate the word. Some options have included “hovel,” “miserable hovel,”
“chamber pot,” “pigsty,” and “filthy shack.”
console oneself for the existential anxiety caused by the mid-nineteenth-

century crisis of faith. But, by reversing the traditional gendering of this
anxiety and desire for consolation, Woolf goes further than a straightfor-
ward feminist criticism of exploitation. By allowing a woman to voice
Arnold’s poetic sentiments, she grants her female protagonist an agency
and voice that Arnold’s poem does not. And by exploring what it looks
like when a woman takes up the role of lost Father God and seeks that
power for herself, she problematizes women’s attempts to take up patriar-
chal roles as means to empowerment. That agency and empowerment also
make women responsible, and in Lily’s eyes, culpable, for the dynamics of
their relationships and lives. Lily attributes Mrs. Ramsay’s death, Mr.
Ramsay’s misery as a widower, and the suffering of their children, which
she describes as “tragedy…children coerced, their spirits subdued” (149),
to the dynamics of the Ramsay marriage. She repeatedly states in this sec-
tion that the suffering of the children and of herself under the relentless
demands of Mr. Ramsay “was all Mrs. Ramsay’s doing…it was all Mrs.
Ramsay’s fault” (149–150), which seems a strange sort of victim-blaming.
But in the context of Woolf’s response to “Dover Beach” and given Mrs.
Ramsay’s desire to be God, Lily’s perspective, one that so often guides the
reader, may suggest that the natural consequences of living out one’s
unexamined desires, coupled with the cultural script by which one lives,
manifest, despite our wishes.
Works Cited
Arnold, Matthew. 1867. Dover Beach. In New Poems, 112–114. London:
Macmillan.
Barr, Tina. 1993. Divine Politics: Virginia Woolf’s Journey Toward Eleusis in To
the Lighthouse. boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture
20 (1): 125–145.
Blotner, Joseph. (1956) 1966. Mythic Patterns in To the Lighthouse. PMLA 71:
547–562. Reprinted in Myth and Literature: Contemporary Theory and Practice,
ed. John Vickery, 243–256. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Caldwell, Lauren. 2007. Truncating Coleridgean Conversation and the
Re-visioning of ‘Dover Beach’. Victorian Poetry 45 (4): 429–445.
Carpentier, Martha. 1988. Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text: The Influence of
Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach.
Childs, Donald. 1997. Mrs. Dalloway’s Unexpected Guests: Virginia Woolf, T. S.
Eliot, and Matthew Arnold. Modern Language Quarterly 58 (1): 63–82.
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Dalgarno, Emily. 2016. Virginia Woolf Reinvents Socratic Dialogue. Woolf Studies
Annual 22: 1–20.
Ellis, Steve. 2007. Virginia Woolf and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Fernald, Anne E. 2014. To the Lighthouse in the Context of Woolf’s Diaries and
Life. In The Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse, ed. Allison Pease,
Gaipa, Mark. 2003. An Agnostic’s Daughter’s Apology: Materialism, Spiritualism,
and Ancestry in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Journal of Modern Literature 26
(2): 1–41.
Harrison, Jane Ellen. 1912. Themis: A Study of the Origins of Greek Religion.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1921. Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
———. (1924) 2007. Mythology. Whitehead: Kessinger.
Hecht, Anthony. 1967. The Dover Bitch. In The Hard Hours, vol. 17.
New York: Atheneum.
Hoffman, Anne G. 1984. Demeter and Poseidon: Fusion and Distance in To the
Lighthouse. Studies in the Novel 16 (2): 182–196.
Hussey, Mark. 1996. Virginia Woolf: A-Z. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lilienfield, Jane. 1977. ‘The Deceptiveness of Beauty’: Mother Love and Mother
Hate in To the Lighthouse. Twentieth Century Literature 23 (3): 345–376.
Love, Jean O. 1970. Worlds in Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of
Virginia Woolf. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lund, Roger D. 1989. We Perished Each Alone: ‘The Castaway’ and To the
Lighthouse. Journal of Modern Literature 16 (1): 75–92.
Marcus, Jane. 1988. Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman. Columbus: Ohio
State University Press.
McNees, Eleanor. 2015. The Stephen Inheritance: Virginia Woolf and the Burden
of the Arnoldian Critic. Cambridge Quarterly 44 (2): 119–145.
Mermin, Dorothy. 1983. The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets. Rutgers:
Rutgers University Press.
Mutter, Matthew. 2017. Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious
Inheritance. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Pitman, Ruth. 1973. On Dover Beach. Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of
Literary Criticism 23 (2): 109–136.
Richter, Harvena. 1970. The Inward Journey. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rubini, Luisa. 2006. Virginia Woolf and the Flounder: The Refashioning of
Grimm’s ‘The Fisherman and His Wife’ (KHM 19, AaTh/ATU 555) in ‘To
the Lighthouse’. Fabula 47: 289–307.
Schneider, Mary. 1983. The Arnoldian Voice in Woolf’s The Waves. The Arnoldian
10 (2): 7–20.
Stephen, Leslie. (1977) 2001. Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Sullivan, Margaret. 2011. ‘Let there be Rose Leaves’: Lesbian Subjectivity and
Religious Discourse in The Waves. Virginia Woolf Miscellany 80: 8–9.
Tarr, C. Anita. 2001. Getting to the Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf and Thomas
Carlyle. Midwest Quarterly 42 (3): 258–270.
Tyler, Lisa. 1994. Mother-Daughter Passion and Rapture: The Demeter Myth in
the Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing. In Woolf and Lessing: Breaking
the Mold, ed. Ruth Saxton and Jean Tobin, 73–91. New York: St. Martin’s.
Weil, Lise. 1997. Entering a Lesbian Field of Vision: To the Lighthouse and Between
the Acts. In Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, ed. Eileen Barrett and Patricia
Cramer, 241–258. New York: New York University Press.
Woolf, Virginia. (1927) 1981. To the Lighthouse. San Diego: Harcourt Brace.
———. 1977–1984. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and
Andrew McNeillie, vol. 5. San Diego: Harcourt Brace.
———. 1985. Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Shulkind. 2nd rev. ed. London:
University of Sussex Press.
CHAPTER 6
Woolf and Hopkins on the

Revelatory Particular
Dwight Lindley
Non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo, divinum est. (“Not

to be restrained by the greatest, but to be bounded by the smallest:
that is divine.” Composed in 1640 as an epitaph for the tomb of
Ignatius of Loyola, Friedrich Hölderlin later made it the epigraph to
his 1799 novel, Hyperion [2008, 7].)
One afternoon in the summer of 1926, Virginia Woolf and a pair of friends
sat in the library of Robert Bridges, then poet laureate of Great Britain.
The elderly man, who had published eight years earlier the first edition of
poems by his long-deceased friend, Gerard Manley Hopkins, brought out
his collection of “Hopkins manuscripts” for her to peruse. Next to Woolf
sat “that gigantic grasshopper Aldous [Huxley] folded up in a chair,”
while Lady Ottoline Morrell “undulated and vagulated” nearby (Woolf
1977–1984, 3: 93). It is a tantalizing diary-entry, if only for what it leaves
unsaid about Woolf’s relation to Hopkins: she was clearly interested in the
man and his poetry, but what exactly had drawn her to them?
D. Lindley (*)
Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, MI, USA

88 D. LINDLEY
The fullest answer we have comes from two letters she wrote a few years
earlier in 1919 and 1920, shortly after Bridges’ first edition. In the first,
from July 1919, she asked her friend Janet Case,
Have you read the poems of a man, who is dead, called Gerard Hopkins? I
liked them better than any poetry for ever so long; partly because they’re so
difficult, but also because instead of writing mere rhythms and sense as most
poets do, he makes a very strange jumble; so that what is apparently pure
nonsense is at the same time very beautiful, and not nonsense at all.
She added, “now this carries out a theory of mine; but the poor man
became a Jesuit, and they discouraged him, and he died” (Woolf
1975–1980, 2: 379). While she is interested in Hopkins’ suffering, appar-
ent repression, and early death, she seems even more fascinated by the
beautiful difficulty of his verse, which she finds meaningful even when it
appears to make no sense. Five months later, she sent her copy of Hopkins
to the same friend, adding that “some [of the poems] are very lovely and
quite plain; others such a mix of beauty and horror that it takes hours to
sort them—for instance the long one on the wreck [The Wreck of the
Deutschland].” She includes a few lines of one of the lovely, plainer poems,
saying “Yes, I should like to have written that myself” (2: 415).1 These
letters, together with a handful of other, briefer, mentions,2 suggest that
Woolf appreciated the surface of Hopkins’ art—its beauty and interpretive
difficulty—but also its depiction of human experience. It is not only syntax
and accentual meter that make The Wreck of the Deutschland pleasingly
arduous to read, but its human beauty and “horror.”
At this point, it is worth asking whether the elements she appreciated in
Hopkins’ poems found their way into Woolf’s fiction—a question surpris-
ingly seldom asked.3 While a comparison of the beautiful jumbles of their
1
Woolf had one of only 750 copies printed of Bridges’ 1918 first edition. There were no
further printings or editions until 1930. See Catherine Phillips, “Note on the Text” (2002,
xxxix). In the second letter to Case, Woolf asks to have the book back once her friend is
finished with it, “since I spent 12/6 on him and also haven’t yet made him out” (1975–1980,
2: 415). Perhaps it was never returned, for the volume is not listed in King and Miletic-
Vejzovic’s list of the Woolfs’ library holdings.
2
Woolf also brings up Hopkins in a 1919 Athenaeum review (1986–2011, 3: 129); a 1928
essay on Meredith (5: 552); a 1932 Good Housekeeping essay (5: 307); and correspondence
from 1932, 1933, and 1935 (1975–1980, 5: 44, 246, 448).
3
Hopkins comes up nowhere in Janis Paul, The Victorian Heritage of Virginia Woolf
(1987); Steve Ellis, Virginia Woolf and the Victorians (2007); or Kate Flint, “Virginia Woolf
and Victorian Aesthetics” (2010).
6 WOOLF AND HOPKINS ON THE REVELATORY PARTICULAR 89
style (e.g. figures of syntactic deviation) could be very helpful, I propose

here to examine their commonalities in dramatic structure: interconnected
aspects of human experience that Woolf would have seen in Hopkins’
verse, and that she took care to fashion into her own novels.4 What emerges
is not so much a definite genealogy—Woolf follows Hopkins in X, Y, and
Z—but a clearer picture of what she would likely have appreciated in his
work. At the heart of their connection is a common focus on what I shall
call the revelatory particular: the unique, numinous charge of meaning
within each moment of conscious experience, and its place in human lives.
An account of Hopkins’ theology of creation as worked out in the 1918
poems, followed by a selective analysis of Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs.
Dalloway, will draw out this common feature of their work, in several
dimensions. Surprisingly, the comparison will suggest that Woolf’s spiritu-
ality and dramatic imagination owe more to the kind of Christianity
Hopkins espoused than is usually presumed.5
In order to see the way different aspects of the revelatory particular
hang together in Hopkins’ poems, we need first to see the shape of his
general theology of creation. As described in his letters and personal writ-
ings, creation looks like a circle, one half of which is (so to speak) God’s
sacrificial offering, the other half of which is the reciprocal offering of all
creatures. In an 1881 essay on “Creation and Redemption, the Great
Sacrifice,” God’s reaching forth appears in scholastic terms, as a “proces-
sion”: just as Son proceeds from Father, and Holy Spirit from Father and
Son, “in the eternal and intrinsic procession of the Trinity,” so also God
4
Another important comparison would be the lives of the two artists: both were aesthetic
visionaries from privileged social backgrounds, who struggled with depression, and so on.
But in the interest of space, the present study will cover only their art.
5
That said, there is a growing body of work on religious inheritance and spirituality in
Woolf. Mark Gaipa situates her between spiritualism and materialism and does helpful work
in placing her more complicated view of religion relative to her father’s fiercer agnosticism
(2003). Christopher Knight also places Woolf’s view of religion in an in-between space: it
registers “itself neither as an affirmation nor a negation, but rather as a vexation, wherein the
religious convictions of the past are undercut by the doubts of the present, just as the doubts
of the present are called into question by the convictions of the past” (2007, 43). Kristina
Groover suggests that Mrs. Dalloway in particular be read in light of a “feminist theology
according to which God is a relation that human beings choose to enact” (2011, 11).
Stephanie Paulsell historicizes Woolf’s relation to religion, placing her writings in relation to
the strains of religious thought and practice she would have known about, in her family and
among friends and extended relatives (2017).
90 D. LINDLEY
chose to give of himself in creation “by an extrinsic and less than eternal”
procession. He did this
To give God glory and that by sacrifice, sacrifice offered in the barren wil-
derness outside of God, as the children of Israel were led into the wilderness
to offer sacrifice. This sacrifice and this outward procession is a consequence
and shadow of the procession of the Trinity, from which mystery sacrifice
takes its rise.…It is as if the blissful agony or stress of selving in God had
forced out drops of sweat or blood, which drops were the world.
(2002a, 288–289)
All things are created, then, as a sacrificial gift that is of a piece with the
love within God himself. But so far we only have half the circle of creation.
In a note from 1882, Hopkins shifted the metaphor slightly, making the
creation out to be God’s communication, an “utterance of himself.…This
world then is word, expression, news of God. Therefore its end, its pur-
pose, its purport, its meaning, is God and its life or work to name and
praise him.” Here is where the circle is closed. “Praise,” Hopkins says,
should be “put before reverence and service…the world, man, should
after its own manner give God being in return for the being he has given
it or should give him back that being he has given.” Thus, creation con-
tinues in the creature’s act of reciprocity, an act that participates in the
work of the Creator. “This is done by the great sacrifice,” a joining of
one’s own offering to the self-offering of Christ to the Father on the cross.
“To contribute then to that sacrifice,” says Hopkins, “is the end for which
man is made” (2002b, 282). In this picture, creation, both that of God
and that of creatures in God, is at once a gift and a word, or revelation.
Now, the significance of this circular model of creation for Hopkins’
poetry will appear more clearly once we examine it from within the hori-
zon of human experience. For Hopkins, the phenomenon of creation, as
experienced, presents several different aspects: particularity, solitariness,
beauty, mystery, analogical character, and connection to God, as well as
the power to elicit a loving gift in response. Creation’s particularity
Hopkins loved to think of as its “inscape,” or form: each existing thing has
its own dynamic shape, a flashing form in which it most reveals itself, “an
individually-distinctive beauty of style” (2013, 2: 835). For Hopkins, the
inscape of each created thing reveals itself in an “instress,” a unique mark
or impression it leaves on the imagination, never to be repeated again.
Thus, creation reveals itself—and reveals the Creator—in strikingly
particular ways.6 The human recipient likewise receives each inscape in an

utterly distinctive way, conditioned by the singularity of his or her soul, a
singularity “incommunicable by any means to another man” (2002b,
282).7 The beauty of these instresses, these inscapes received by the par-
ticular soul, reveals fresh new aspects of the Creator, never before experi-
enced, and thus they carry with them a profound mystery. Indeed, as the
theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar has written, “the mystery incorporated
in the inscapes is…of infinite depth, penetrating all the levels of being
from flesh to spirit and beyond into the abyss of the Trinity” (1986, 394).8
As they reveal these depths, all particular created things take their places in
analogical relation, at once distinct and alike, possessing “either manifestly
or secretly, a christological form,” inasmuch as they participate in the son’s
sacrificial gift of self (383). This gift completes the circle of creation as
humans consciously make their own offerings, in Christ, to the glory of
God.9 In the poems Virginia Woolf was reading in 1919 and 1920, these
various aspects of creation shimmer through the lines of verse, lighting up
human experience in some of the same ways we associate with Woolf’s
own fiction.
First, Hopkins’ poetry tends to dramatize the solitary individuality of
human experience, punctuated by moments of profound beauty. Many of
Hopkins’ poems are injunctions to see a lovely inscape right now, as in
“The Starlight Night”: “Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! / O
look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!”10 Similarly, in poems like “The
Windhover,” Hopkins dramatizes a particular moment of his own seeing:
“I caught this morning morning’s minion.” In these and other poems
6
For more on Inscape and Instress, see Hans Urs von Balthasar (1986, 365–366).
7
On the individuality of each person’s inner life, Hopkins wrote: “When I consider my
selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and
in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the
smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man (as
when I was a child I used to ask myself: What must it be to be someone else?). Nothing else
in nature comes near…searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being”
(2002b, 282).
8
On Hopkins’ understanding of mystery, see also the important letter to Robert Bridges,
from October 24, 1883 (2013, 2: 619–620).
9
In many places, Hopkins emphasizes the fundamental Jesuit principle that humans have
been made to give glory to God: “Why did God Create?…He meant the world to give him
praise, reverence and service: to give him glory…. I was made for this, each one of us was
made for this” (2002c, 290–291).
10
All quotations from the poetry are taken from the Bridges edition of 1918.
92 D. LINDLEY
such as “Hurrahing in Harvest” and “Felix Randal,” Hopkins focuses his

reader’s gaze on a single moment of conscious experience in which the
details of life converge in a fresh, unique way: his poems strive to catch
that newness, recreating the instress of a particular created thing. In these
moments of experience, Hopkins presents himself as palpably alone, first
because the soul of each filters external experience differently: “The mind,
mind has mountains,” as Hopkins says in “No worst,” and that internal
geography plays a greater role in the structuring of our view of life than
any external phenomena. Thus, as Hopkins remarks in “As kingfishers
catch fire,” it is “indoors”—within the self—that “each one dwells,” in a
place set apart from all others; as “The Lantern out of Doors” makes clear,
each percipient has his own solitary light, and passes other knowers in the
“darkness wide” of life. In some poems, this aloneness is disturbing, while
in many, such as “Heaven-Haven,” it is precious.11 Nevertheless, these
consciously particular moments of experience, in which each person knows
himself to be utterly alone, become sites of breathtaking beauty: indeed,
all of Hopkins’ poems feature dramatic encounters with particular beau-
ties, such as the flight of the falcon in “The Windhover,” or the lovely end
of summer in “Hurrahing in Harvest”:
now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise

Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behavior
Of silk-sack clouds! Has wilder, willful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
His poems strive to catch the unrepeatable beauty of these particular

moments, and we know this was one of the things Virginia Woolf most
appreciated in reading him (Woolf 1975–1980, 2: 379).
At the same time, Hopkins’ moments of dramatic experience are pro-
foundly mysterious, opening out on to vast fields of analogical connection,
and transcendent emergences of the divine. The mystery of particular
moments comes through most clearly in the matched pair of poems, “The
Lantern out of Doors” and “The Candle Indoors,” both of which empha-
size the impossibility of getting into the other’s inner life. In the second
poem, he sees someone’s light through a window, symbolic of the interior
11
This poem about “a nun” taking “the veil” is particularly notable, as we know Woolf
admired it (1975–1980, 2: 415), and it brings to mind Clarissa’s explicitly nun-like solitude
(2005, 28, 30).
life of a person that sometimes flashes across his or her face: Hopkins asks,
“By that window what task what fingers ply, / I plod wondering,
a-wanting.” The moment is beautiful, revelatory, yet we are at once given
to know that there is so much more we do not, cannot, know. Even so,
part of what one can know in a Hopkins poem is the breadth of analogical
connection between the experience of the moment and other similar phe-
nomena. The surface of a Hopkins poem frequently shifts metaphors, daz-
zling the eye with the range of reference. “The Windhover,” for example,
makes the falcon into the “kingdom of daylight’s dauphin,” a rider on
horseback with reins in the air, its wings like a nun’s wimple, before the
creature dives, fire breaking from it like a roman candle, or embers in the
fireplace, that “fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.” Besides his
alliteration and accentual “sprung rhythm,” this constant play of meta-
phorical suggestion is perhaps what Hopkins is best known for: at every
moment, the experience shimmers with a range of likenesses, connections
we see or sense, though the object yet escapes us. All these phenomena,
bristling with difference, are nevertheless somehow part of the same thing,
the same unfolding revelation of the divine. We could name almost any
Hopkins poem as an example, but suffice to mention “God’s Grandeur,”
where “The world is charged” with his greatness, flaming out with it in
particular moments. Likewise, in “As kingfishers catch fire,” Hopkins
writes that “Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and
lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”
Divinity impresses itself upon us precisely in the smallest, most individual
instresses—the loveliness of face or limb at this moment. For Hopkins, as
will also be true for Woolf, the mystery of particular experience is that it
ever escapes us, even as it opens our eyes to a range of beautiful meanings,
both horizontally and vertically.
Hopkins’ poems also reflect a set of interrelated, appropriate responses
to the revelatory particular, ways of participating in the creative circle well.
The way not to participate well is to pursue the urge to control. This more
problematic move toward domination comes out clearly in a poem like
“Binsey Poplars,” where humans fell the beautiful trees—“Not spared,
not one”—according to some abstract, pre-determined plan.12 “Even
12
In this connection, it is worth noting the similarity between Hopkins’ convictions about
trees, and those of Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway (“Men must not cut down trees. There is a
God” [2005, 24]). By contrast, Sir William Bradshaw, with his theory of “proportion,” will
seek to dominate by means of imposed abstractions.
94 D. LINDLEY
where we mean / To mend her we end her,” Hopkins says, for humans
frequently prefer control or domestication to a just recognition of the
beauty in the world. That more just response takes the form of love, let-
ting-be, and a gift in return. Love shines out in many of the poems, for
example in “The Windhover,” where the speaker’s “heart in hiding” is
“stirred for a bird”—the falcon he sees flying. When Felix Randal is dying
in the poem of that name, his tears “touched my heart,” just as his work-
manship did in earlier times. In the poem, “To what serves Mortal
Beauty?,” Hopkins clearly dramatizes a further aspect of this loving
response. When the “World’s loveliest [objects]—men’s selves” are
revealed to us, when “self flashes off frame and face…what do then? how
meet beauty?” In a way that Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway will echo, he
answers, “Merely meet it; own / Home at heart, heaven’s sweet gift; then
leave, let that alone.” Recognizing the dignity of the other, be it a poplar
tree or another human, and letting that creature be itself: this is a fitting
expression of love. This completes the creative circle of sacrificial offering.
Another way of loving is that modeled in Hopkins’ poetic work in general:
the making of something beautiful oneself, in reply to an original experi-
ence of particular loveliness. We see this poetic act explicitly drawn out in
“The Windhover,” “Hurrahing in Harvest,” “Henry Purcell,” and others,
but perhaps it emerges most clearly in the reflective sonnet Hopkins wrote
for Bridges himself, “To R.B.” The poem presents a procreative conceit,
beginning with “The fine delight that fathers thought,” the delight at a
moment of illumined experience; the artistic response, then, must gestate
within the poet for months, or even years, before he brings out a lovely
counterpart to that original “rapture of inspiration.” This is what Hopkins’
poems do: they pay back the original beauty by creating a reciprocal offer-
ing of their own. In the poems Virginia Woolf was so struck by, love lets
the other be, but not only that; it also crafts a fitting tribute to the other,
and to the God in and beyond that other.
While of course Woolf could not have known that much about Hopkins’
theology of creation,13 the personal experience of it dramatized in the
poems seems to have touched her imagination. In Mrs. Dalloway, the
revelatory particular plays a role similar to what it does in the poems, and
13
In the scene we opened with, Woolf was going over Bridges’ Hopkins manuscripts: pre-
sumably, this meant the hand-written copies of his poems, but it is also possible that she saw
something of Hopkins’ theological thought, which comes out all over the place in the letters
he wrote to his friend.
many of the same aspects appear: uniqueness, solitariness, beauty, mystery,

analogy, and divinity. In the human response to these aspects of experi-
ence, a similar ethic of reciprocity emerges, so that Woolf’s novel really
does seem to be working with the same kind of circular model that is
bodied forth in Hopkins’ poems. After analyzing Mrs. Dalloway, I will
conclude with a reflection on the significance of their similarity.
In Woolf’s novel, as in Hopkins, the moment of revelation must be
consciously experienced as unique. At the beginning of her walk at the
start of the novel, Clarissa waits for Big Ben to strike, just as she has for
over twenty years, and everything is familiar, yet strangely new. It is the
same “life,” the same “London” as always, but now in “this moment in
June,” she realizes her love for it in a fresh way (Woolf 2005, 4). Of
course, every moment is unique, and uniquely charged with its own vital-
ity, but the ones worth writing about, as Hopkins also understood, are
those consciously appreciated as such. “Moments like this,” in which the
reality of temporal difference stands out clearly, “are buds on the tree of
life,” thinks Clarissa at one point (28); at another, she tries to “catch the
falling drop” of passing time, plunging “into the very heart of the moment
of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings,
seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the bottles afresh, collecting
the whole of her at one point” (36). These things are all habitual, familiar,
but the ever-growing past and ever-diminishing future stand in different
ratios to each particular point in time, so that no moment is ever the same.
Each, as Hopkins would say, leaves a different mark. Plunging in and gath-
ering oneself there in the unique present can heighten experience, as both
Clarissa and others learn: though Peter Walsh is “by conviction an atheist
perhaps, he is taken by surprise with moments of extraordinary exalta-
tion,” individual experiences in time that nevertheless seem to lift him into
a transcendent beyond (55). They seem to be associated with conver-
gence, “these moments,” like the one that comes to Peter “by the pillar-
box opposite the British Museum…a moment, in which things came
together; this ambulance; and life and death. It was as if he were sucked up
to some very high roof by that rush of emotion and the rest of him, like a
white shell-sprinkled beach, left bare” (148). Every moment is sui
generis—particular unto itself—but when one realizes this at the time, the
whole of life appears to come together in a flash.14
14
Here and elsewhere, as many have remarked, Woolf’s imagination seems to run parallel
to Henri Bergson’s theory of external time and internal duration. For Bergson’s distinction,
96 D. LINDLEY
In Woolf’s moments, as in Hopkins’, the individual feels herself to be

fundamentally alone in her perception. On the face of it, the individuality
of experience is obvious, yet Woolf’s descriptions of epistemic life lay bare
some of the reasons for this—first and foremost, the fact that each person’s
soul is much bigger, richer, deeper, than her body. When Clarissa is out in
Bond Street, she feels she is somehow loose from her body, and only wear-
ing it as clothing, her real self going about “invisible, unseen; unknown”
(10). When she thinks of Doris Kilman two pages later, she does not
merely register neutral memories of the woman: something reacts to Miss
Kilman from within the “leaf-encumbered forest” of Clarissa’s soul, a
hooved beast embodying the peculiar hatred that colors her perception of
the poor woman (12). Like every character in the novel, she brings her
own internal life to every external event she witnesses. Later, when
Septimus Smith is on the couch at home, reflecting on the beauty of the
trees, his inner life speaks calm to its outer covering: “Fear no more, says
the heart in the body; fear no more”—and his body begins to settle down
(136). The soul of each, according to a theory Peter Walsh attributes to
Clarissa, is “the unseen part of us, which spreads wide,” beyond the
appearances of the moment, attaching to each experience in a specific,
individual way (149). In the encounter, subject dwarfs object, and their
relation is the truth of that particular event.15 It is what it is to someone, or
several someones. Thus, Mrs. Dalloway embodies the insight of Woolf’s
contemporaneous essay “Character in Fiction,” where “Mrs. Brown…can
see Time and Free Will (2001, 90–91); on the disputed question whether Virginia Woolf
actually read Bergson, or merely converged with his theory accidentally, see Mary Ann Gillies
(1996, 107–131, esp. 107–108).
15
To emphasize the relativity of experience in these terms is to bring to mind Walter
Pater’s aesthetic model in The Renaissance: in the “Introduction,” he states that “Beauty, like
all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative” (1980, xix). In the famous
“Conclusion,” Pater fills out the picture thus:
the whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual
mind. Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for
each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever
pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be with-
out. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation,
each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. (187–188)
As an influence on both Hopkins and Woolf, Pater could help explain some of their com-
mon elements. On Pater and Hopkins, see Lesley Higgins (1991); on Pater and Woolf, see
John Beer (1993).
be treated in an infinite variety of ways, according to the age, country, and

temperament of the writer” (1986–2011, 3: 426).
In a character’s concrete experience, this sense of aloneness in the par-
ticular moment can assume surprising existential weight. Early on, Clarissa,
concentrated in the experience of the present, is struck with the feeling,
“as she watched the taxi cabs, of being far out, out, far out to sea and
alone” (8). Depending on the circumstances, this realization can be utterly
crushing: the desperate Lucrezia Smith feels it so in Regent’s Park, crying,
“I am alone; I am alone!,” while her husband Septimus later sees himself
as “quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die
alone” (23; 90). Since the war’s end, he has intermittently felt his doom
to be an isolation in the moment: “That was it: to be alone forever” (142).
Clarissa herself feels at times that her solitary experience is a condemna-
tion: when her husband goes to lunch without her, she unwittingly echoes
Septimus, thinking, “he has left me; I am alone forever” (46).16 On the
other hand, aloneness in the moment can also be liberating, thrilling, in
Mrs. Dalloway, as it frequently is for Peter Walsh. “Standing under
Gordon’s statue” near the Strand, Peter implicitly identifies with the stat-
ue’s solitariness: “the strangeness of standing alone, alive, unknown, at
half-past eleven in Trafalgar Square overcame him,” and he feels blissfully
new and capable of anything. “He had not felt so young for years” (51).
More often than not, Clarissa responds to this sense in the same way, as
when she retreats upstairs, “alone…like a nun withdrawing, or a child
exploring a tower” (30). When Richard brings her flowers, but cannot (in
so many words) say “I love you,” she paradoxically feels the distance
between them as a blessing, for “there is a dignity in people; a solitude;
even between husband and wife a gulf ”—an independence of experience
“one must respect” (117). When Septimus leaps to his death, Clarissa feels
he has somehow honored this sacred aloneness, in the face of the oppres-
sion of Holmes and Bradshaw (180). The novel, then, presents the loneli-
ness of particular experience as a precious, yet potentially terrifying fact. If
properly respected and fostered, it can provide Woolf’s characters with the
opportunity to see the profound beauty of the world in a fresh way.
With beauty, we get closer to what makes these kinds of moments open
up to transcendence. From the start of Mrs. Dalloway, from Clarissa’s
opening walk, the novel’s moments are fundamentally about the experience
16
In Hopkins, the Sonnets of Desolation provide notable examples of this kind of loneli-
ness: for example, “To seem the stranger lies my lot.”
98 D. LINDLEY
of beauty. Poor, wounded Septimus, his consciousness heightened by a

strange alienation from other human beings, is smitten with “this beauty,
this exquisite beauty” of the smoke-signaling airplane:
tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting
in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laugh-
ing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signaling
their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely,
with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks. (21)
Later, in the same Regent’s Park scene, he again experiences the world as
beautiful, gratuitous gift: “The trees waved, brandished. We welcome, the
world seemed to say; we accept; we create. Beauty, the world seemed to
say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses,
at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang
instantly.” “Beauty,” he reflects, echoing Keats, “that was the truth now.
Beauty was everywhere” (67–68). If the particular moment is the place,
and the isolated individual is the subject, then beauty is in some sense the
object, the shimmering of being, caught in an unrepeatable instress. Doris
Kilman catches sight of the same shimmer when young Elizabeth
Dalloway’s beauty pierces her cloud of bitterness and resentment: “but
here was Elizabeth, rather out of breath, the beautiful girl” (122). Amid
her generally more egoistic trains of feeling and thought, these moments
of beauty happily stand apart, so that she is bereaved when her companion
departs: “Elizabeth had gone. Beauty had gone, youth had gone” (130).
Again, Peter Walsh, en route to the Dalloways’ party, is overcome by
London in the evening light: “He was astonished by the beauty,” but not
simply the physical beauty of trees, structures, or bodies (158). “Not the
crude beauty of the eye,” but “a sense of pleasure-making hidden” in the
houses he is walking past, “hidden, but now and again emerging” in many
small details: “absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life” (159).
At the end, Septimus’ passing sharpens Clarissa’s sense of the same myste-
rious shimmer: she becomes acutely aware of the moment; “he made her
feel the beauty” (182). Throughout the novel, this kind of experience of
beauty forms the core of the heightened moment.
As Peter has just remarked, though, Mrs. Dalloway’s moments of beauty
are also profoundly mysterious. Lovely realizations of this spot in time or
that transcend the capacity of the viewer to comprehend. The phenome-
non first strikes us when the regal motor car of who knows what important
person passes Clarissa in Bond Street: “the motor car with its blinds drawn
and an air of inscrutable reserve proceeded towards Piccadilly,” and pedes-
trians all around share the sense that “greatness was passing, hidden, down
Bond Street” (16). Who is that person, they all want to know? To Peter
Walsh, Clarissa Dalloway has the same fascinating “impenetrability” about
her, a hiddenness in plain sight (59). “So transparent in some ways,” she
is yet profoundly “inscrutable in others”: he finds her beautiful and fetch-
ing, yet he can only come so far before she escapes him (76). Her daughter
strikes Miss Kilman in much the same way, Elizabeth’s beauty coinhering
with an “Oriental mystery” that renders her “inscrutable” just as one
begins to be struck with her (120, 128). In the final seconds of his life,
Septimus Smith thinks about how “Life was good”—life with Rezia, and
the silly women she makes hats for—and yet he cannot fully understand it:
“human beings—what did they want?” (146). From start to finish, Virginia
Woolf’s human characters are like the motor car in Bond Street, blinds
drawn, passing before others with an air of inscrutable reserve. The beauty
of these lives breaks in on Clarissa, Peter, Septimus, yet the object tran-
scends the viewer’s interpretive capacity.
The mystery of particular experience appears with greatest clarity in the
two luminous scenes shared by Clarissa and her elderly neighbor in
Westminster. In the first, as Big Ben strikes again, Clarissa reflects “how
extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching, to see the old lady (they had
been neighbors ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she
were attached to that sound, that string.” As the older woman retreats
from vision, Clarissa, led on by curiosity,
tried to follow her as she turned and disappeared, and could still just see her
white cap moving at the back of the bedroom. She was still there moving
about at the other end of the room. Why creeds and prayers and mackin-
toshes? when, thought Clarissa, that’s the miracle, that’s the mystery; that
old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to
dressing-table. She could still see her. And the supreme mystery…was sim-
ply this: here was one room; there another. (124–125)
In Woolf’s picture, the individual viewer, consciously caught up in the

beauty of the moment, is inexorably led to speculate about the object she
perceives: who is in the car? What is the airplane writing? What do they
want? Where is she going? The question is the same as Hopkins’ in “The
Candle Indoors”: “what task what fingers ply / I plod wondering” (5–6).
100 D. LINDLEY
Yet these interpretive questions lead into an inviolable mystery of other-

ness: “Here was one room; there another,” thinks Clarissa. One does not
reach the bottom of those depths.
Even so, Woolf presents at least two ways by which the viewer may clarify
the mysterious beauty of the other: the drawing of analogies, and the turn
to divinity. We might call the first a horizontal means of clarification, and
the second a vertical. Horizontally, she draws analogical connections
between the phenomena her characters are met with, and countless other
types of experience. The pages of the novel crawl with metaphor and simile:
Clarissa has “a touch of the bird about her” (4). Septimus hears a woman’s
voice intoning words with interconnectedness “like a mellow organ,” with
a “roughness…like a grasshopper’s” (21). Peter’s grief over the past rises
“like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from
sunken day” (41). As he and Clarissa challenge one another again, Homeric
war images pour in: “So before a battle begins, the horses paw the ground;
toss their heads; the light shines on their flanks; their necks curve” (43).17
We could go on and on, as the analogies ripple and change over every page
of the novel, as in a Hopkins poem. One effect of Woolf’s constant play of
metaphor is to open up lateral associations, a range of connection that can
fill out our sense of particular experience. In the complex scene between
Peter and Clarissa, two old lovers know one another well, are still mutu-
ally attracted, and yet run up against the inscrutability of the moment.
The multiple, shifting, similes give us a flashing, powerful sense of the
depth of these phenomena—they are like and unlike many other familiar
experiences—and yet Woolf does not allow us to stay with any one for very
long. Thus, she charges the scene with significance, with universality, but
does not leave space for working out the connections into a schema. Over
and over, the novel uses passing analogies to create a sense of breadth and
intelligibility, but moves on before we have a chance to theorize.
While the revelatory moment opens out into this brilliant but elusive
horizontal dimension, it also stretches vertically, to offer glimpses of the
divine. Of course, Clarissa and Peter (and behind them, Woolf) are “by
conviction” atheistic: “not for a moment did she believe in God” (55, 28).
And the character who most believes in a traditional God, Doris Kilman,
also seems to be one of the most frequent projectors of desire. At the same
time, the novel’s catena of deep moments thrill with a sense of givenness,
revelation, and divinity. On the first page, Clarissa’s walk opens with a sense
On the novel’s Homeric register, see Molly Hoff (1999).

17
of freshness mysteriously received as a gift, “fresh as if issued to children on

a beach” (3; emphasis mine). The world of activity in Westminster chafes
the air and moves the leaves, “on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa
loved” (7). She remembers similarly divine moments from the past, as
when Sally Seton kissed her at Bourton: it was “a present,” a “revelation,”
to be responded to with “religious feeling” (35). Septimus, like Woolf’s
other characters, is lit up several times with a numinous sense of the divine:
as the foliage moves about him in Regents Park, he thinks, “Men must not
cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs of
envelopes.)” (24). Later, he feels that “Heaven was divinely merciful, infi-
nitely benignant,” sparing him, pardoning his weakness—this is a “revela-
tion” he must share (66, 69). Still later, lying on his sofa, he is overwhelmed
with the sense of transcendent gift: “every power poured its treasures on
his head” (136). Peter Walsh, while an atheist, recurs habitually to less
threatening, semi-pagan images of the divine, in order to communicate his
sense of things: he speaks of love as to a goddess in a dark grove (43); he
dreams of a “battered woman…singing of love…love which prevails,” in
the presence of the “the Gods” (79). In these and other scenes, Mrs.
Dalloway’s moments of particular beauty connect Woolf’s characters not
only with the world around, but with some sort of beneficence from
beyond that world. As in Hopkins, it is a beneficence one tends to catch in
the humblest things, the smallest snatches of time. For Woolf, these
“moments of being” are crowned with a gratuitous transcendence, pre-
cious beyond expression.
If these moments of particular revelation form the systole at the heart
of the novel, then human response must be the diastole. A gift has been
given; how will it be met? As Woolf describes it, there are two basic ways
one can respond to the luminous beauty of heightened experience: there
is the path of egoistic control (as in “Binsey Poplars”), and there is the
path of loving reciprocation.18 Down the former path run the narratives
of Miss Kilman, Holmes and Bradshaw, and at times, others. At their
worst, characters in the novel respond to the beauty of experience by
seeking to bring it under their control, as Miss Kilman does with Elizabeth
18
Woolf tends to focus more on the problematic sort of response than Hopkins, perhaps
partially because he had been advised by religious superiors to avoid a too-critical spirit. See
Hopkins’ 1881 letter to a friend, in which he refuses to speak disparagingly of others’ poetic
work for more than a couple of paragraphs: “However I must write no more criticism”
(2013, 1: 478).
102 D. LINDLEY
at the Army and Navy Stores. Already a domineering person, Kilman

unsurprisingly desires to possess Elizabeth’s beauty, just as “the beautiful
girl” is starting to slip away from her: “Ah, but she must not go! Miss
Kilman could not let her go! This youth, that was so beautiful, this girl,
whom she genuinely loved! Her large hand opened and shut on the
table” (128). Again, on the next page, “the great hand opened and shut,”
in a mute sign of her failing grasp for control (129). The theme has
already emerged in almost baroque fashion in the narrator’s allegorical
description of “Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William [Bradshaw]’s
goddess” (97). She represents his practice of imposing an abstract
model—“rest, rest, rest; a long rest in bed”—on the concrete, individual
lives of his patients (94). Like Holmes, his response to Septimus’ visions
is to try to domesticate them: “Holmes and Bradshaw were on him!”
(144). Toward the end of the novel, Clarissa rightly senses that this
response to Septimus’ startling moments of vision is a “forcing” of the
“soul” (180). Faced with his powerful, beautiful, experiences, they prefer
to box the phenomena up for safety’s sake, thus exemplifying the prob-
lematic response to life’s revelations.19
On the other hand, Woolf also presents three aspects of a more fitting
response to the revelatory particular: love, recognition of dignity, and
reciprocal generosity. The first of these comes up again and again in the
novel—indeed, Mrs. Dalloway could be said to be fundamentally about
love20—though in the present context, we might limit discussion largely
to the love that responds to experiences of the moment.21 We see this
kind of response in Doris Kilman at the Army and Navy Stores, when the
beautiful girl “whom she genuinely loved” is leaving: here, Kilman reacts
affirmatively to the beauty of the moment, yet immediately squelches it
in a grasp for control (128). In Clarissa, whatever her foibles, Woolf
presents a more completely loving response to the revelatory particular.
On her opening walk in Westminster, she responds to all the individual
phenomena around her in this affirmative way: “Heaven only knows why
one loves it so”—this locus of beautiful experience, “this moment of
19
The human urge to dominate the phenomena arises again and again in Woolf’s novel, for
example in the recurrent echoing of clocks, whose metallic rings of sound seek to limit and
control the temporal space of the day: “The leaden circles dissolved in the air” (2005, 47).
20
On love in Mrs. Dalloway, see Blanche Gelfant (1966).
21
This means putting aside, for example, the repeated questions Peter and Clarissa ask
themselves about “being in love” (e.g. 2005, 11, 34, 43–45, 74, 170, 187), and the florid,
almost allegorical dreams Peter and Septimus have about love (78–80, 144).
June” (4). In Clarissa’s acts of love, her affection leads her out, not to
grasp, but into wonder at that which is beyond herself: “what she loved
was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab” (9). In the
florist’s shop, it is the flowers and every other little thing to which she
responds: “how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out,
over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses” (13). When she loves,
she is drawn out of herself to affirm the goodness, the beauty, of the
other. It is the same love Richard Dalloway feels for Clarissa and expresses
by action, though he cannot enunciate it (not in so many words). It is
the same love Peter Walsh feels for Clarissa herself (though he hesitates
to admit it). It is the “ecstasy” he experiences at the famous closing of
the novel, a momentary standing outside himself (ek-stasis) in apprecia-
tion of the being of the other: “For there she was” (190).
If the first aspect of an appropriate response to the moment is love, then
the second is what we might call recognition, or letting-be. While this
seems to be a moral response to beauty at the heart of Mrs. Dalloway, it is
not nearly so common as that less difficult response: loving. In the novel,
we see many who love or appreciate the flame-like beauty of the other, but
very few indeed who consciously decide to let the other be herself, him-
self, itself, foregoing all efforts at control and rationalization. Indeed, it is
primarily Clarissa herself who models this response to the moment; in the
case of most others, we see either a thorough refusal to recognize the
other (Kilman, Holmes, Bradshaw), or the desire to be recognized oneself
(Septimus, Rezia). By contrast, Clarissa appears determined from the start
to let each thing be itself, each person him or herself: loving the “divine
vitality” she finds in each person, she determines not to “say of any one in
the world that they were this or were that” (7, 8). That is, because she
loves, she wants to let each person be, recognizing the other’s freedom in
the moment, rather than imposing her own model, her own determina-
tions (“this” or “that”). This is why she responds so strongly to Miss
Kilman’s efforts to “convert” her daughter, and Bradshaw’s “forcing” of
Septimus’ soul (123, 180): “Had she ever tried to convert any one herself?
Did she not wish everybody merely to be themselves?” The old lady next
door provides the best example of Clarissa’s practice: “Let her climb
upstairs if she wanted to; let her stop; then let her…disappear again into
the background” (123). To love the old woman well is to recognize her
dignity and let her be in charge of her own life; to love Septimus the same
way, as Clarissa does late in the novel, is to allow him the freedom Holmes
and Bradshaw have tried to forbid: the freedom to live out of his own
104 D. LINDLEY
“centre,” his own “soul” (180). When “the old lady [stares] straight at
her” across the way, it forms almost an icon of the kind of love Woolf
prizes, other facing other appreciatively, each letting be (181). Again,
Peter’s final “there she was” closes the novel with a simple recognition of
Clarissa’s dignity, her beautiful freedom (190).
If love and recognition are two aspects of a good response to the
moment, the third and most distinctive, as we also saw in Hopkins, is
reciprocal generosity. In response to the overwhelming munificence and
gratuity of the world at any one point in time, Clarissa and others make
corresponding gifts of their own, crowning the beauty of the moment
with an affectionate return of generosity. Rezia’s hats are one smaller
example of this kind of reciprocation: she responds to the experience of
others with her own (literally) crowning gifts. But the practice, like that of
letting-be, is much more associated with Clarissa than anyone else in the
novel. From the start, she responds to the gift of life with “an absurd and
faithful passion,” wanting “to kindle and illuminate” just as she sees the
world doing: she will “give her party” (5). “Give” is the right word, for
the party, toward which the whole plot of the book moves, is precisely her
gift. The novel could be said to consist of two movements: the world’s gift
(a variegated set of beautiful moments), and Clarissa’s corresponding gift
(the party). “One must pay back,” she thinks in the hall of her house,
“from this secret deposit of exquisite moments” (29). They have been
given; she will give in return. Key to this gift she makes is the action of
gathering, drawing together, assembling: “plunging into the very heart of
the moment,” she collects “the whole of her at one point,” and works to
bring together all necessary people “for the party. All was for the party”
(36, 37). Peter appreciates Clarissa’s ability to draw others together when
he thinks of her “making a world of her own wherever she happened to
be”: she gathers and re-presents life, giving it a fresh unity, making her
“drawing-room a sort of meeting place; she had a genius for it” (75).
Ultimately, she does it out of love for the beauty of life—“‘that’s what I do
it for,’ she said”—making “an offering” of her own to give back (118). In
an important sense, she realizes, the party is “for no reason whatever,”
unnecessary, gratuitous, and yet she asks herself why she does it: “it was an
offering, to combine, to create; but to whom?” (119). It is at this point
that Clarissa reaches the dramatic center of the novel’s spirituality: she has
received a gift that seems at once divine and personal, and is led to make
her own gift, atheist that she is, in response. At the luminous heart of Mrs.
Dalloway rests a shared life of love, a repeated exchange of gracious gifts,
a unity that does not violate individuality. For Virginia Woolf, the best way
to respond to the revelatory particular is with a creative gift of self.
When she read Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1919, this two-part, circular
structure of particular experience and loving response must have been part
of what Virginia Woolf prized, for the same structure emerges in her nov-
els, and Mrs. Dalloway in particular. In both authors, the aesthetic experi-
ence of this or that spot in time assumes the kind of urgency and value
given it by Hopkins’ old tutor, Walter Pater: “Every moment some form
grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer
than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement
is irresistibly real and attractive to us,—for that moment only” (1980,
188). At the same time, both Woolf and Hopkins find in those individual
moments a source of divine transcendence beyond what Pater was com-
fortable with.22 What is more, they both dramatize the felt necessity of
responding to the original gift with a gift of one’s own, an offering, a song
that brings together the experience and crowns it with fresh beauty. Thus,
we see in Virginia Woolf the urge not simply to appreciate beauty, but to
spiritualize it. It must be more than mere aesthetic sensation—a gift, a
bestowing from beyond, and deserving one’s own bestowing in return. In
tracing out her own aesthetics of love and mutual self-gift, something
similar to what she saw in Hopkins, Woolf draws more on a distinctively
Christian theology of creation than she might herself have imagined.
Certainly, Woolf’s conception of the divine is more impersonal than
Hopkins’, without any clear connection to Jesus of Nazareth. Even so, the
structure of her vision of human life places her within a constellation of
theological ideas evolved with reference to Christ: most centrally, she
implies something like Hopkins’ view of God’s “Great Sacrifice” as an
unmerited gift from a transcendent power beyond us, a gift that reveals
the giver, especially in its humblest iterations. It is a gift meant to draw its
recipients into a relationship of love and reciprocity, both with other crea-
tures and with their Creator. While excluding any presence of the Christian
God, she dramatizes revelation in distinctively Christian ways. By finding
this divinity in the smallest things of life, Virginia Woolf comes close
indeed to the paradox of the Incarnation, if not to Bethlehem itself.
22
Pater, like Woolf’s father Leslie Stephen, had given up his childhood faith and was thus
self-consciously agnostic (Donoghue 1994, 95–97), while Woolf herself, raised without reli-
gion, was able to appreciate its associated phenomena more disinterestedly (Gaipa 2003,
2–3). Like Hopkins, she saw a place for the kind of reverie often attached to profound reli-
gious experience.
106 D. LINDLEY
Works Cited
Balthasar, Hans Urs von. 1986. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics:
Volume III: Studies in the Theological Style: Lay Styles, Trans. Andrew Louth
et al., ed. John Riches. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
Beer, John. 1993. Romantic Influences: Contemporary—Victorian—Modern.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bergson, Henri. 2001. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness. Trans. F.L. Pogson. New York: Dover.
Donoghue, Denis. 1994. The Oxford of Pater, Hopkins, and Wilde. In
Rediscovering Oscar Wilde, ed. C. George Sandulescu, 94–115. Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Ellis, Steve. 2007. Virginia Woolf and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Flint, Kate. 2010. Virginia Woolf and Victorian Aesthetics. In The Edinburgh
Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed. Maggie Humm, 19–34.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Gaipa, Mark. 2003. An Agnostic Daughter’s Apology: Materialism, Spiritualism,
and Ancestry in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Journal of Modern Literature. 26
(2): 1–41.
Gelfant, Blanche. 1966. Love and Conversion in Mrs. Dalloway. Criticism 8
(3): 229–245.
Gillies, Mary Anne. 1996. Henri Bergson and British Modernism. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Groover, Kristina K. 2011. Enacting the Sacred in Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf
Miscellany 80: 11–13.
Higgins, Lesley. 1991. Essaying ‘W.H. Pater Esq.’: New Perspectives on the
Tutor/Student Relationship Between Pater and Hopkins. In Pater in the 1990s,
ed. Laurel Brake and Ian Small, 77–94. Greensboro: ELT Press.
Hoff, Molly. 1999. The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs. Dalloway. Twentieth
Century Literature 45 (2): 186–209.
Hölderlin, Friedrich. 2008. Hyperion. Trans. Ross Benjamin. New York:
Archipelago.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. 1918. In The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed.
Robert Bridges. London: Humphrey Milford.
———. 2002a. Creation and Redemption, the Great Sacrifice. In The Major
Works, ed. Catherine Phillips, 287–290. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2002b. Notes on the Spiritual Exercises. In The Major Works, ed. Catherine
Phillips, 281–282. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2002c. The Principle or Foundation. In The Major Works, ed. Catherine
Phillips, 290–292. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2013. Correspondence, ed. R.K.R. Thornton and Catherine Phillips, vol. 2.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.
King, Julia, and Laila Miletic-Vejzovic, eds. 2003. The Library of Leonard and
Virginia Woolf: A Short-Title Catalog. Pullman: Washington State
University Press.
Knight, Christopher J. 2007. ‘The God of Love Is Full of Tricks’: Virginia Woolf’s
Vexed Relation to the Tradition of Christianity. Religion & Literature 39
(1): 27–46.
Pater, Walter. 1980. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed.
Donald L. Hill. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Paul, Janis. 1987. The Victorian Heritage of Virginia Woolf: The External World in
Her Novels. Norman: Pilgrim Books.
Paulsell, Stephanie. 2017. Family Resemblances: Religion Around Virginia Woolf.
In Cultural Icons and Cultural Leadership, ed. Peter Iver Kaufman and Kristin
M.S. Bezio, 81–102. Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Phillips, Catherine. 2002. Note on the Text. In Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major
Works, ed. Catherine Phillips, xxxix–xxlii. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Woolf, Virginia. (1925) 2005. Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott.
New York: Harcourt.
Trautmann, vol. 6. New York: Harcourt.
———. 1977–1984. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, vol. 5.
New York: Harcourt.
———. 1986–2011. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie and
Stuart N. Clarke, vol. 6. London: Hogarth Press.
CHAPTER 7
“Perpetual Departure”: Sacred Space

and Urban Pilgrimage in Woolf’s Essays
Elizabeth Anderson
Introduction
Studies of sacred space tend to emphasise the importance of locatedness
over against mobility, yet in Virginia Woolf’s writings on the city, we see
connections made between moving through space and consideration of
particular places.1 In this chapter, I explore how pilgrimage as sacred jour-
neying contributes to the formation and perception of sacred space in two
of Woolf’s urban essays: ‘The London Scene: IV Abbeys and Cathedrals’
(1932) and ‘Street Haunting’ (1927). Woolf’s writing on sacred buildings
and other places blurs boundaries between inside and outside, life and
death, stasis and movement. Pilgrimage is usually understood in religious
terms as set apart from ordinary life, even otherworldly, but in Woolf’s
work pilgrimage is brought into everyday life.2 Pilgrimage becomes a
mode of simultaneously inscribing the ordinary and the extraordinary in
material encounters that invite connection while preserving difference.
See the introduction to Philip Sheldrake’s The Spiritual City (2014).

1
See Maddrell et al. (2015, 3) and Stump (2008, 335).

2
E. Anderson (*)
University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

110 E. ANDERSON
Michel de Certeau’s studies of both everyday urban life and mysticism are
helpful in developing an understanding of everyday spirituality. His work
on everyday urban life emphasises the strange and uncanny city but one
that is also marked by repetition and familiarity. He notes a distinction
between the top-down strategies that govern urban space and the tactics
of individuals that subvert these codes (de Certeau 1992, 93). His empha-
sis on practice resonates with Deborah Parsons’ contention that writers do
not merely describe places, but also contribute to the formation of space:
‘the urban writer is not only a figure within a city; he/she is also the pro-
ducer of a city…The writer adds other maps to the city atlas; those of
social interaction but also of myth, memory, fantasy, and desire’ (2000, 1).
In much modernist writing, we see a mode of spiritual exploration that
may be unmoored from questions of belief in doctrines, commitment to
religious institutions and even theism: ‘[Modernist writers] understand
the experience of the sacred as one of being connected to something larger
than the self and consequently construct spirituality as an ethical mode of
understanding the place of the individual in the universe’ (Peat 2011, 2).
This resonates with Quaker Parker Palmer’s definition of spirituality as
‘the diverse ways we answer the heart’s longing to be connected with the
largeness of life’ (qtd. in Sandercock and Senbel 2011, 88). Peat’s work is
significant for my project as she directly addresses the role of pilgrimage in
modernist literature. Her work can be situated in the growing area of
modernist studies that chart the myriad engagements of modernist writers
with spirituality and religion.3 Moreover, she contributes to the wider
intellectual project of challenging the secularism thesis.4 Peat confines her
discussion to fiction, but I hope to show here how the essay is also an apt
form for the exploration of sacred travelling. She is more focused on
movement, but I wish to explore the connection between movement and
space. De Certeau is a helpful conversation partner as he understands the
transition into modernity as one that situates mysticism as a kind of wan-
3
I do not have the space here to review the literature on modernist spirituality more
broadly, but a non-exhaustive list would include the following: Hobson (2011), Lewis
(2010), Materer (1995), Surette (1994), Sword (2002) and Vetter (2010).
4
A growing number of scholars contend that not only is secularism as a growing trajectory
across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries an inadequate model for the diversity of reli-
gious and spiritual experience in global cultures but also that a secular/sacred binary tends
to occlude the ways in which secularity often operates in frameworks inherited from religion
(Asad 2003; Cady and Fessenden 2013; Connelly 1999).
7 “PERPETUAL DEPARTURE”: SACRED SPACE AND URBAN PILGRIMAGE… 111
dering, a ‘perpetual departure’. The modern mystic is always in search of

an ‘elsewhere’ as the traditional telos of pilgrimage is reconfigured (de
Certeau 1992, 299). Woolf’s writing shows an engagement with this
mode of sacred journey that is not melancholic but joyful in its affirmation
of the sacred as situated within the everyday, rather than an other-
worldly beyond.
Sacred Space
‘Space’ and ‘place’ are contested terms for geographers and definitional
struggles spill over into related disciplines as the spatial turn across the
humanities gathers momentum. Andrew Thacker summarises the posi-
tion: ‘To a number of geographical theorists space indicates a sense of
movement, of history, of becoming, while place is often thought to imply
a static sense of location, of being, or of dwelling’ (2009, 13).5 A compli-
cating issue in the definition of space and place is what is meant by ‘abstrac-
tion’; for some scholars this means a dangerous universalism, a flight from
the material and a commitment to (problematic) grand narratives, for oth-
ers it means the recognition of imagination, story-telling and social histo-
ries as crucial to understanding the (built and natural) environment.6 It
can be helpful to consider ‘spaces’ as referring to kinds or categories of
environments while places refer to particular locales; that is, ‘domestic
space’ may indicate a range of lived in, intimate interiors, while my house
has a particular geographical location and specific material details, affective
resonances and histories. For this chapter, I rely on de Certeau’s sense of
space as ‘practiced place’, while also being mindful of the warnings of
Doreen Massey and others about the problems of maintaining sharp dis-
tinctions between the place and space and the assumptions that go with
5
Michel de Certeau suggests that place ‘implies…stability’ while space is ‘actuated by the
ensemble of movements deployed within it’, while Yi-fu Tuan defines place as ‘a focus of
value, of nurture and support’ (de Certeau 1988, 117; Tuan 1977, 29). Doreen Massey
notes that for many geographers, space and place are associated with hierarchical dualisms,
with the ‘general, universal, theoretical/abstract’ associated with space and ‘[b]eing…local,
specific, concrete, descriptive’ tied to place (2005, 9).
6
Even this distinction can be seen as problematic as on the one hand, human beings are
themselves natural and therefore one can see our creations as part of the natural world and,
on the other, human endeavours have so marked the non-human environment that the idea
of untouched nature is fast becoming anachronistic. It is important to remember how Woolf
frequently portrays the natural and the built environment as enmeshed.
112 E. ANDERSON
them (de Certeau 1988, 117).7 I also draw on bell hooks’ formulation,
which privileges the environment itself as communicative: ‘Spaces can tell
stories and unfold histories’ (1990, 152). In modernity, the distinctions
between space and place erode and much modernist writing ‘complicate[s]
any sharp and easy division between a conservative sense of place and a
revolutionary sense of space’ (Thacker 2009, 13). Even James Clifford,
whose work emphasises how movement is constitutive of culture, rather
than supplemental, does not completely shun notions of dwelling. He
formulates the capacious ‘traveling-in-dwelling’ and ‘dwelling-in-traveling’
which emphasises the porosity of these terms (1997, 3, 36).8
Scholars of religion differ over how to define sacred space. Those fol-
lowing Mircea Eliade see sacred space as marking an ‘irruption of the
sacred into the world’ while those following Durkheim see sacred space as
generated by human practices of creating meaningful space (Wenell 2007,
4).9 The concept of ritual practices creating sacred space is important for
my reading of Woolf, but I do have some concerns with this body of litera-
ture. One is that the non-human world appears to recede in analysis of
space that emphasises human action (by both geographers and religious
studies scholars). Belden C. Lane articulates this discomfort when he
notes that Indigenous understandings of nature as actively participating in
spiritual encounters between humans and places often fail to find a place
in scholarly discourse ([1988] 2001, 41).10 Manual A. Vásquez goes some
way towards addressing my concerns in his attempt to unite the two
7
Massey also urges the departure from ossified opposition between space and place, sug-
gesting that we consider space as ‘the product of interrelations; as constituted through inter-
actions’ (2005, 9).
8
The postcolonial theologian Wonhee Anne Joh draws upon Clifford as well as Korean
American theologian Sang Hyun Lee, to argue that the metaphor of ‘sacred journey…
embodies both the remembering of our past roots and the forging of new routes’ for minor-
ity immigrant communities (2006, 9). Theologians like Joh and Lee are working to inter-
rogate and transform the painful aspects of liminality. The kind of urban pilgrimage
experienced by Woolf’s privileged narrator is far removed from the pain and precarity of
many immigrant experiences but we do see the potential for coalition with the marginalised
in her exploration of the city.
9
In turn, Eliade draws upon Rudolf Otto’s understanding of the sacred as the numinous
or ‘wholly other’ (Otto qtd. in Vásquez 2011, 265). Belden C. Lane characterises these two
approaches as ‘ontological’ and ‘cultural’, while Chidester and Linenthal name them as ‘sub-
stantial’ and ‘situational’ (Lane [1988] 2001, 43; Chidester and Linenthal 1995, 6).
10
For more on indigenous worldviews and sacred space, see Gunn Allen (1986, 119–26),
Kimmerer (2013, 17, 35–37) and Hogan (2015).
approaches outlined above. While Vásquez critiques Eliade’s universalism

and neglect of historicity and practice, he finds his spatialising and non-
reductive thinking valuable (2011, 269). I find Vásquez helpful in moving
towards an understanding of sacred space that takes greater account of the
material realities and agencies of particular places and that recognises the
mystery that breathes within our interpretations.
Pilgrimage
Pilgrimage—a journey to and from a designated sacred place as an act of
penance, thanksgiving or petition—has a long history in Christian practice,
as in many religions across the globe.11 From the medieval period, the peni-
tential discourse declined in favour of an increased ‘emphasis on transfor-
mations in the self’ (Coleman and Eade 2004, 10). This corresponds with
the rise of spirituality as a largely interior affair; Pietism (generally associated
with Protestant denominations, but with Catholic counterparts as well)
‘emphasised the supreme religious significance of an inner, experiential
encounter with the divine leading to personal transformation’ (Maddrell
et al. 2015, 39). In turn, this emphasis on self-transformation opens pil-
grimage to secular co-option and in both secular and sacred pilgrimages, a
greater emphasis on the journey rather than the end-point.12 The term
‘pilgrim’ derives from the Latin peregrinus which means ‘a wanderer, a trav-
eller from foreign parts’ (Edwards 2005, 6).13 This gives us the powerful
metaphor of pilgrim as wanderer, exile or foreigner.14 The metaphor of
11
Pilgrimage is a capacious term that takes in a wide range of religious (and irreligious)
practices around the world. Because of the historic dominance of Christianity in the West and
Woolf’s location in a predominantly Christian country, the literature on pilgrimage that I
draw upon largely (though not exclusively) concerns Christian pilgrimage. But I note that
pilgrimage is of interest to scholars of comparative religion because of its many and diverse
global manifestations and furthermore, the practices, meanings and effects of pilgrimage in
different traditions may complicate or contradict the interpretations given here.
12
Woolf explored the topic of secular literary pilgrimages in several essays, including
‘London Revisited’ and ‘The London Scene: III Great Men’s Houses’, but I do not have
space to consider this corollary to sacred pilgrimage here.
13
The term is found in Latin Vulgate in the book of Hebrews, which reads persons from
the Hebrew Bible, such as Abraham, as emblematic of the Jewish search for the Promised
Land. These seekers are in turn ‘fused with the alienation from worldly life felt by the new
Christian Church’ (Edwards 2005, 7).
14
As Maren Tova Linett points out, this biblical interpretation also encodes the problem-
atic ideology of supersessionism (in which Judaism is seen as a temporary stage along a spiri-
tual trajectory towards Christianity) in the motif of pilgrimage (2007, 200n27).
114 E. ANDERSON
pilgrimage is all too easily aligned with imperialist literature in which the
sacred journey can become a motif that mystifies the progression from
exploration to domination and exploitation, ‘ignoring the historical reality
that one person’s Promised Land is often already another’s homeland’
(Peat 2011, 10). However, the trope of pilgrim as wanderer also enables
departure from or subversion of institutional norms and dominant doc-
trines. Pilgrimage is a capacious practice; just as it can be used in secular
terms, even religious pilgrimages can expand include those ‘who are on the
margins or outside religious communities’ (Maddrell et al. 2015, 38).
Pilgrimage may have an awkward relationship with institutional religion. It
is often motivated by popular devotional movements, such as, those of
Lourdes or Guadalupe. Clifford notes that the term is less ‘class- and gen-
der-biased’ than the broader term ‘travel’ (1997, 39). In modernity, the
rise of secular pilgrimages highlights the intersection between pilgrimage
and tourism, yet religious studies scholars remind us that there has always
been a (sometimes uneasy) connection between pilgrimage and tourism.15
Souvenirs, guides and, of course, the experiences of leisure and pleasure
blur the boundaries between these two modes of travel.
Pilgrimage has always been understood to consist of both a spiritual
and material practice, thus engaging the imagination and attracting liter-
ary representation (Maddrell et al. 2015, 36). Dante’s journey through
Hell, Purgatory and the Heavenly spheres engages a pattern of a pilgrim-
age as a spiritual journey towards the otherworldly beyond.16 This is not
the material practice of travel to and return from an earthly holy place, but
a singular trajectory. A similar pattern is found in Paul Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress (1678). For centuries, this work was the most common devo-
tional book aside from the Bible in the Anglophone world; it profoundly
influenced both the course of English literature and the religious imagina-
tion in the English-speaking world in its offering of pilgrimage as a meta-
phor for the spiritual life (Maddrell et al. 2015, 32–33).17 Philip Edwards
15
See the oft-quoted phrase, ‘a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist’ (Turner
and Turner 1978, 20). For more on secular pilgrimage, see Reader (1993).
16
It should be noted that Dante’s journey is thoroughly imbricated in the politics of its
day.
17
Even a religious text like Bunyan’s had implications for secular developments. As well as
contributing to the formation of emerging Protestantism, Bunyan’s text also ‘spoke to a
culture “in motion” which was on the verge of trading and technical innovations and would
increasingly come to value notions of disciplined personal development and intellectual
argues that pilgrimage literature’s concern with the possibilities and uncer-
tainties of pilgrimage has led to its endurance and permutations across
time as patterns of religious practice and belief have changed (2005, 4).
Alexandra Peat suggests that in modernist literature, the ambivalence of
sacred journeying meets more mundane material travels. Turning to the
work of Virginia Woolf more specifically, urban wanderings in The Years
and Mrs. Dalloway have been read as pilgrimages (Peat 2011, 161–68;
Groover 2008). In this chapter, I have chosen to focus on Woolf’s essays,
partly because their significance for our understanding of everyday spiritu-
ality in Woolf remains unexplored, but also because the essay form (par-
ticularly as practised by Woolf) lends itself to the ‘purposeful wandering’
at stake here.18
Sacred Space in ‘Abbeys and Cathedrals’

I turn now to the sacred places Woolf details in ‘The London Scene: IV
Abbeys and Cathedrals’, one of a series of essays on the city published in
Good Housekeeping in late 1931 and 1932. Most readings of this series
have focused on the other essays and what they suggest about Woolf’s
understanding of capitalist consumption, politics, public space and aes-
thetics.19 However, ‘Abbeys and Cathedrals’ is important for understand-
ing Woolf’s engagement with institutional Christianity and her more
heterodox presentation of sacred space as various, social, lively and mobile.
Across her work, Woolf identifies how ecclesiastic, political and social
power are entwined and how St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey contrib-
uted to the formation and regulation of such power. In her ground-
breaking study, Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture (2018), Jane de Gay
notes how tourism can disrupt the hegemony of ecclesiastical power as
tourists resist the programme of worship with its hierarchical ordering of
space and interact with the building on their own terms (2018, 127–28).
De Gay argues that in ‘Abbeys and Cathedrals’, Woolf ‘provides an
exploration’ (Maddrell et al. 2015, 37). The act of reading devotional texts can be depicted
as a pilgrimage itself. Perhaps the most well-known example would be the habit of the March
girls in Little Women of both reading and acting out Pilgrim’s Progress and in turn reading
their lives and intentions by its metaphors; thus Alcott implicitly invites her readers into a
pilgrimage alongside her characters.
18
See Tracey Seeley’s compelling essay on ‘Street Haunting’ for an analysis of the ‘digres-
sive’ or wandering form of Woolf’s essays: (2013, 150–59).
19
See Caughie (1989), McVicker (2003, 2004), Reynier (2018) and Sarker (2001).
116 E. ANDERSON
alternative visitors’ guide that subtly and cleverly undercuts the power and
significance of Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral in a way that is
satirical while making the buildings accessible to the uninitiated’ (132).
Woolf describes St Paul’s as ‘august in the extreme; but not in the least
mysterious’ ([1927] 1993, 123). The sanctuary is tied to civic life and
thus limited: ‘death and the corruption of death are forbidden to enter.
Here civic virtue and civic greatness are ensconced securely’ (124). Unlike
the august and solemn space of St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey is ‘narrow
and pointed, worn, restless and animated’ (124). Like St Paul’s, the Abbey
eschews death, but this is because of the vibrancy of the restless ghosts that
haunt it: ‘Here are the dead poets, still musing, still pondering, still ques-
tioning the meaning of existence’ (125). The lives of monarchs, statesmen
and poets are absorbed and echoed by the building: ‘Not an inch of its
walls but speaks and claims and illustrates’ (125). Their passion wears away
at stone: ‘Even the stone of the old columns seems rubbed and chafed by
the intensity of the life that has been fretting it all these centuries’ (124).
While Woolf’s essay focuses on the people memorialised in the churches
and contemporary engagement with the buildings which give a social
reading of space, it is important to notice how she draws attention to the
material particularity of the building itself. Westminster Abbey, like many
of Woolf’s houses, is alive: ‘Lights and shadows are changing and conflict-
ing every moment. Blue, gold and violet pass, dappling, quickening, fad-
ing. The grey stone, ancient as it is, changes like a live thing under the
incessant ripple of changing light’ (125). Woolf compares both sacred
buildings to trees (although the metaphor is more emphatic in reference
to Westminster Abbey) and this suggests that they ‘become living organ-
isms’ (de Gay 2018, 137). This uncanny, changeable animism indicates
the mysterious nature of the building as containing a kind of being that
escapes both the strategies of ecclesiastical authority and the tactics of the
tourist. The Abbey’s life indicates a mode of being (divine or otherwise)
that cannot be explained or contained.
Woolf notes that even the smaller city churches are enmeshed in the
‘full tide and race of human life’ and, therefore, the only ‘peaceful places’
in the city are to be found in outdoor garden cemeteries ([1932] 1993,
125–26). De Gay notes that Woolf seeks to craft a sacred space that
includes and nurtures those who are excluded from ecclesiastical institu-
tions (and the social and political power that comes with them): women,
children and the poor (2018, 139): ‘Here mothers and nursemaids gossip;
children play; and the old beggar, after eating his dinner from a paper bag,
scatters crumbs to the sparrows. These garden graveyards are the most
peaceful of our London sanctuaries and their dead the quietest’ (Woolf
[1932] 1993, 126). In the graveyard, Woolf’s emphasis is still on life as
the dead are animated, not in an otherworldly afterlife but in the grass and
bulbs that rise in the spring: ‘For here the dead sleep in peace.…When the
gardener plants his bulbs or sows his grass they flower again’ (126).
Woolf’s emphasis on the continuity between human life and death and
plant life underlines the point made by scholars that Woolf’s London is
astonishingly green (Lee 1997, 421; Penner 2016, 1–2; Scott 2012, 4–5).
This continuity gestures towards an understanding of the sacred that
anticipates both the concerns of post-humanists and eco-theology in pos-
iting a sacred connection between human and other-than-human life. For
all St Paul’s expansiveness and Westminster Abbey’s liveliness, it is the
humbler cemetery that holds a fuller sense of the sacredness of all life and
its continuation in cycles of death and renewal. The erosion of boundaries
between sacred and secular—one that frets at the definition of ‘sacred’ as
something apart from ‘ordinary’ life—is evident in the subversion of
orthodox use of sacred buildings and in the garden graveyards used for all
manner of leisure activities that also aid spiritual repose and nourishment.
Although ‘Abbeys and Cathedrals’ engages with particular places, it is
also situated in the discourse of journeys. As part of the ‘London Scene’
series, the description of these sacred sites is embedded in a wider dis-
course on the city of London. Aside from the placement of the essay in the
series, the connection with London is evident from the opening sentences
that refer to St Paul’s as dominating London and to author and reader as
urban travellers—‘as we approach’—and the essay’s close, as the narrator
moves through the city looking for a space in which the dead rest in peace
(122). The series is clearly aligned with tourist literature, but the concept
of travelling the city and experiencing its sacred spaces also correlates to
pilgrimage. Abbeys and cathedrals were often end-points for pilgrimages,
particularly if they housed relics of a saint, but the churches themselves
could be seen as inviting a pilgrimage within their walls. As the more ardu-
ous pilgrimages to Jerusalem or Rome were impractical for many, localised
pilgrimages within the walls of a single building, or through labyrinths
built into floors, were seen as a valid substitution for longer transnational
journeys. The movement through the city and around the buildings dis-
cernible in ‘Abbeys and Cathedrals’ is more evident in Woolf’s earlier
essay, ‘Street Haunting’, which invites further exploration of the mobility
of sacred space and how a secular journey can be read as urban pilgrimage.
118 E. ANDERSON
Urban Pilgrimage in ‘Street Haunting’

‘Street Haunting’ recounts the rambling walk and internal musings of the
narrator as she entertains ‘the greatest pleasure of town life in winter—
rambling the streets of London’ (Woolf [1927] 1993, 70).20 The title
gestures both to the association of women in public with prostitution
(‘street walkers’) and the ghostliness of the twilight hour when ‘[w]e are
no longer quite ourselves’ (70).21 While the essay appears to chart an
entirely secular journey, Woolf’s depiction of purposeful wandering, the
divestment of self and the compelling nature of the pencil touches on
many tropes of pilgrimage.
‘Street Haunting’ is often discussed in terms of flânerie, the epitome of
nineteenth-century urban wandering tied to the rise of consumer capital-
ism and consequent spectacle, and while I do not dispute these readings,
I do not think they entirely account for the spiritual resonance of Woolf’s
essay (Bowlby 1997, 204–19; Hankins 2000, 17–19; Parsons 2000,
200).22 I would like to pick up on a shift that Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega
notes in her reading of Black female flânerie in Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem
‘In the Mecca’ in which the role of ‘black flâneuse as witness’ emerges
(Ortega 2007, 145). This is not to suggest that Woolf’s essay charts the
same degree of violence, racial oppression and calls for justice evident in
20
The essay was first published in the Yale Review in 1927, then as a limited edition pam-
phlet by the Westgate Press, San Francisco in 1930, then collected in The Death of the Moth
(1942) and The Crowded Dance of Modern Life (1993).
21
The narrator is not explicitly marked as female, yet the alignment of the narrator’s
delight in walking in London with Woolf’s own provides a strong temptation to read the
narrator as Woolf herself. In addition, the narrator’s choice of pearls in the Oxford Street
section aligns her with femininity. The feminine nature of the narrator is a critical convention
(Hankins 2000, 19; Parsons 2000, 202). Feminist scholars have long critiqued how women
in public may be deemed publicly available to the male gaze, appropriation and violence and
how this experience is exacerbated by race and class oppression.
22
The flâneur is a figure popularised by Walter Benjamin in his writing on the nineteenth-
century French poet Charles Baudelaire. For Benjamin, the flâneur wanders the city, observing
the spectacle and display and eventually transforming his observations into art. Feminist schol-
ars have debated to what extent women can participate in flânerie. Parsons summarises the
argument neatly, pointing out that critics such as Janet Wolff and Griselda Pollock argue that a
flâneuse, or female flâneur, is impossible because women do not have the same freedom to walk
and gaze in urban space without being subject to objectification, while others such as Rachel
Bowlby and Judith Walkowitz detail women’s presence and mobility in the modern city.
Parsons points out that ‘the concept of the flâneur itself contains gender ambiguities that sug-
gest the figure to be a site for the contestation of male authority rather than the epitome of it’
(2000, 4–7). See also Bowlby (1992, 6–30), Walkowitz (1992) and Wolff (1985).
Brooks’ work, but that within the light-hearted tone of Woolf’s essay
there are ethical encounters with disabled and destitute fellow ‘anony-
mous trampers’ and a concern with affect that indicates a journey with
more heft than flânerie ([1927] 1993, 70). Flânerie is usually seen as aim-
less, but while there is an element of drift to Woolf’s London adventure,
there is also purpose to the wanderings. The ostensible goal of the walk is
a stationer’s shop to procure a pencil, however, the narrator admits readily
that this is an excuse for the more purposeful aim of ‘shed[ing] the self our
friends know us by’ and tasting the ‘champagne brightness’ of winter’s air
(70). We cannot discount the covering aim entirely as it is deemed neces-
sary for the all-important departure from home. Woolf’s pilgrimage here
is one that does and does not have a goal—a paradox that will be mirrored
in other paradoxes as the essay unfolds.
In ‘Street Haunting’, the journey itself is the site of sacred encounter
and self-transformation. Alan Morinis identifies wandering as a type of
pilgrimage in which the goal is not predetermined: ‘we set out, hoping to
find the Other through the act of going forth’ (1992, 13). Modernist
wandering pilgrims are trying to find a way to ‘live in [the world]’
(Hemingway qtd. in Peat 2011, 97). For Woolf’s narrator, the essay form
itself allows exploration of ways of living, one in which wandering itself is
paramount. The wandering is performed physically in the city streets but
also mentally, in the narrator’s imaginings that drift and eddy as she goes,
and creatively, in the expansive essay form that holds together these myr-
iad levels of wandering. Tracy Seeley notes the numerous temporal and
geographic layers to Woolf’s essay: ‘I often think that to map “Street
Haunting” properly I’d have to create a model in more than three dimen-
sions…Fall through trap doors of “what if” and “seems” into marvellous
antechambers and rooms within rooms, each of them as invisible as a
thought and as solid as the physical world’ (2013, 151–52).
Earlier I offered a definition of sacred space as made by practices. This
process of crafting a kind of space draws me to the work of Michel de
Certeau, whose work on the practices that create space has been influential
across a wide range of disciplines from geography to religious studies to
literary studies. For de Certeau, walking is a tactic by which ‘ordinary
practitioners of the city’ subvert the planned and ordered city (1988, 93).
Thus space is formed through the intersection of individual experience
and bodily habits with the particular places of the city: named streets and
buildings, the character of neighbourhoods, etc. The ordinary act of walk-
ing through the city, then, gives access to the ‘metaphorical city’ which
120 E. ANDERSON
overlays the ‘planned and readable city’ with ‘poetic and mythic experi-
ence of space’ (93). Woolf brings ‘poetic and mythic’—the workings of
the visionary imagination—into contact with the material and political in
her urban wanderings.
Wandering the city also involves displacement, de Certeau argues that
being on the move means ‘to lack a place’, to be always absent from and
in search of, place (1988, 103). He invokes the significance of proper
names in a city and how the urban wanderer is collected by the name of
the city itself and the smaller (but still proper) names of streets or particu-
lar locations (i.e. Tavistock Square, the Strand and the Thames). This
sense of being absent and searching opens the wanderer to experiences of
alterity and encounter. The practice of walking, of moving towards the
other and being both absent (from a place) and present to the creation of
urban space draws out the alterity folded within the ordinary. Thus de
Certeau opens Woolf’s everyday walk to the sacred; ‘the everyday has a
certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper
limit, outlining itself against the visible’ (93). The sense of a depth of
strangeness allows the unknown and the holy into the interstices of urban
space; this resonates with the garden graveyards of ‘Abbeys and Cathedrals’,
where the contrast between the liveliness of children and the repose of the
dead gives the space a ‘certain strangeness’.
Another of Woolf’s paradoxes is how the city both is and is not home.
Alexandra Peat explores how narratives of journeys always address notions
of home, arguing that for some modernists ‘no matter how much or how
little we travel geographically, our emotional and spiritual ties to a sense of
home are always in the process of being imaginatively reconfigured’ (Peat
2011, 132). Urban pilgrimage is different from longer transnational jour-
neys. The understanding of pilgrimage as apart from ordinary life becomes
complicated when the journey is one that can be taken between tea and
dinner, between twilight and darkness. The narrator of ‘Street Haunting’ is
at home in the city; she wanders without being lost. However, the city is also
de-familiarised at several points in the essay and its contrast to home as
domestic interior is often highlighted: ‘But when the door shuts on us, all
that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house
themselves…is broken’ (Woolf [1927] 1993, 71). In a process of switching
which is disorienting to the reader, the essay explores the city as both famil-
iar and uncanny, as composed of ‘bright paraphernalia’ and ‘crevices and
crannies’ (72, 74). This uncanniness is perhaps more unsettling than if the
essay were set in a place where the narrator expected to be foreign.
In ‘Street Haunting’ boundaries between inside and outside are at

times emphasised and other times blurred, similar to the slippage between
the two in ‘Abbeys and Cathedrals’. At the essay’s beginning and end the
distinction between the domestic interior and the city streets is empha-
sised through an invocation of winter air and the changing nature of the
self, which is defined by objects and memory when within the home, but
less constrained when abroad. In the middle of the essay, these boundaries
are shown to be unstable in the examples of the boot and book shops,
which are enclosed spaces yet semi-public. The stationer’s shop towards
the essay’s close shows how different spaces can overlap, as the hidden
domestic space within the shop is indicated in the narrator’s imagination
by simple objects and actions: ‘She would get out her sewing; he would
read his newspaper; the canary would scatter them impartially with seed’
([1927] 1993, 80). The domestic space is then also made by practices:
sewing, reading and scattering seed.
As stated earlier, the purpose of many pilgrimages is an interior, spiri-
tual transformation of self. This transformation can be seen as sloughing
of an ‘old’ self in order to prepare for encounters that will usher a new self
into being. This divestment of self is evident in the beginning of Woolf’s
essay when the narrator leaves her home and with it the objects and mem-
ories that define her. In the city streets, ‘[t]he shell-like covering which
our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a
shape distinct from others, is broken’ (71). What is left after the loss of
‘the self our friends know us by’ is ‘a central oyster of perceptiveness, an
enormous eye’ (70–71).23 The self is not annihilated but sheds the con-
straints of personal history and associations to be more present to encoun-
ters that may enable transformation.
In one encounter, a dwarf woman tries on shoes with growing delight
and satisfaction, only to be deflated by their acquisition and her return to
the external streets. Kathryn Simpson reads this episode as Woolf exposing
the way capitalist marketing contributes to ‘processes of fragmentation
and fetishization’ of the female body (2010, 49). However, despite the
disappointment wrought by commodities the dwarf woman retains agency
as she transforms the perspective of the city: ‘she had called into being an
atmosphere which, as we followed her out into the street, seemed actually
23
Hankins argues that the images of anonymity and androgyny are problematic ‘for an
invisible cloak which would allow males and females to move equally freely in the streets is a
utopian fantasy’ (2000, 19).
122 E. ANDERSON
to create the humped, the twisted, the deformed’ (Woolf [1927] 1993,
73–74). Simpson reads Woolf’s repeated use of words like ‘deformity’ and
‘grotesque’ as exposing the grotesque disproportion of reality to the imag-
ined lack and desire created by marketing in the capitalist economy, while
simultaneously gesturing towards ‘connections across identities’ created
by the power of the woman’s anger which ‘disrupts the rhythm of com-
merce’ (49). While I sympathise with Simpson’s reading, I confess I find
the continued appellation of ‘grotesque’ to the dwarf woman’s move-
ments troubling; it is hard not to see Woolf’s word choices—‘hobbling,
grotesque dance’—as disgust for uneven movement, consigning the
woman to abjection. Yet in the unnamed woman’s dance, we can see fierce
defiance that transforms those around her: ‘all joined in the hobble and
tap of the dwarf’s dance’ ([1927] 1993, 74).24 The narrator’s act of wit-
ness may be limited but it is not insignificant; she sees the dwarf woman
and records her agency.
Her encounter with the dwarf woman changes how the narrator sees,
who she sees and in what terms she imagines relationships. When she
describes second-hand books as ‘homeless’, she associates the comradery
of texts, authors and readers with the disadvantaged folk she has encoun-
tered in the city.25 The narrator comes to sees the city not only as a place
of wonder and beauty but also dereliction and homelessness where the
city streets do not represent freedom but lack, where ‘a question is asked
which is never answered’ (74). Her privilege is evident, both in her able-
bodied freedom to move about the city and in her economic status that
secures a home to return to, her window shopping that avoids the entrap-
ment of ownership but also avoids ‘hunger-bitten…misery’ (74). The
narrator also comes to place a greater value in home by essay’s end. She
finds the objects that offered only constraint at the essay’s beginning now
offer valuable shelter: ‘as we approach our own doorstep again, it is com-
forting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and
24
For further exploration of how urban experience may be framed by disability, see Betcher
(2014, 26–49).
25
Phyllis Lassner and Mia Spiro read these encounters as alienating. The ‘bearded Jew,
wild, hunger-bitten, glaring out of his misery’ epitomises the ‘derelicts’ the narrator encoun-
ters and encodes what for Woolf was the ‘most eerie, dangerous aspect of writing: the peril
of becoming immersed in the retrograde foreign spaces of the self, the city, and the degener-
ate aspects of modern English civilization as a whole’. They go on to critique Woolf’s associa-
tion of Jews with urban squalor and contrast Woolf’s ‘imagined Jewish spaces’ with the real
places ‘where Jews lived, worked, and produced Jewish culture in London’ (2013, 59–60).
the self…sheltered and enclosed. Here again is the usual door; here the
chair turned as we left it and the china bowl and the brown ring on the
carpet’ (81). We may question if there has been any true transformation,
but I would answer that ‘immanence is no less fleeting than transcen-
dence’, true across religions but perhaps even more so in modernity’s
tentative connection to the sacred (Tweed 2006, 163). The brevity of
sacred encounter does not render it meaningless.
The narrator also encounters herself in her urban wanderings, both in
memories of the past and in imagined alternatives to the present. This brings
a contemplation of what it means to be a self, to have a soul: ‘Or is the true
self…something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the
rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed our-
selves?’ (Woolf [1927] 1993, 76). As she returns home, the narrator pon-
ders her connection to others, a connection that preserves difference,
underlining the inherent mystery of other people: ‘Into each of these lives
one could penetrate a little way.…One could become a washerwoman, a
publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be
than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those foot-
paths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the
forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?’ (81). Woolf meshes the
natural and the urban in a way that emphasises the different environments
within the city. She links human persons with animals and wilderness itself,
suggesting that vitality, mystery and wonder are interconnected.
The final connection I wish to draw between Woolf’s essay and more
traditional notions of pilgrimage relates to the pencil. Like much else in
‘Street Haunting’, the role of the pencil is paradoxical; its importance is
both asserted and denied. At the beginning, the narrator claims the pencil
is merely an excuse to conceal her deeper desire, which is to go walking in
London. However, the pencil’s importance cannot so easily be dismissed.
Its compelling nature in some ways is problematic, as it indicates the lack
of freedom women feel in walking the streets without purpose. But there
is also a residue of spiritual power that accrues to the pencil and it can be
seen as a relic, the orienting object of a pilgrimage.
Kathryn Simpson writes about purchase of the pencil as the culmina-
tion of the trajectory of Woolf’s essay as a journey towards the gift econ-
omy (2010, 52). Elsewhere she writes of the gift economy as ‘privileging
generosity, social bonds and intimacies’ (2008, 4).26 When the narrator
26
For further discussion of the gift economy, see Hyde (1983, 3–140), Morris (2003,
21–31) and Simpson (2008, 2–7).
124 E. ANDERSON
enters the stationer’s shop, she senses that the shopkeepers have been
quarrelling. She then deliberates over the pencil, spending time and emo-
tional energy to draw the shopkeepers together while their anger drains
away. This excess of time and emotional labour moves the pencil out of
capitalist exchanges based on financial profit. I would argue that despite its
low value, the pencil is still enmeshed in capitalism, albeit on its margins.
What we are given here is a complex constellation of affect, the spiritual
and ethical values of the gift, capitalism and creativity (the pencil is associ-
ated with the physical act of writing and thus with the creation of the essay
itself). The pencil is a marginal position that allows gift and capitalist econ-
omies to mingle.27 In colluding with the narrator to draw out the process
of selection and purpose, the pencil participates in easing the conflict
between the shop owners. Upon her return home the narrator indicates
the change wrought by the journey in her final contemplation of the pen-
cil: ‘let us examine it tenderly, let us touch it with reverence…a lead pencil’
(Woolf [1927] 1993, 81). There is an irony to Woolf’s claim to regard the
pencil with reverence, but again, the suggestion cannot be completely dis-
carded as a joke, because the pencil has enabled the urban pilgrimage with
all its complex encounters and experiences. By closing the essay with the
pencil, Woolf underlines its importance even while ironising it.
In considering the pencil as relic, we again approach the connections
between pilgrimage and tourism: ‘The experience of pilgrimage, like that
of tourism, is frequently prolonged through souvenirs as “tokens of
place”.…They function in numerous ways to remind [and] invoke the
experience of a place visited, giving tangible form to an intangible experi-
ence’ (Maddrell et al. 2015, 16). The pilgrimage souvenir encapsulates
and perpetuates the experience of pilgrimage and this then draws together
souvenir and relic as both have a ‘special agency’ (Maddrell et al. 2015,
17; Bynum 2015, 21–31; see also Stausberg 2011, 209). In her article on
relics in children’s literature, Carissa Turner Smith argues that they are
important for an understanding of intersubjectivity. She emphasises the
medieval Christian tradition where most relics are the bodily fragments of
saints that retain agency even after their death, however, there is also a
related tradition of sacred objects as relics, the most significant being
pieces of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. This tradition contributes
27
As well as its associations with relics, the pencil is described as ‘the only spoil we have
retrieved from all the treasures of the city’ (81). Simpson reads this association with piracy
and theft as another way of marking the pencil as exterior to economic exchange (2010, 52).
to an understanding of intersubjectivity that is not limited to human bod-

ies but includes the non-human and it is here that we can situate Woolf’s
essay and the pencil as modernist relic.
I alluded earlier to the importance of self-transformation and intersub-
jectivity. We can see that for the dwarf woman, the fragmentation of the
female body through capitalist marketing and creation of unnecessary
desires that cannot be satisfied is profoundly wounding and provokes her
anger. But the porosity of the body indicated in the connection made
between all those drawn into the dwarf’s dance creates an alternative, and
I would argue, sacred space of encounter. Smith draws upon Judith Butler
to point out that intersubjectivity does not undermine the right of bodily
autonomy and boundaries, whilst simultaneously asserting that subjectiv-
ity comes through impinging upon other bodies and being impinged by
them (Smith 2016, 217). The bodily and affective connections made
between human persons earlier in the essay then resonate with the pencil
as the non-human relic. The pencil enables subjectivity and is drawn into
subjectivity itself, rather than remaining inert. Smith argues that relics
demonstrate the porosity between the categories of subject and object and
thus occupy a ‘liminal—and holy—status’. This holiness in turn fuels an
alternative ethics to a kind of humanism that all too easily excludes certain
categories of persons from subjectivity and related rights (228). In Woolf’s
essay, this includes the disabled and the impoverished, and there are others
we might add in our own day and age. In ‘Street Haunting’, as well as in
‘Abbeys and Cathedrals’, Woolf finds myriad ways of connecting the
human and other-than-human, whether referring to fellow men (sic) as
wild beasts, characterising sacred buildings as woods or identifying the
human capacity for connection with inanimate objects. When thinking of
sacred space as one created by patterns of movement and ritual, it is impor-
tant to remember that relics travel and thus enable an understanding of
the sacred as mobile, rather than rooted (McDannell 1995, 136).
“Perpetual Departure”: Pilgrimage in Writing

The pencil is not just an ordinary object, but it is also allied to the world
of creativity and writing. A crucial layer of the essay’s palimpsest of times,
places and selves is the time of writing (Seeley 2013, 157–58). De
Certeau’s work on writing and mysticism can help us reflect on the rela-
tionship between writing and walking as practices that can generate sacred
space. De Certeau describes mystical writing as ‘a body of journeys’, while
126 E. ANDERSON
the mystic continually searches: ‘he or she is mystic who cannot stop walk-
ing and, with the certainty of what is lacking, knows of every place and
object that it is not that…Places are exceeded, passed, lost behind it. It
makes one go further, elsewhere’ (1992, 299). He argues that in moder-
nity, the form of this restless desire remains while the origin and goal has
been lost: what remains is ‘perpetual departure…the traveller no longer
has foundation nor goal. Given over to a nameless desire he is a drunken
boat. Henceforth this desire can no longer speak to someone. It seems to
have become…voiceless, more solitary and lost than before, or less pro-
tected and more radical.…It goes on walking, then, tracing itself out in
silence, in writing’ (299). This ongoing departure is particularly marked in
writing. With writing we have a form of expression that is removed from
the direct presence of speech. Writing is paradoxical in that it communi-
cates yet lacks the material properties of voice.
De Certeau’s work resonates with ‘Street Haunting’, a depiction of an
urban pilgrimage with a disavowed goal. Rather than seeking unification
with a divine origin in a heavenly beyond, Woolf attends to places she
passes and the spaces crafted by urban wandering: this building, this street,
this shop and this city. Here we have a paradoxical celebration of presence;
not a totalising presence but one that is revealed and concealed in the
interstices of difference. Woolf’s work does not emphasise lack as does de
Certeau.28 The paradoxes in Woolf’s work, especially in ‘Street Haunting’
but also ‘Abbeys and Cathedrals’ with its depiction of places with multiple
sacred valences, indicate a modernist version of spirituality that is con-
cerned with sacred space and practice outside traditional religious struc-
tures and habits. In Woolf’s writing, we see the joyfulness of foundationless
wandering that makes myriad connections, delighting in the fruitfulness of
possibility.
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CHAPTER 8
Quaker Mysticism and Virginia

Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
Emily Griesinger
Have you ever seen a revolving lighthouse at night from across the sea,
with its steadfast light alternately hidden and displayed? […] Its
appearances and disappearances are a language by which the human
care that devised it can speak to the watchers and strugglers at sea.
That care does not wax and wane with the light; but in its
unchanging vigilance, it provides a means of communication which
no unaltering beam could afford. And in like manner, surely, while
we endure as seeing Him who is invisible, and rest on His
unchangeableness, we may welcome with filial thankfulness and awe,
the tender touches by which from time to time, and as we can bear it,
He makes His presence felt in our lives; speaking to us in a language
understood by the trusting heart alone. (49–50)
—Caroline Emelia Stephen, The Vision of Faith (1911)
Those familiar with the history of the Quakers in England may recognize
this passage, written by a woman who converted to the Society of Friends
in the 1870s and later became a spokeswoman for its beliefs and practices.
What some may not know is that this woman, Caroline Emelia Stephen,
E. Griesinger (*)
Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA, USA

132 E. GRIESINGER
was the only sister of Sir Leslie Stephen and the aunt who left his daughter,
Virginia Stephen Woolf, a legacy of 500 pounds a year, thus providing the
economic freedom she needed to write fiction. We could even say that we
owe to Caroline Stephen, or “Aunt Milly,” her family name, the material
wealth that produced Woolf’s most famous novel To the Lighthouse, a clas-
sic of literary modernism.1 What interests me, and the topic of this chap-
ter, is the spiritual legacy of Caroline Stephen, which shows up indirectly
or implicitly in Woolf’s treatment of the lighthouse and light imagery as
emblems of the Divine or Ultimate Truth. While others have studied
Woolf and mysticism, few have interpreted her work through the lens of
Quaker mysticism with its emphasis on “Divine Radiance” and “Inner
Light.” Such an approach is warranted, however, when reading To the
Lighthouse, a novel that “radiates” multiple and seemingly contradictory
truths through its central image. The lighthouse is the unyielding “eye” of
rational thought piercing the darkness of human ignorance. It is the
romantic “eye” of dreams and mystery speaking intuitively to the deepest
levels of consciousness. It is also the mystical “eye” of divine guidance
leading the soul to salvation and the eternal rest of God.
Before turning to the novel, I want to say more about Virginia Woolf’s
assumed rejection of traditional faith and the countering influence of
Quaker mysticism. As Christopher Knight and others have argued, Woolf
had a “vexed” relationship to Christianity.2 Knight joins a number of
Woolf scholars, including Mark Gaipa, Jane de Gay, Pericles Lewis, and
Vincent Pecora, in seeking to understand that relationship. Her hostility
to the conversion of her friend T. S. Eliot, which occurred in 1927, the
same year she published To the Lighthouse, is well known. “A corpse would
seem to me more credible than he is,” she wrote to her sister, Vanessa Bell.
“I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire
and believing in God” (Woolf 1975–1980, 3: 457–58). While there is
evidence of “vexations” with Christianity in To the Lighthouse, the d oubters
1
Alison Lewis notes that from her youth, Virginia Woolf seems to have accepted her
father’s demeaning view of her aunt, whom the children often derided as “Silly Milly,”
“Nun,” or “The Quaker” (2000, 3). Lewis argues that her views shifted later in life as she
gained respect for Caroline’s independence as an unmarried woman writer (4–5).
2
Christian iconography pervades Woolf’s writing, says Knight, and although her fiction
“includes testimonies of belief and disbelief,” these are “more characterized by a tone of
inquiry, of questioning […] Woolf’s readers are expected to take an interest in the questions as
questions, the search as a search” (2007, 31). Hence, where Christianity is concerned, her fic-
tion “register[s] itself neither as an affirmation nor a negation, but rather as a vexation” (43).
8 QUAKER MYSTICISM AND VIRGINIA WOOLF’S TO THE LIGHTHOUSE 133
and skeptics are not positively portrayed, the “odious” atheist Charles
Tansley being a case in point, nor does Woolf’s literary genius as a whole,
expressed in her diaries, letters, essays, and short stories, support a “god-
less” perspective of truth and life. Contextualizing To the Lighthouse within
the framework of Quaker mysticism, which Woolf inherited from her aunt,
Caroline Stephen, suggests the author’s ambivalence toward secularism
and her yearning for something more. Employing a critical lens that takes
the Quaker mystical influence seriously means not assuming that Woolf is
primarily and irrefutably an atheist, but viewing her instead as a woman
with her own spiritual agenda, a brilliant literary modernist who sought
truth beyond the ordinary, rational, material world.3 Woolf’s spirituality is
best understood as a complex and highly imaginative response to secular-
ization, by which I mean the rejection of Christian belief that accompa-
nied the rise of modern science beginning as early as the Renaissance, and
continuing through the Enlightenment, the Victorian Era, and the twen-
tieth and twenty-first centuries.
The focus of much debate in this century, the secularization thesis, which
says scientific progress leads inevitably to loss of faith, has been largely dis-
credited as reductive, or worse, naïve. In his well-known study A Secular
Age, Charles Taylor defines secularization as the “move from a society where
belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it
is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest
to embrace” (2007, 3). Virginia Woolf certainly experienced the kind of
secularization Taylor describes. Not only were her Victorian grandparents
members of the Evangelical Clapham Sect, which included such luminaries
as William Wilberforce and Henry Venn, but both parents, Sir Leslie Stephen
and Julia Duckworth Stephen (Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay in the novel) were
outspoken agnostics and/or atheists who challenged the Evangelical faith of
their parents and raised their daughter to do the same. She later married a
Jewish atheist, Leonard Woolf, and surrounded herself with artists and intel-
lectuals, the Bloomsbury Group, many of whom traced a similar lineage to
the Clapham Sect, and were eager to distance themselves from that heritage,
which they found repressive.4
3
Critics who have recognized the influence of Quaker mysticism and specifically Caroline
Stephen include Jane Marcus, Alison Lewis, and most recently Kathleen Heininge, whose
work I discuss further on.
4
Jane de Gay traces this history in her article “Challenging the Family Script” and in her
book Virginia Woolf and the Clergy. For a helpful “family tree” showing Woolf’s heritage in
the Clapham Sect, see Hermione Lee (1997, xx–xxi). See also my discussion of Woolf and
134 E. GRIESINGER
On the other hand, Woolf appears to have valued the ethical content of
Christianity as found in the Gospels. In her first novel The Voyage Out, she
draws a firm line between the “sad and beautiful figure of Christ” and the
failure of the church to live up to his example (Woolf [1920] 1948, 227).
In her excellent study on the subject, Virginia Woolf and the Clergy, Jane
de Gay notes Woolf’s angry response in 1933 when the Church of England
refused to admit women to the priesthood. For Woolf, the whole system
was “irremediably flawed” and “deeply misogynistic” (de Gay 2009, 10).
Woolf takes up the topic again in Three Guineas (1938), urging women to
read the Bible for themselves, and “if need be, to create a new religion
based, it might well be, upon the New Testament, but, it might well be,
very different from the religion now erected upon that basis” (Woolf
1938, 112–13). These women will form a “Society of Outsiders,” perhaps
following the example of Caroline Stephen, who became an “Outsider” to
the Anglican Church in 1878 by joining the “Society” of Friends.
In Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, Pericles Lewis con-
tends that literary modernists did, in fact, create, if not a “new religion,”
then a new literary form that might “preserve against modern rationality
an intimate, imaginative sphere, a remnant of religious life and locus of
mystical experience” (2010, 146). For Virginia Woolf, “the only authentic
religious or ‘spiritual’ experience” was to be found in “intense moments of
vision or ecstasy” which she believed only “the techniques of art [could]
preserve and transmit” (Lewis 2010, 155). To the Lighthouse is a case in
point. Two of the main characters, Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, experi-
ence “moments of vision” that the novelist Virginia Woolf seeks to pre-
serve through stream-of-consciousness techniques, multiple competing
perspectives, interior monologues and the like.5 Recurring spiritual themes
include reflections on human relationships—how they are all flawed—and
the mysteries of beauty, suffering, death, and God. What Pericles Lewis
does not explore are connections between the kinds of visionary experi-
ence depicted in To the Lighthouse and the experience of Inner Light and
Divine Radiance central to Quaker mysticism, and indeed to the mystical
element in all religions.
Christianity in “Religious Belief in a Secular Age: Literary Modernism and Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway” (Griesinger 2015).
5
Woolf uses the term “moments of being” to distinguish incidents of illumination from
the “cotton wool” of everyday life. The “shock-receiving capacity” that allows her to pene-
trate behind the “cotton wool” and put into words what she finds there is what makes her a
writer. She explains the process at length in “A Sketch of the Past” (1985a, 70–75).
Two scholars who do read Woolf’s life and fiction through a Quaker
lens are Jane Marcus, whose seminal essay, “The Niece of a Nun: Virginia
Woolf, Caroline Stephen, and the Cloistered Imagination,” appeared in
1983; and Kathleen Heininge, whose book Reflections: Virginia Woolf
and Her Quaker Aunt, Caroline Stephen was published in 2016. My read-
ing follows their lead in attributing the mystical aspects of To the Lighthouse
to what Woolf inherited directly or indirectly from her Quaker aunt. The
first part of this chapter looks at mysticism in the writings of Caroline
Stephen, and historically in the Quaker movement in England. The sec-
ond and longer part explores the lighthouse as a “mystical” image in the
novel. While this image may express modernist rejection of Christ as the
“Light of the World,” as Lewis and others have suggested, it also conveys
Woolf’s ambivalence toward secularism and her longing for transcen-
dence, the Divine, or Ultimate Truth.
The term mysticism is notoriously difficult to define, as Evelyn Underhill
(1875–1941) cautions in her book on the subject published in London in
1911. “One of the most abused words in the English language, it has been
used in different and often mutually exclusive senses by religion, poetry,
and philosophy: it has been claimed as an excuse for every kind of occult-
ism, for dilute transcendentalism, vapid symbolism, religious or aesthetic
sentimentality, and bad metaphysics” (xxi). Drawing insights from psy-
chology, philosophy, theology, and the direct testimony of mostly medi-
eval Christian mystics, Underhill defines mysticism as “the expression of
the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with
the transcendental order; whatever be the theological formula under
which that order is understood” (xxi). The Quaker historian and philoso-
pher Rufus Jones (1863–1948) further claims that mysticism often if not
always entails “direct and intimate consciousness of the Divine Presence”
([1909] 1963, 57). Such encounters occur “in the deeps of the soul,
beyond our power of knowing,” giving the persons who have them “a
constructive spiritual energy […] which makes them sure that they are
allied to a Being who guarantees the ultimate goodness of the world” (71).
Both Underhill and Jones published seminal works on mysticism in
England during Woolf’s lifetime. Though she was probably aware of
them, it is not clear that she ever read them. What she did read was closer
to home in the books of her aunt, Caroline Emelia Stephen. The only
sister of Virginia Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, Caroline did not fol-
low her brother in abandoning her Christian faith. But she did abandon
the doctrinal and creedal expression of that faith in the Church of England,
136 E. GRIESINGER
which she had attended for over twenty years. Virginia wrote Caroline’s
obituary when she died in 1909, and she lived briefly with her aunt in
Cambridge after the death of her father in 1904, before moving to
Bloomsbury with her brother, Thoby, and her sister, Vanessa. Thoby
invited his Cambridge friends to meet at their flat periodically, giving birth
to a group of friends, thinkers, artists, and writers known as the Bloomsbury
Group. According to Charles Taylor, literary Bloomsbury was itself a secu-
lar subversion of Christianity since several members of the group could
trace their heritage back to the Evangelical Clapham Sect.6
Whereas personal faith in Christ had grounded the moral earnestness of
the Claphamites, such faith degenerated in the next generation, that of
Woolf’s parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen, resulting in a repressive moral-
ism that alienated their children. The Bloomsbury Group rejected their
grandparents’ Christianity, on the one hand, and their Victorian parents’
substitute religion of moral earnestness and duty on the other (Taylor
2007, 395–407). If Woolf sought for a model of religious experience that
could accommodate Bloomsbury rejection of authority, she might look no
further than her aunt’s non-creedal, non-doctrinal form of Christianity as
practiced by the Society of Friends. To reiterate, it was Caroline’s legacy,
combined with the sale of family properties over the years, that enabled
Woolf to achieve what she famously says is essential to a woman writer:
economic freedom, privacy, and a “room of one’s own.” Based on exami-
nation of Woolf’s personal library, which contains several of Caroline’s
books, Quaker Strongholds (1891), Light Arising (1911), and The Vision
of Faith (1911), Marcus and Heininge argue for a spiritual legacy as well.
To understand that legacy requires saying more about Quaker beliefs
and spiritual practice. The most thorough, sympathetic, and beautifully
written history of the Quakers from George Fox to John Woolman is that
of American philosopher-historian Rufus Jones. Three pages in his two-
volume history The Later Periods of Quakerism are devoted to Caroline
Stephen, whose conversion, or “convincement,” was central to the devel-
opment of Quakerism in England:
6
Following the usage of British church historian David W. Bebbington, the term “evan-
gelical” is capitalized when it refers to Anglican Evangelicals. Lower-case “evangelical” is the
broader term referring to an international network of professing Christians who share similar
theological beliefs dating from the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century (Bebbington
2005, 9–11). For more on these distinctions, see Elizabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart:
Anglican Evangelicalism in the Nineteenth Century Novel (1979).
Under the powerful influence of the naturalistic movement, dominant in the

circles in which she moved, and one of the leaders of which was her brother,
Sir Leslie Stephen, Caroline became more or less forced intellectually to take
an agnostic position. She grew dissatisfied with the [worship] services of the
[Anglican] religion in which she had grown up. New occasions had brought
new problems, and the old faiths and forms did not meet her personal spiri-
tual needs, nor speak to her condition. In the midst of her perplexities and
real ‘dismay,’ she unexpectedly found in a Friends’ meeting what she was
seeking. (Jones 1921, 2: 967–68)7
Quaker worship based on silence rather than sacraments and creeds

“pledged me to nothing,” Caroline writes, “and left me altogether undis-
turbed to seek for help in my own way” (Stephen 1891, 54).
Because of her “graceful literary style,” Stephen became “the foremost
interpreter” in England of the Friends’ way of worship. “[S]he was gifted
to penetrate to the heart and living secret of the faith which she had
accepted. She belonged by bent and by experience to the order of the
mystics. She had seen truth at first hand, had received a direct revelation,
and, according to her own testimony, she had been able to ‘sink into the
innermost depth of her being and become aware of things which are
unseen and eternal’” (Jones 1921, 2: 969).8 The secret referred to here is
the transformative power of Inner Light and Divine Radiance.9 I will have
7
Jones alludes to the experience of George Fox as recorded in his Journal: “As I had for-
saken all the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most experi-
enced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition.
And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly
to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, Oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is
one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’, and when I heard it my heart did
leap for joy” (Fox [1694] 1975, 11).
8
Jones is citing Caroline Stephen, Light Arising (1908, 128).
9
According to Jones, “radiance” was Caroline’s favorite word: “It appears in everything
she wrote. It was a trait in the character both of her father and her mother [Virginia Woolf’s
grandparents on her father’s side], and she calls everyone to an experience of ‘the central
glow of Light and Love,’ when the innermost depth is expressed no longer in words but by
‘a living radiance’” (1921, 2: 970). Modern Quakerism has further developed such ideas in
ways we cannot go into here, except to note overall disagreement about the authority of
mystical experience versus the authority of Scripture, and whether the Inner Light is always
the same as the Light of Christ testified to in the Gospels. Nevertheless, the idea that a direct
and personal revelation is available to all people, and that this inward experience is transfor-
mative in and of itself without priests, sermons, or sacraments is central. Citing the 2002 Book
of Discipline for the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Pink Dandelion records, “The Light Within
is the fundamental and immediate experience for Friends. It is that which guides each of us
138 E. GRIESINGER
more to say about “spiritual radiance” in a moment. Here I simply stress

the overall emphasis beginning with George Fox, according to Jones, on a
mystical approach to seeking and knowing God. It was the immediate
apprehension of God by individual souls that mattered, not intellectual
agreement with creeds, participation in sacraments, or alignment with par-
ticular interpretations of Scripture.
In the “Preface” to an inscribed edition of Quaker Strongholds in
Woolf’s personal library, Caroline defines Quakerism as a “protest against
the attempt to reduce spiritual life to a technical process—a matter of rules
and definitions to be confidently applied and transmitted by human agents,
and separable from the growth of the Divine seed in the heart. [Quakers]
feel this growth to be mainly beyond human ken—a hidden birth pro-
ceeding from a source unfathomable by the human mind” (Stephen 1891,
7). This copy contains marginal notations by Virginia Woolf, the majority
from Chapter II “The Inner Light.” For example, Woolf puts a line by the
following passage: “It is the secret of light—an inward light clothing itself
in life, and living to bring all things to the light. Mystics, as I understand
the matter, are those whose minds, to their own consciousness, are lighted
from within; who feel themselves, that is, to be in immediate inward com-
munication with the central Fountain of light and life” (Stephen 1891,
35–36). A few pages later, she marks another passage: “If we believe, in
any real and honest sense, that the ordering of all human affairs is in the
hands of one supreme Ruler, how can we stop short of believing that the
minu[t]est trifle affecting any one of us is under the same all-pervading
care?” (48).10 Both the idea of “inward communication” with Ultimate or
in our everyday lives and brings us together as a community of faith. It is, most importantly,
our direct and unmediated experience of the Divine” (2008, 69).
10
There are two copies of Quaker Strongholds in the Leonard and Virginia Woolf Library
housed at Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman, Washington. One is the third
edition, published in 1891, and cited throughout this chapter, inscribed to Virginia from
Caroline Stephen; the other, published in 1890, belonged to her father, Sir Leslie Stephen.
According to Heininge, both copies were “uncut” from about midway to the end, suggest-
ing that father and daughter read them together, stopping at the same place in the text
(2011, 20–21). If this theory is correct, then we can assume Virginia received Quaker
Strongholds in 1899, when she was seventeen years old, as indicated in the inscription. Her
mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen, the model for Mrs. Ramsay in the novel, died in 1895,
followed by a decade in which her father grieved, as does Mr. Ramsay in the novel. As Leslie
Stephen died in 1904, their reading together of Quaker Strongholds must have occurred
between 1899 and 1904. In a visit to the Woolf Library housed at WSU, I examined both
copies of Quaker Strongholds, as well as other books in this 9000+ collection, including sev-
Divine truth and the idea of a supreme Being or God arranging, ordering,
and caring for the affairs of human life are central concerns in To the
Lighthouse. If Woolf is not the staunch atheist others have portrayed, then
such echoes of Quaker theology could suggest she was more open to reli-
gious faith than is typically assumed.
I do not mean that Virginia Woolf was a “hidden” Christian or “anony-
mous” Quaker mystic. And yet, as her nephew Quentin Bell explains, she
definitely had a religious sensibility.11 At least she was a spiritual seeker,
looking for something beyond the materialism and rationalism of an
increasingly “disenchanted” secular age. Indeed, traces of mystical think-
ing and feeling are everywhere in her writing once readers give themselves
permission to look. In her article on To the Lighthouse, Gabrielle McIntire
argues that Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique employs religious
language in imaginative ways to “repudiate” and “renegotiate” the divine
so that in the end her characters often reject God while remaining “aston-
ishingly” open to “immanence, transcendence, redemption, and illumina-
tion” (2013, 1). My argument is that Woolf’s “astonishing openness” to
such matters is (or could have been) influenced by Quaker mysticism and
Christian mysticism as a whole, from whence such terms—“immanence,”
“transcendence,” and “illumination”—surely derive.
If scholars overlook the Quaker influence, it is partly because they
assume Caroline’s participation in a “patriarchal” religion like Christianity
would have been anathema to Woolf’s feminism. Kathleen Heininge dis-
agrees, contending that both Caroline and Virginia sought in the symbol
of light a replacement for the demands of patriarchal religion. For both
women, light functions as “a kind of internal guidance system” (2016, 157)
that does not depend on men. Heininge continues: “Caroline gave
Virginia a path to explore which was wholly different from the path
ordained by her father.…It was not, indeed, God with whom she quar-
eral by Caroline Stephen as well as other works by or about Quaker authors or concerning
Quaker history such as The Journal of George Fox, Robert Barclay’s Apology, The Journal of
John Woolman, and Ray Strachey’s biography of her “Quaker Grandmother” Hannah Whitall
Smith. For a complete list of titles in the collection, see The Library of Leonard and Virginia
Woolf: A Short-Title Catalog (King and Miletic-Vejzovic 2003).
11
“Using the word in a very wide sense we may find a ‘religious’ element in her novels,”
writes Bell, “she tended to be, as she herself put it, ‘mystical’; but she entertained no com-
fortable beliefs. That the Universe is a very mysterious place she would certainly have
allowed, but not that this mysteriousness allows us to suppose the existence of a moral deity
or of a future life” (1972, 136).
140 E. GRIESINGER
reled, but […] the construction of the patriarchal God who created such
trouble in the world, who lay at the center of patriarchal institutions that
perpetrated the evil which is so often attributed to God” (2016, 171).
Obviously, one wants to avoid the “intentional fallacy.” Nevertheless, as
Woolf famously argues in A Room of One’s Own, women “think back
through their mothers” (1929, 75). Even subconsciously, a woman writer
absorbs, reworks, or reconstructs ideas from the literature of other women
writers. Therefore, I see no reason not to consider Caroline Stephen a
“foremother” whose Quaker influence readers can legitimately look for in
the writing of her gifted niece and literary heir, Virginia Woolf.
As early as 1983, Jane Marcus finds connections between the light-
house in Caroline Stephen’s “The Vision of Faith” and Woolf’s novel To
the Lighthouse.12 Her claim is based on the passage cited at the beginning
of this chapter where the “revolving lighthouse” sends a “steadfast light
alternately hidden and displayed” to guide “strugglers at sea” (Stephen
1911, 49–50). In Christian iconography, the lighthouse signifies divine
guidance, the rescue of lost souls, and ultimately, the redemption of
humanity through Christ, the Light of the World.13 Whereas traditional
Christianity posits an all-loving, all-wise, personal deity, a God who “never
slumbers nor sleeps,” whose “eye is on the sparrow,” and who sovereignly
rules the universe, Woolf’s lighthouse in the novel is viewed through mul-
tiple, sometimes contradictory perspectives. Mr. Ramsay views the
lighthouse through the “eye” of rationalism and atheism; Mrs. Ramsay
sees the same lighthouse through the romantic “eye” of love and senti-
ment. Lily Briscoe, the painter, a surrogate for Virginia Woolf, the novel-
ist, sees the lighthouse through the “eye” of modernist art and feminism.
Thus the lighthouse is a luminous symbol that radiates multiple truths.
12
See Marcus, “The Niece of a Nun” (1983, 24).
13
The idea of the lighthouse as salvific is not original to Christianity but goes back to the
ancient world. The first lighthouse is believed to have been the Pharos of Alexandria, built
on the Island of Pharos around 280 BC, later deemed one of the seven wonders of the
ancient world. This 350-foot tower had a bonfire on top to warn sailors away from danger-
ous sandbars as they entered the harbor of Alexandria (“Pharos of Alexandria”). In the Old
Testament the image of the lamp represents divine light, for example, in II Samuel 22:29:
“for thou art my lamp, O Lord; and the Lord will lighten my darkness.” In the New
Testament Jesus calls himself the “light of the world” in John 9:5, which became the inspira-
tion for William Holman Hunt’s famous painting of Christ “The Light of the World”
(“Lamps, Lanterns, and Lights” 2005). Woolf saw a replica of this painting at Hunt’s home
in 1905 (Woolf 1985b, 176–77). For more on lighthouse imagery and Christianity, see
Philip Kosloski, “Lighthouses, An Ancient Symbol of Christianity” (2017).
Although insufficient to save Mrs. Ramsay, Prue, and Andrew, all of whom
die in the course of the novel, the lighthouse is metaphorically salvific
nevertheless, expressing the human yearning for transcendence and the
possibility of redemption through human relationships, love and marriage,
and/or through human work, creativity, and art.
The novel divides into three sections: “The Window,” “Time Passes,”
and “The Lighthouse.” The Ramsay family is on vacation in the Hebrides
off the coast of Scotland where they own a ramshackle but dearly loved
cottage. The main conflict has to do with a trip “to the lighthouse” which
Mrs. Ramsay has promised her six-year-old son James, but which Mr.
Ramsay forbids. The trip is delayed for ten years, during which time Mrs.
Ramsay dies, along with her daughter Prue and her son Andrew. The cot-
tage deteriorates during this period but is eventually “resurrected” in
“Time Passes” by two cleaning ladies just before Mr. Ramsay, his remain-
ing children, and the artist, Lily Briscoe, return in “The Lighthouse.”
James, Cam, and Mr. Ramsay sail across the bay to the Lighthouse, arriv-
ing just as Lily puts the final “dab” of color on the abstract painting she
began ten years prior when Mrs. Ramsay was alive and the family together.
“With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line
there, in the center. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying
down her brush in extreme fatigue. I have had my vision” (Woolf [1927]
2005, 211).
In keeping with the claims of Quaker mysticism, each of the main char-
acters, Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay, and Lily Briscoe, is capable of inward
transformation through the apprehension of truth mediated by the light-
house. Through their multiple and contradictory perceptions, these char-
acters suggest Woolf’s ambivalence toward her aunt’s mystical theology
and by implication her conflicted feelings toward Christianity as a whole.
Modeled on the outspoken agnostic, Leslie Stephen, Mr. Ramsay sees
nothing divine in the lighthouse beam. His theological horizon stops at
the factual, the measurable, what can be known by the light of human
reason. When his wife dies, Mr. Ramsay finds no comfort or consolation
in a lighthouse that signifies (or could signify) the providential care of a
loving God. If anything he becomes more desolate, indeed a “figure of
infinite pathos,” as Lily describes him. “He tied knots. He bought boots.
There was no helping Mr. Ramsay on the journey he was going” (158).
Mr. Ramsay’s despair stems from his belief that human beings drive
before the “gales” of life weighed down by suffering and grief until their
boats sink and they “perish each alone.” There is no heavenly beacon
142 E. GRIESINGER
across the waves, just man-made towers on bare rocks. Indeed, it could be
argued that Mr. Ramsay is himself such a “tower,” standing as he does “on
his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance, how we know nothing
and the sea eats away the ground we stand on” (47). The image repeats
when he leads the expedition to the lighthouse, standing “very straight
and tall” in the boat as they arrive, “for all the world, James thought, as if
he were saying ‘There is no God,’ and Cam thought, as if he were leaping
into space” (210). Such claims are not made directly by Mr. Ramsay, but
the suggestion is clearly there throughout the novel that Mr. Ramsay is an
agnostic if not an atheist, which was also true of Leslie Stephen, on whom
his character is based.14 Atheism itself is undermined through a “foil”
character, the “odious little atheist” (9) Charles Tansley, a student visiting
the family to discuss his dissertation. Gabrielle McIntire observes that as
Tansley “parrots” Mr. Ramsay’s insistence that the weather will not be
fine, thus dashing the hopes of James to go to the lighthouse, the reader
is drawn to sympathize with James, who “had there been an axe handy”
would have “gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and
then” (8). In this manner, says McIntire, Woolf indirectly challenges “the
status and the value of atheism, hinting that she is perhaps writing just
slightly against the grain of her ‘secular age’” (McIntire 2013, 4).
That atheism is itself a failed philosophy is suggested by the similarity
between Mr. Ramsay “standing” in the boat as if “there is no God” and
Mr. Ramsay the “withered” philosopher “standing” alone on a rock, eyes
“fixed on the storm,” trying but failing to “pierce the darkness” (38).
Defiantly, “he would die standing. He would never reach R” (38). Not a
protest against Christianity per se, Mr. Ramsay’s excessive rationalism is
mainly a defense against religious coercion. It is disturbing to him that the
skeptic David Hume is “trapped” into repeating the Lord’s Prayer in order
to get out of a bog. Mr. Ramsay would avoid such coercion at all costs,
which is ironic since in other ways he is a tyrant, demanding that others do
his will, especially his wife and children. This theme takes shape in “The
Fisherman’s Wife,” a fairy tale Mrs. Ramsay reads to James in the opening
chapter. The wife in the story coerces her husband, the fisherman, to use
his contract with a magic fish to make her a king, then a pope, then
almighty God. In punishment for her presumption, the couple are returned
14
See Leslie Stephen’s An Agnostic’s Apology published in 1893. A good biography that
discusses Stephen’s position at length is Noel Annan’s Leslie Stephen: His Thoughts and
Character in Relation to His Time (1952).
to a life of poverty as the sea darkens and roars. At one level, the story
points to Mrs. Ramsay, who urges everyone to “marry, marry,” thus play-
ing the Divine Matchmaker—but also to Mr. Ramsay. Through fits of rage
and temper—slamming doors, whizzing plates—Mr. Ramsay coerces his
wife and children. Mark Gaipa contends that Mr. Ramsay rejects God—he
is an atheist—but puts Mrs. Ramsay in God’s place. According to Gaipa,
that is the fate of every Angel in the House whose doubting husbands
“sought from [their wives] what others have sought from religion”
(2003, 17–18).15
It is worth noting that Mrs. Ramsay’s communion with the lighthouse
occurs only after she escapes her role as Mr. Ramsay’s “angel” or fertility
goddess, as suggested at the dinner party, and “shrinks” to “a wedge-
shaped core of darkness” invisible to others (65). Similarly, the Quaker
mystic, according to Caroline Stephen, “retreats at will” to a “secret
chamber” to find “refuge from the ever-changing aspects of outward exis-
tence” (1891, 36). In such moments there comes “an awful guidance; a
light which burns and purifies; a voice which subdues,” until “the imper-
ishable, unfathomable, unchanging elements of humanity” become “one”
with “the well of living waters [that] springeth up unto eternal life”
(36–37). From her “wedge-shaped core of darkness,” Mrs. Ramsay gazes
at the lighthouse, “hypnotized, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers
some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with
delight” (68). Without identifying God as the source, Mrs. Ramsay
acknowledges that her life has been blessed. “[S]he had known happiness,
exquisite happiness, intense happiness, […] and the ecstasy burst in her
eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she
felt, It is enough! It is enough!” (68).
The light imagery works beautifully here to “repudiate” and “renegoti-
ate” the divine, as McIntire says, so that Mrs. Ramsay appears to have it
both ways. The lighthouse beam “radiates” divine truth—“We are in the
hands of the Lord” (66)—but in the next sentence that truth is renounced.
Mrs. Ramsay is “annoyed with herself” for being “trapped into saying
something she did not mean” (66). In theological terms, Mrs. Ramsay
15
“Domesticity essentially replaced religion for [Leslie] Stephen,” Gaipa contends, “and
he made this exchange explicit when he wrote to Julia Duckworth in anticipation of their
marriage: ‘I have not got any Saints and you must not be angry if I put you in the place where
my Saints ought to be’” (2003, 18). The letter is included in Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum
Book ([1893] 2010, 53).
144 E. GRIESINGER
wrestles with theodicy, the attempt to justify God’s existence and/or

goodness in the face of suffering. She cannot believe any good and loving
God would make a world in which “no happiness lasted,” where “there is
no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor” (67). Caroline
Stephen raises the same issue in Quaker Strongholds. “People cannot bring
themselves to feel that the infliction of pain can be the act of One whom
they desire to know as Love” (Stephen 1891, 49). Her answer is to “read”
the “dark riddle” of suffering in the light of Christ’s victory over death on
the cross. “[I]n His strength we can and must meet evil with good and
overcome it” (118). It could be argued that a similar desire motivates Mrs.
Ramsay to nurse the poor, knit a stocking for a lighthouse boy with a
tubercular hip, and more subtly, cover up the dead pig skull in her chil-
dren’s bedroom. What are these acts of kindness if not efforts to overcome
evil with good?
Caring for others, especially her needy husband, is exhausting. Mrs.
Ramsay must recharge by withdrawing to a room of her own, where in the
passage just cited, she looks across the bay at the lighthouse. The language
suggests mystical apprehension or even union with the Divine: “Losing
personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips
always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together
in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to
meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the
three, which was her stroke” (66–67). As she contemplates the light, with
knitting needles suspended, “ there curled up off the floor of [her] mind,
rose from the lake of [her] being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover”(66–67).
In mystical tradition, the soul is imaged thus as a bride who, purified by
the Inner Light, is prepared to meet the Bridegroom, who is Christ, the
Lover of the Soul.16
Such “moments of vision,” as Woolf calls them, inspire Mrs. Ramsay to
create similar moment for others, like the dinner party, for example, which
occurs at the end of “The Window.” “[H]ere, inside the room, seemed to
be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things waved
and vanished, waterily” (99). The centerpiece of fruit, the Boeuf en
16
For further discussion of this aspect of Christian mysticism, see Evelyn Underhill’s chap-
ters “Mysticism and Symbolism” (1911, 136–140) and “Ecstasy and Rapture” (1911,
358–379). Connections between human marriage and mystic union are the focus of St.
Bernard’s mystical sermons on the Old Testament “Song of Songs.” In these sermons “the
Divine Word is the Bridegroom and the human soul is the Bride” (Underhill 1911, 137). See
also “Spiritual Marriage” in The Dictionary of Christian Spirituality (Scorgie 2011, 601).
Daube, the family gathered round the table, all of these images suggest
divine perfection, the Eternal in the midst of Time. “[T]here is a coher-
ence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change,
and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected
lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so
that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of
peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that
endures” (107). Although the scene could be read as a parody of the “Last
Supper”—literally, it is the last time the family eats together before Mrs.
Ramsay dies—like other modernists, Woolf could also be “masking”
sacred experience, as McIntire points out, “alternately displacing and yet
embracing the theological imagination” (2013, 6). Thus the dinner scene
displaces the Christian ritual of Communion even as it remains open to its
underlying theology.
While Quakerism rejects all doctrines, creeds, and rituals, including
Holy Communion, the sacramental imagery and/or theology suggests a
sacred impulse in the Ramsay family, an impulse toward beauty and truth
with no creedal strings attached. The perfect dinner that ends “The
Window” points forward to “The Lighthouse” where Lily Briscoe seeks
to do something similar—impose order on chaos, make something per-
fect and permanent—through her painting. Mark Gaipa reads To the
Lighthouse as Woolf’s effort to reconcile “two incompatible views of the
world,” materialism and spiritualism (2003, 5). Mr. Ramsay is the “mate-
rialist” in this reading, and Mrs. Ramsay is the “spiritualist.” The contest,
which grows fierce in “Time Passes,” is only resolved abstractly in Lily’s
painting. For Gaipa, “spiritualism” refers to various occult practices that
flourished between the two world wars. Such practices substituted for a
discarded Christian faith and for mechanistic science which was supposed
to replace it. Thus he reads the successful completion of Lily’s painting as
evidence of telepathic awareness. In a séance-like trance, she calls on the
ghost of Mrs. Ramsay, and Mrs. Ramsay appears.17 What Gaipa overlooks,
17
Science and evolutionary theory eroded orthodox religion during the nineteenth cen-
tury. Yet, for many Victorians “the triumph of the new materialism (represented by world-
views like utilitarianism, positivism, and naturalism) failed to provide the emotional security
that religion had offered, leaving them desirous of some other source of spiritual comfort”
(Gaipa 2003, 6). Such sources might include theosophy and other forms of the occult. Lily
summons the dead Mrs. Ramsay in what Gaipa describes as a “séance” during which she
“avails herself of spiritualist tools: she falls into a trance, and even facilitates spiritual com-
munion by engaging in a sort of telepathy—as demonstrated in her silent communications
146 E. GRIESINGER
which I want to recover, is a reading that foregrounds the spiritual legacy

from Woolf’s Quaker aunt, one that aligns more with Christian mysticism
than pagan spiritualism and the occult.
If Lily’s vision means anything theologically, it signifies the consola-
tions of art in the face of lost religion. For it is not simply the destruction
of the abandoned cottage that Woolf depicts so powerfully in “Time
Passes,” but the impact of the Great War—the loss of an entire generation
of young men, including Andrew Ramsay—on belief in the existence and/
or goodness of God. For a period of ten years the night rains destruction,
the house falls apart, the rats gnaw the wainscot, the garden runs to seed,
with “poppies sowing themselves among the dahlias,” and “artichokes
towering among the roses” (141). The insensibility of Nature mimics the
idiocy of war. Patches of purple stain the sea, suggesting the blood of
“leviathans” who “lunge” and “plunge” beneath the surface, their brows
“pierced by no light of reason” (138). Meanwhile, God is absent or indif-
ferent. Divine goodness, if there is any, “covers his treasures in a drench of
hail,” breaking their “calm,” making it impossible for anyone, whether
artist, philosopher, or ordinary believer, to “compose from their fragments
a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth”
(132). Assuming the “line” in Lily’s painting represents the lighthouse,
then the lighthouse itself could be a metaphor for the power of art to pro-
test and/or resist this perspective. For Lily’s painting finds a shape for the
fragments and at least some semblance of truth in their littered pieces.
War is horrific and destructive. Andrew Ramsay’s death in France
“mercifully, was instantaneous” (Woolf [1927] 2005, 137). Mrs. Ramsay
dies for no apparent reason “rather suddenly” in the middle of the night
(132). There is no “great revelation” that could ever explain such mat-
ters. The gifted artist, like the gifted mystic, has only brief glimmerings
of truth: “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly
in the dark” (164–65). Steering by such lights, Lily pieces together her
contradictory feelings about the Ramsays, their way of life, their “per-
fect” marriage, her grief and sense of loss at the death of Mrs. Ramsay,
her guilt and lack of sympathy for Mr. Ramsay. At the same time, through
dabs of color and lines running this way and that, she clarifies her vision
and completes a thoroughly modern, abstract painting, thus justifying
with Mr. Carmichael” (2003, 32). For a similar reading of Woolf’s mysticism through a spiri-
tualist lens, see Julie Kane, “Varieties of Mystical Experience in the Writings of Virginia
Woolf” (1995).
her decision not to marry but to fulfill her vocation as an artist. As an

artifice created by the writer Virginia Woolf, the painting signals the suc-
cessful completion of the novel itself, and the phrase, “I have had my
vision,” refers at once to the modern painting and Woolf ’s tour de force
modernist novel To the Lighthouse.
Here is a possible key to Woolf’s spiritual aesthetic, her effort to “make
life stand still” by capturing its “radiance” in a work of art. Beauty, pat-
tern, and order can be apprehended above or beneath the temporal, the
factual, what can be known through science, technology, and the senses.
The best works of art offer, if not the beatific vision of Christian mysti-
cism, then at least beacons and flashes of light, epiphanies and “daily mir-
acles” that point in that direction. The artist is intensely aware of such
miracles and seeks to preserve them. Moreover, the best works of art are
(or can be) redemptive. This truth pervades the entire novel. Even the
seventy-year-old housekeeper Mrs. McNab performs a work of domestic
art that “redeems” by “rescuing” and “restoring” the Ramsays’ aban-
doned cottage, which would otherwise sink “downwards to the depths of
darkness” (142–43). Her work aligns structurally and symbolically with
the work Mrs. Ramsay performs at the dinner party or in knitting the
stocking, and the work Lily performs when she completes her painting.
The same religious language informs all three. “‘No’, [Mrs. Ramsay] said,
flattening the stocking out upon her knee, ‘I shan’t finish it’” (125;
emphasis added). Later Mrs. McNab thinks, “[T]he windows were shut
to, keys were turned all over the house; the front door was banged; it was
finished” (145; emphasis added). Finally, at novel’s end, Lily proclaims, “It
was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought laying down her brush in
extreme fatigue, I have had my vision” (211; emphasis added). The
repeated allusion to Christ’s last words on the cross suggests modernist
appropriation of the Christian sacred, while at the same time hinting at
similarities between the sacrificial work of Christ and the vocation of the
artist—literary, domestic, or otherwise.
“Moments of being,” which Woolf defines elsewhere,18 or “little daily
miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark,” as Lily
imagines, or times spent contemplating the lighthouse itself: these all serve
as portals for mystical revelation. The source of their “radiance” remains
open to interpretation. The interpretation advanced here foregrounds the
Christian mystical tradition and specifically the Quaker belief in “divine
“A Sketch of the Past” (Woolf 1985a, 70–75).

18
148 E. GRIESINGER
radiance” and the Inner Light. According to Quaker theology, all people
can know the love and wisdom of God, commune with God personally in
this world, and live with Him forever in the next. While open to more
liberal views, Caroline Stephen remained firm in identifying the Inner
Light as the Christ of orthodox faith. “As through [His] death life is
opened to us, so—whether slowly or suddenly, yet surely, as in a heavenly
dawn—does the ‘Radiancy Divine,’ the ‘brightness of the Father’s glory,’
become visible to us, and we recognize it for what it is—‘the light of the
knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ’” (Stephen
1891, 8). That her niece, Virginia Woolf, did not finally experience this
kind of assurance and security, that she was ultimately overcome by dark-
ness and took her own life, remains a great tragedy. That Woolf left behind
a trove of exquisite writing would have pleased her aunt, who had always
encouraged her to write and to seek publication. To the Lighthouse is the
fruit of that encouragement, a work of art “bright, like a diamond in the
sand” (136), radiant with life and light, a miraculous gift to the world.
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CHAPTER 9
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Dostoevsky:

The Sacred Space of the Soul
Rita Dirks
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), more than any other of her nov-
els, pays homage to the soul, the privacy of the soul, and the connected-
ness of souls. In 1924, while writing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf notes in her
diary on June 21, 1924, that she wants “to write about the soul. I think
it’s time to cancel that vow against soul description.…Perhaps I restrained
it, and now like a plant in a pot it begins to crack the earthenware” (1978,
304). At the same time, Woolf’s fascination with Russian writers, expressly
with Fyodor Dostoevsky, was at its zenith. Her contemplations upon the
soul in Mrs. Dalloway, and, more specifically, the mysterious connected-
ness between the two main characters—Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus
Warren Smith—are inspired by her readings of Dostoevsky, and especially
by his idea of sobornost’, or holy connectedness. Not religious herself,
Woolf nevertheless speaks up for a kind of religion, and the privacy of the
soul, in opposition to the fervid evangelicalism of Miss Kilman and the
religion of science as espoused by Drs Holmes and Bradshaw.
Woolf’s proclamations against belief in God are well known; Woolf
articulates her atheism in both her autobiographical and fictional writings.
For example, she expresses her lament in 1928 over T.S. Eliot’s conversion
R. Dirks (*)
Ambrose University, Calgary, AB, Canada

152 R. DIRKS
to Anglo-Catholicism in a letter to her sister Vanessa Bell: “[D]ear Tom

Eliot…may be called dead to us from this day forward.…I mean there’s
something obscene in a living person…believing in God” (1975–1980, 3:
457–8). Clarissa Dalloway similarly utters her religious atheism when she
declares that “not for a moment did she believe in God” immediately after
an exquisite experience of beauty and feeling intense gratitude for life
([1925] 2005, 28). Yet, in the same passage, she draws on religious lan-
guage to shape her feelings into words: “[S]he felt like a nun who has left
the world.…[She] felt blessed and purified” (28). Recently scholars, like
Pericles Lewis in his Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, have
re-examined Woolf’s religious beliefs and denials thereof and her portrayal
of these in her fiction. Lewis writes that “scholars of Woolf’s work have
generally taken her declarations of secularism at face value, ignoring her
interest, despite her resistance to institutional religion, in alternative forms
of the sacred” (2010, 143). According to Lewis, what Woolf found repug-
nant were “the more dogmatic and intolerant aspects of religion” (143),
but she was “receptive to mystical experience” (144). A different kind of
faith inspired Woolf more: young Virginia was close to her Quaker aunt
Caroline Emelia Stephen, whose Quaker Strongholds (1890) she read
(Heininge 2011, 20). Cathy Heininge writes that Stephen was “a well-
known Quaker mystic and writer who rejected the established church”
(29). Suzette A. Henke indicates that Caroline Stephen “may have inspired
Woolf’s life-long interest in the religious and ‘mystical’ dimensions of real-
ity” (1981, 145, n. 8). It is my conviction that the “alternative forms of
the sacred,” to use Lewis’s words, include Woolf’s attraction to Russian
Orthodoxy, a more mystical religion than Western Christianity, as medi-
ated through Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, written after his con-
version. Specifically, and this is the purpose of this chapter, Woolf
incorporates the Russian religious concept of sobornost’, as represented in
Dostoevsky’s novel.
Woolf first encountered Dostoevsky’s work in 1912, reading Crime
and Punishment in French, before Constance Garnett’s English transla-
tions of Dostoevsky’s works began to appear between 1912 and 1920.
Woolf was so impressed with the novelist and the novel that she “granted
it, with comic seriousness, ultimate power of her destiny” (Sandberg 2014,
37–38). Subsequently, Hogarth Press began to publish Russian works in
translation in 1917, including some religious works; for example, in 1924,
the Woolfs published the autobiography of a seventeenth-century Russian
archpriest and schismatic, The Life of Archpriest Avvakum (Mills 2014,
9 WOOLF’S MRS. DALLOWAY AND DOSTOEVSKY: THE SACRED SPACE… 153
153–154). It is significant that Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway during what

Peter Kaye, in his Dostoevsky and English Modernism, calls her more serious
Dostoevskian phase, from “1921 to 1925,” when she read the Constance
Garnett translations, learned Russian, translated “Stavrogin’s Confession”
with S.S. Koteliansky, and wrote “The Russian Point of View” (written in
1919, and published in The Common Reader in 1925), and was, at the
same time, well on her way to becoming “an important and innovative
modernist” (1999, 66). In total, she published 17 essays on Russian litera-
ture (Dalgarno 2012, 70).
In “Modern Fiction,” Woolf praises the Russian writers for their spiri-
tuality and contrasts them to the English materialist, or Edwardian writers.
“In every great Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint,”
she writes; “[i]t is the saint in them which confounds us with a feeling of
our own religious triviality” ([1919] 2008, 12). And further, she exclaims,
“If we want understanding of the soul and heart where else shall we find
it of comparable profundity” but in “the Russians?” (11). More impor-
tantly, here, this phase coincides with the season in Woolf’s life when she
began to give her attention yet again to the nature of the soul. In “The
Russian Point of View,” Woolf writes that “it is indeed the soul that is the
chief character in Russian fiction,” and “it is of greater depth and volume
in Dostoevsky.” The novels of Dostoevsky “are composed purely and
wholly of the stuff of the soul” ([1925] 2016). As Jean Mills observes, in
the publications at this time Woolf “identifies an abiding spirituality and
understanding of ‘the soul’ [in all of Russian writing, and in Dostoevsky in
particular] she finds lacking or culturally unacceptable, if not unattainable,
in English literature” (2014, 163). Her fascination with the Russian idea
of the soul is evident in Mrs. Dalloway; her novel also imports some of
Orthodoxy’s principal beliefs, mediated through Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky’s and Woolf’s personal beliefs are expressed through their
fiction; both put much of themselves into their characters. Dostoevsky,
after writing his existentialist nihilistic Notes from Underground (1864),
converted (back) to Orthodox Christianity, and evidence of that return
appears in his next novel, Crime and Punishment (1866). Even before
Notes, and upon his release from penal servitude in Siberia in 1854,
Dostoevsky calls himself “a child of [his] age, a child of disbelief and
doubt,” but also someone who “believe[d] that there is nothing more
beautiful, more profound, more loving, more wise, more courageous and
more perfect than Christ” (qtd. in Freeborn 1992, 304). David McDuff,
in examining the drafts and notes on Crime and Punishment, finds that
154 R. DIRKS
“the book was originally planned as a novel of ‘the Orthodox outlook’,

expressing ‘the essence of Orthodoxy’” (1991, 18). Dostoevsky is obvi-
ously not a theologian but an author whose works “radiate a profound and
mostly intuitive intimacy with Orthodox spirituality” (Grillaert 2016, 193).
The Russian Orthodox Church is more mystical and intuitive than the
Western Roman Catholic counterpart and its descendant churches. Often
members, official and unofficial, of the Orthodox or sobornaya Church
are connected by invisible threads; the Church “is both visible and invis-
ible”; and people who explore the “mystical experiences of faith” in their
own private lives often feel a connection with others who are on a similar
spiritual quest, as we observe in the otherworldly connection between
Clarissa and Septimus (Ware 1983, 247; Grillaert 2016, 187). Orthodox
Christians feel part of the All-Unity, or sobornost’, but also remain private,
or individual. Undivided, as the three persons of the Trinity, yet distinct
in their own way, “in the Church a multitude of human persons are
united in one, yet each preserves his personal diversity unimpaired” (Ware
1983, 244). One’s soul is a private matter, as Clarissa insists so often in
Mrs. Dalloway; one’s soul is to be explored privately or perhaps in con-
junction with another conscious soul. Clarissa and Septimus preserve
their autonomy and, at the same time, perceive and receive each other in
epiphanic moments.
Sobornost’ is a term somewhat difficult to explain. Two of Russia’s
prominent religious philosophers, Aleksei Khomiakov (1804–1860), a
theologian and co-founder of the Slavophile movement, and Nikolai
Berdyaev (1874–1948), a religious philosopher, point to the unique “har-
mony between unity and freedom” in sobornost’ (Moyse et al. 2016, xxxi).
The term implies communion with others that is freely chosen, creating a
harmonious togetherness and sense of belonging illuminated by God. The
root of the word, sobor (noun), means “cathedral,” “a gathering”; sobrat’
(verb) means “to collect,” or “unite,” and also “prepare,” even in the
spiritual sense, as in “preparing the soul” before death; soborovanie (noun)
means “extreme unction,” or the “anointing of the sick and dying”
(Ozhegov 1968, 729).1 In Mrs. Dalloway, the word has a particular sig-
nificance, as both Septimus and Clarissa are close to dying: the madman
with undiagnosed post-war trauma and a frail middle-aged woman with
heart disease. In this chapter, I use sobornost’ to refer to mysterious, divine
1
These definitions are taken from Ozhegov (1968); translations from Russian to English
are my own.
attraction of souls who are themselves otherworldly, prone to the contem-

plation of beauty and connectedness of all things, visible and invisible.
Dostoevsky, in Crime and Punishment, offers a vision of the soul
“deeply grounded in the spirit of sobornost’” (Moyse et al. 2016, xxxi).
Dostoevsky’s philosophy of religion is an artistic rendering of individuality
and connectedness as the writer stresses a mystical connection between
characters. In Crime and Punishment, sobornost’, privacy of the soul, the
death and rebirth of the soul, wisdom, and saintliness, are all connected.
After he commits two murders, Raskolnikov’s soul is in a state of estrange-
ment from sobornost’: “His soul had suddenly and consciously been
affected by a gloomy sense of alienation, compounded with one of an
agonizing, infinite solitariness” (Dostoevsky [1866] 1991, 144).
Solitariness, for Raskolnikov, does not mean autonomy or privacy of soul,
but both the lack of connection to anyone and the loss or death of his soul.
It is not only his crime that separates him from community but his belief,
based on the utilitarian argument that killing the old louse of a pawnbro-
ker is ridding the world of a parasite, so that others may have a better life
(van den Bercken 2011, 26). He convinces himself that he committed the
crime for the benefit of many: “It wasn’t a person but a principle that I
killed” (Dostoevsky [1866] 1991, 328). It is Sonya, the lowly, humiliated,
saintly figure, who makes Raskolnikov aware of the crime as a danger to
his soul and a loss of holy connectedness.
In Mrs. Dalloway, similarly, Clarissa experiences both separation from
and restoration of sobornost’. Initially, Clarissa, after not having been
invited to lunch at Lady Bruton’s, feels irreparably alone and old: She feels
as if she had been at a party (foreshadowing her own party that evening)
and now “had shut the door and gone out and stood alone, a single figure
against the appalling night,…feeling herself suddenly shrivelled, aged,
breastless” (Woolf [1925] 2005, 30). Clarissa’s solitude within her mar-
riage is a nun-like, virginal state: “Like a nun withdrawing,” she retreats to
her attic room, where her bed becomes “narrower and narrower” and the
sheets “tight,” where “she slept badly,” and where “she could not dispel a
virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet”
(30). Clarissa is cut off from everyone, reliving past connections with Sally
and Peter, before she intuits her affinity with Septimus.
Sonya, who carries the “yellow card” of prostitution, is one of Dostoevsky’s
most extraordinary yurodivyi or “holy fool” characters (Dostoevsky [1866]
1991: 45). Her name also signifies “Holy Wisdom,” as Sonya is diminutive
for Sophia; in Russian Sophiology, Divine Wisdom is personified in this
156 R. DIRKS
intercessory female figure. Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), a Russian reli-

gious philosopher and friend of Dostoevsky, and Sergius Bulgakov
(1871–1944), also a theologian and philosopher, write of Sophia as a per-
sonification of selfless love and wisdom that aids in the unification or union
between the human and the divine, and by extension, the divine connected-
ness between human beings. Bulgakov specifically links Sophia with sobor-
nost’, as someone who is a real presence on earth of evidence of divine love:
She is ousia, or God’s nature, the “universal cosmic sobornost’ of concrete
all-unity in divine love” ([1933] 2008, 104). In Crime and Punishment,
Sonya, or Hagia Sophia, is the conduit to God, through Lazarus and Christ,
for Raskolnikov. She makes Rodion Romanovich realize that, by killing the
pawnbroker, he killed his own soul and violated the holy cosmic order, or
the divine connectedness between all human beings, as Orthodoxy pro-
claims. It is not until the end of Part V, and with the intercession of Sonya,
the holy fool, that Raskolnikov realizes he has killed his own soul, as he
exclaims: “No, it was myself I killed, not the old woman!” (Dostoevsky
[1866] 1991, 488).
In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith is the yurodivyi or even Christ
figure who reminds Clarissa of the value of keeping her soul alive. Septimus is
“the giant mourner,” or Man of Sorrows, as Christ is customarily referred to
(Woolf [1925] 2005, 69); he is the prophet of “a new religion” of love (22):
“first, the trees are alive; next there is no crime; next love, universal love” (67);
moreover, “the unseen bade him…him who was the greatest of mankind,
Septimus…the Lord who has come to renew society” (25). He records rev-
elations: “Men must not cut down trees. There is a God,” and sparrows sang,
“from the trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk,
how there is no death” (24). Being a hierophant is never easy; “speaking the
truth of the world order is highly difficult, because it is a highly poetic art,
demanding” that the prophetic figure “work at the limit of his or her capaci-
ties” (McGuckin 2013, 43). Septimus perceives that “Leaves were alive; trees
were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own
body,” that everything is connected and part of divine pattern, reminiscent of
the Orthodox all-unity and interconnectedness (Woolf [1925] 2005, 22). In
Orthodoxy, as opposed to the Western tradition, “the Logos can be seen in
every created thing”; the fear of Pantheism as heathen does not pertain, for
the world is alive because of the divinity within and without, as below so it is
above (McKibben 2013, xiii). Septimus is “a young man who carries in him
the greatest message in the world”; he is “the most exalted of mankind; the
criminal who faced his judges,” as Septimus, “the Lord who had gone from
life to death,” faces his doctors as Christ faced Pontius Pilate (Woolf [1925]
2005: 81, 94–95). At the party, alone, Clarissa intuits Septimus’s motivation:
“She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She
felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away….He made her feel the beauty”
and gave her strength to not let her soul die (182).
The motif of death of the soul manifests itself in both Crime and
Punishment and Mrs. Dalloway; both novels can be read as narratives of
the journey of the soul, from death of the soul to transformation or invin-
cibility of the soul. In Crime and Punishment, fittingly, Raskolnikov and
Sonya read the story of Lazarus together, from St. John’s gospel; this
episode signals the beginning of his transformation for Rodion’s soul. It is
the central scene of the novel, where “the murderer and the prostitute
who had so strangely encountered each other,” read “of the eternal book”
by the “dim light” (Dostoevsky [1866] 1991, 388). Sonya begins to read
the story with great effort, beginning again and again, with trembling
voice, a spasming throat, and shaking hands. Raskolnikov intuits the
utmost importance of this passage to her, but also comes to the realization
that this is what has been missing in his arguments with himself and in his
appropriations of Western philosophies. He begins to understand and tells
Sonya: “None of them [others] would understand.…But I’ve understood.
You are necessary to me, and that’s why I’ve come to you” (388).
In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus is also the Christ figure who, through his
mad visions, raises his friend Evans, who died in battle, from the dead. In
the above passage where Septimus sees “the meadow of life…where the
dead walk,” he also sees Evans “behind the railings opposite.…Evans was
behind the railings!” (Woolf [1925] 2005, 24). Evans, Lazarus-like, comes
back from the dead even more clearly in a subsequent vision: “But the
branches parted. A man in grey was actually walking towards them. It was
Evans! But no mud was on him; no wounds; he was not changed,” echo-
ing the narrative in St. John’s Gospel where Lazarus “come[s] forth. And
he that was dead came forth,” after he had been dead for four days (John
11: 43–44). Evans returns in the midst of Septimus’s reverie on beauty
everywhere; “Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it,…
wherever he looked,…beauty sprang instantly” (68). The whole of cre-
ation is one beautiful creation:
To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the
sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in an out, round and
round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies
rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery,
dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now and again some
158 R. DIRKS
chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of
this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was
the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere. (68)
I present this passage, with its Keatsian echoes (Miss Pole once asked
Septimus if he were not like Keats) at length to contrast Septimus’s divine
vision with those, like Rezia and other onlookers, who merely see an
advertisement for toffee written in the sky. The dead are not excluded
from this panoply of divine beauty; Septimus “sang. Evans answered him
from behind the tree. The dead…Evans sang among the orchids” (68).
Septimus perceives the divine pattern in ordinary things around him;
through his madness or Christ-like sensibility he is able to perceive the
seen and unseen, and also the dead, as part of beauty and truth.
The Lazarus episode in Crime and Punishment, in addition to bringing
awareness to the death and possible revival of his soul, signals the begin-
ning of Raskolnikov’s eventual restoration into community. He admits to
Sonya that he has “severed his links with them”—his mother and sister
and friends (388). He begins to restore his connectedness to humanity
after he confesses his crime to Sonya. She receives the news with “a terrible
wail”; along with the pawnbroker, Raskolnikov had also killed her sister
Lizaveta who was Sonya’s friend. However, foremostly, Sonya exclaims,
“‘What is it, what have you gone and done to yourself?’” (479). With “a
face hideously distorted with despair,” Raskolnikov asks Sonya what he
should do (488). Holy Wisdom’s reply is:
‘Go immediately, this very moment, go and stand at the crossroads, bow
down, first kiss the ground that you’ve desecrated, and then bow to the
whole world, to all four points of the compass and tell everyone out loud: “I
have killed”! Then God will send you life again. Will you go? Will you?’ she
demanded, quivering all over, as though she were in the throes of a seizure,
gripping him by both hands, clenching them hard in her own and staring at
him with a gaze of fire. (489)
Raskolnikov’s soul is restored, through suffering and redemption and, not

least, Sonya’s love; he comes to realize that “in her lay his only hope and
salvation” (490). Raskolnikov is a nineteenth-century Lazarus, who must
be brought back to life by his belief in Christ and cosmic unity. “Sacred
wisdom” leads Raskolnikov to kiss the earth, accept love, and rejoin those
whose souls are alive. In Orthodoxy, God and human, especially the soul-
ful or enlightened human, whose soul has come out of the darkness, are
irrevocably in communion with each other (Michelson 2017, 60).
In Mrs. Dalloway, Peter Walsh pronounces the death of Clarissa’s soul
when she states that she would never again speak to a woman who had had
a child before marriage. Peter characterizes the youthful Clarissa as “timid;
hard;…arrogant; unimaginative; prudish” (58). Peter, at Bourton, had
been “so passionately in love with Clarissa,” but she had chosen Richard to
be her husband (57). Clarissa seemingly makes a “very shrewd” choice in
marrying Richard Dalloway, yet she, as well as Septimus Smith, marries out
of fear (74). The first two things Clarissa recalls on her walk on the very first
pages of Mrs. Dalloway are that summer at Bourton, and Peter Walsh
reminding her of “the defects of her own soul” (7). Clarissa learned to pro-
tect the privacy of her own soul, choosing to share her life with someone
who placed no demands upon her. Both Clarissa and Septimus live in the
past because that is when their souls were most alive. Septimus loved Miss
Isabel Pole, Shakespeare, poetry, and Evans, and Clarissa loved Sally, poetry,
and Peter. Now, Septimus is married to Rezia, whom he married out of fear
that he might not feel anything at all; Rezia, who does not perceive the
“harmonies” or “the sparrows” [being] “part of the pattern” (22). Clarissa
marries Richard out of the fear of feeling too much, as with Peter. One is
also struck by the similarity between Raskolnikov and Clarissa, who both
walk through a capital city, while those closest to them, Sonya Marmeladova
and Peter Walsh, notice the deaths of their beloveds’ souls. As Woolf has
identified the soul as chief character in Russian fiction, so she too makes it
her main focus in Mrs. Dalloway.
While in Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov and Sonya are together
visibly as well as in their private, shared faith, in Mrs. Dalloway the connec-
tion between Clarissa and Septimus is more suggestive and invisible. In
Mrs. Dalloway, a higher level of connection with the transcendent, divine,
or spiritual occurs to those who worry about the state of the soul, beauty,
poetry. These characters get flashes of insight, discerning the divine pat-
tern. Woolf’s expressions of the everyday appear in sacred language in
Mrs. Dalloway; Clarissa’s own theory regarding the transcendent is mani-
fested in her connectedness to everything and everyone in the “here, now,
in front of her” which she loved (9). Sacred meaning in Mrs. Dalloway is
found in the everyday: Clarissa’s impassioned cries that “she loved; life;
London; this moment of June” and the “waves of that divine vitality” on
which the leaves lift in the Park (4, 7). Even though “she must inevitably
cease completely,…somehow in the streets of London,…here, there she
160 R. DIRKS
survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part…of the
trees,…part of the people she had never met; being laid out there like a
mist between the people she knew best” (9). Kristina Groover writes that
the connection between Clarissa and other people—and especially between
her and Septimus—“this interstitial space between self and other” can be
defined “as sacred” (2011, 12). When Clarissa transforms into “a connec-
tive ‘mist,’” her spiritual self becomes part of “a spiritual dimension that
connects people to one another and to their environment” (Groover
2011, 12). This interconnectedness is aided by the stream of conscious-
ness method that marries thoughts and beings, united in the unseen web
of sacred community. For Woolf, “Sublime moments of being temporarily
allow the barriers between one mind and another to evaporate…in this
way, they form the basis for a sacred communion, an alternative” to church
communion (Lewis 2010, 153).
Woolf’s “excitement about liberating” dull Victorian and Edwardian
prose, and about the “potentialities of form” that Dostoevsky and other
Russian writers offered her, not only prompted vital changes in her narra-
tive style “during a pivotal phase of her artistic development,” but also
influenced her perception and representation of the sacred in her novels,
in particular Mrs. Dalloway (Rubenstein 2009, 157). What distinguishes
Woolf’s novel from that of her Edwardian contemporaries and earlier
Realist writers is her correlation between non-traditional narrative pat-
terns and non-traditional English beliefs. As opposed to the conventional
novel, the plot, or absence of it, in Mrs. Dalloway is driven by an obscure
spiritual connection between the main characters who actually never meet
but are linked in mysterious ways: “[I]n Mrs. Dalloway, relationships”
between words and people “are determined by coincidences in space ([the
characters’] paths cross), coincidence in time (someone doing something
at the same time as someone else), and coincidence in memory [Peter
thinking about Clarissa and remembering their time at Bourton and
Clarissa thinking of Peter as she walks through London]” (Love 1970,
49). It is a novel “of pattern, rather than plot” (Fletcher and Bradbury
1991, 408). Yet, the pattern eludes one at first; what gives the novel mean-
ing, what holds it together, is its own unseen pattern, hinted at by reli-
gious language. What give meaning and insight into the characters are the
intuitions of the unseen divine patterns they encounter in solitude and in
their connections to others in London, in their imaginations and everyday
associations.
Clarissa has strong moments of connectedness to the transcendent

world and to other characters throughout Mrs. Dalloway; Peter’s final
words in the novel—“For there she was”—affirm Clarissa’s embrace of
this transcendent, interconnected self (190). She lost her soul when she
married Richard Dalloway, and not Peter Walsh, because “with Peter
everything had to be shared; everything gone into” (7). Peter demands
complete openness, sharing, intimacy, connection, and soulfulness. Before
she married Richard, Clarissa “read Plato in bed before breakfast; read
Morris; read Shelley by the hour” (33). But now, when she returns from
her walk, to the house she shares with Richard, “It was all over for her.
The sheet [of her single bed in the attic] was stretched and the bed nar-
row” (46). The wild and bohemian friend of her youth Sally Seton…
“implored [Peter]…to carry off Clarissa, to save her from the Hughs and
the Dalloways and all the other ‘perfect gentlemen’ who would ‘stifle her
soul’ (she wrote reams of poetry in those days), make a mere hostess of
her…” (74). Then, Clarissa had not had the courage for an authentic life.
However, it takes the yurodivyi, or Christ-like holy fool protagonist of
Woolf’s novel, to affirm Clarissa’s courageous and authentic self. Septimus
Warren Smith, the shell-shocked, mad poet soldier, “aged about thirty,
pale-faced,…wearing a shabby overcoat” (14) with whom Clarissa senses
a connection throughout the novel, is Clarissa’s uncanny double. Their
affinity is manifested through art: most obviously Shakespeare (both recite
the line from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: “Fear no more the heat o’ the
sun”) and their love of trees (seat of the soul). Earlier on, I referred to a
passage from the novel wherein Clarissa appears as mist in the trees, and
Septimus, in turn, appears as a white coverlet of snow; both have reason to
fear the heat of the sun but come to a point where they no longer fear
death. Some of Woolf’s most recurrent religious language appears around
descriptions of Septimus: “Look the unseen bade him,…the greatest of
mankind, Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had
come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only
by the sun, for ever unwashed, suffering for ever, the scapegoat, the eter-
nal sufferer” (25). Clarissa senses his mission in the end, when she feels
Septimus when she is alone in her room, as she hears of his death at her
party. She sees Septimus’s suicide as a victory: “Death was defiance. Death
was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reach-
ing the centre which, mystically, evaded them” (180). Moreover,
Septimus’s death reminded her that “[a] thing there was that mattered.…
This he had preserved” (180). Septimus, the Christ figure, the scapegoat
162 R. DIRKS
“sacrifice[s] his body to save the privacy of his soul” and “has preserved his
autonomy, his idealism, and his spiritual freedom” (Henke 1981: 140,
143). Clarissa had not had the courage for an authentic life until the end,
after Septimus’s sacrificial death. In the end, Clarissa comes back to Peter,
to Sally, to herself: “For there she was” is how the novel ends.
Clarissa’s version of sobornost’, her “‘theory’ of unconscious connec-
tions between humans that…stills the suffering of daily life and contests
the objectification of human beings” (Stables 2009, 341) is a striking way
of explaining the strong connections between protagonists, who never
meet and characters who ought to be together. These connections protect
Clarissa and Septimus from the likes of Drs Bradshaw and Holmes and
Miss Kilman. Now, briefly, I want to move from self-imposed deaths of
soul (by Raskolnikov and Clarissa) to the enemies of the soul in Mrs.
Dalloway, for the novel also concerns itself with the lethal struggle between
those who guard the privacy and sanctity of the soul—Clarissa and
Septimus—and those who are set on imposing their beliefs upon others—
Miss Kilman and the doctors. These enemies of the soul violently encroach
into the private space of the soul of others; they represent the dogmatic
and intolerant religions that Woolf find so objectionable.
Dr William Bradshaw, “the priest of science” (92), “who…never had
time for reading” (95), resents the upstart intellectual and cultural educa-
tion of Septimus and plans to stamp it out, along with what the doctor
perceives to be his patient’s Christ complex: “[T]hese prophetic Christs
and Christesses…should drink milk in bed, as Sir William ordered” (97).
According to Dr Bradshaw, once “a man comes into your room and says
he is Christ (a common delusion), and had a message…you…order rest in
bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without
books…” (96–97). This rich man’s doctor, under the “concealed…plau-
sible disguise; some venerable name; [such as] love, duty, sacrifice,”
preached proportion [his right to seclude the lunatics in England] and
conversion to his unbending will (98). At her party, “Clarissa, feeling
‘somehow very like him [Septimus]’ (182), intuits that his ‘soul’ had been
forced by someone like Sir William Bradshaw, who made his life ‘intoler-
able’” (180; Sim 195).
Miss Kilman represents a vulgar aberration of the sanctity of the soul as
expressed through her dogmatic zeal. “The pious and pathetic Miss
Kilman” (Lewis 2010, 154), forcing conversion upon Clarissa’s daughter,
lacks companionship and love and, in reality, desires to have dominion
over another creature. Clarissa believes that religious folk like Miss Kilman
are “callous” with “all her soul rusted…poor embittered unfortunate crea-
ture!”; having turned to God out of desperation and her own ugliness of
soul, she represents the evangelical segment of believers that Woolf found
so abhorrent (11, 12). In more apocalyptic language, intrusive thoughts
of Miss Kilman as Clarissa walks in the divine morning “feel [like] hooves
planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul” (12).
Miss Kilman’s communion is a forced one, borne out of a terrible need for
companionship. Phyllis Rose writes, “Fanatics and ideologues like Miss
Kilman commit the crime of ‘forcing’ the soul”; she and the doctors
“share a lack of respect for the privacy of the soul” (134). It is no wonder,
then, that alternative forms of religion, in this case, the belief in the auton-
omy of the soul and sobornost’ by way of Dostoevsky, find a favourable
response in Woolf. Clarissa’s theory of unconscious transcendent connec-
tions between human beings and all the rest of living things like trees
speaks to her embracing of Orthodox thought, complemented by her
ardent belief in the privacy of one’s soul.
Orthodoxy, which is both highly personal and communal at the
same time, would have suited Clarissa very well. It emphasizes intuitive
contemplation, diversity, individuality, and the ability “to distinguish as
well as unit[e]” (Tracy 2011, 3). As a mystic atheist (Gillespie 2010,
76), Woolf, with an appreciation for her aunt’s Quakerism and a devout
belief in the human soul, reveals why the synergistic worldview would
appeal to her. Andrew McNeillie writes that “Woolf ’s version of tran-
scendental reality was hybrid, emphatically secular, yet also mystical”
(2010, 17). Her concerns with the representation of the individual soul
stem from reading Dostoevsky. Woolf ’s appropriation of Dostoevsky’s
artistic rendering of sobornost’ lends Mrs. Dalloway a vitality, a novelis-
tic expression of the spiritual in a new way. The struggle of her pro-
tagonists is for the integrity of their individual souls. Both Raskolnikov
and Clarissa kill or lose their souls through murder or marriage for
status, respectively, but also recover their souls by a return to them-
selves, choosing Divine Wisdom and rejecting the tyranny of the con-
verters. Woolf ’s musings upon the soul in Mrs. Dalloway, and more
specifically, the mysterious connectedness to others, are inspired by her
readings of Dostoevsky, and especially by his idea, stemming from
Orthodoxy, of holy connectedness.
164 R. DIRKS
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Bulgakov, Sergius. [1933] 2008. The Lamb of God. Trans. Boris Jakim. Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans. Originally Published as Agnets Bozhyi.
Dalgarno, Emily. 2012. Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language. Cambridge:
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Fletcher, John, and Malcolm Bradbury. 1991. The Introverted Novel. In
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Sobornost: Conversations between Karl Barth and the Russian Orthodox
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ebooks@Adelaide. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91c/
chapter16.html
CHAPTER 10
“She heard the first words”: Lesbian

Subjectivity and Prophetic Discourse
in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and
Between the Acts
Margaret Sullivan
As Virginia Woolf wrote her final lesbian subject—Between the Acts’ Miss
La Trobe—she drew on many of the characteristics that, by the time of the
novel’s publication in 1941, had marked the “invert”: La Trobe’s “thick
ankles,” “sturdy shoes,” and the designation, used by those around her, as
“bossy” all create a version of a stereotypically mannish lesbian (Woolf
[1941] 1969, 63). Such an overtly lesbian subject might appear to have
little in common with an earlier lesbian character: Rhoda from The Waves.
Rhoda’s woman-centered desire is written only subtly: her attraction to
Miss Lambert, for example, as well as her memories of Miss Lambert’s
purple ring with its “amorous” light (Woolf [1931]1959, 33) create what
Annette Oxindine perceptively calls a “heavily coded” treatment of a
M. Sullivan (*)
Marshall University, Huntington, WV, USA

168 M. SULLIVAN
woman who desires other women (1997, 24).1 Yet, La Trobe’s role as a
lesbian artist and prophetic disruptor of English patriarchal history recon-
ceptualizes what, I argue, is central to Rhoda’s story: Rhoda as a lesbian
mystic, as a challenger to inherited religious texts, specifically the Biblical
book of Genesis and the story of the Garden. Not only does Rhoda lesbi-
anize Eden, centering it around her beloved Miss Lambert, but one of her
final utterances—“let there be rose leaves, let there be vine leaves”—
explicitly appropriates the authority of God-the-Father’s creative voice
([1931]1959, 204). Rhoda dies, however, removed from the text in a
suicide that announces the continuing power of Christianity’s hegemonic
discourse. With La Trobe, Woolf returns to the texts of Christian tradi-
tion, but now uses the lesbian to fragment, and in fact make illogical,
those very texts. As La Trobe’s voice echoes “from the bushes,” substitut-
ing “gun slayers” for “sheep,” and as she parodies English heterosexist
history ([1941] (1969, 187), La Trobe functions as an iconoclastic subject
akin to what Walter Brueggeman says of prophets: they “evoke a percep-
tion alternative to the dominant culture around [them]” (2001, x).
Placing La Trobe’s disruptive religious positioning alongside Rhoda’s
fragile mysticism produces compelling insight into Woolf’s changing per-
ception of how the female “Outsider” prophet might function. Amid the
decade of political and cultural upheaval that separates La Trobe (1941)
from Rhoda (1931), Woolf mobilizes the lesbian and prophetic voice for
political and cultural action. Through Miss La Trobe, Woolf envisions an
increasingly crucial politico-prophetic role for the lesbian Outsider.
An essay Woolf wrote during the interwar period, “The Artist and
Politics,” establishes her recognition that the artist must assume a political
positioning. Written in response to the spread of fascism across Europe,
Woolf’s piece negotiates between the artist as propagandist (“you shall
only practise your art […] at our bidding”) (1948, 228) and apolitical
observer (“to mix art with politics […] was to adulterate it”) (226).2 While
Woolf refrains from advocating for the artist, across all eras, as a fully
engaged political actor, she nonetheless indicates that for her contempo-
rary artist, a political positioning has become a necessity. “The artist is
forced to take part in politics,” Woolf states, and further explains that the
1
See Weil (1997, 241) for commentary on La Trobe as “the only ‘out’ lesbian in Woolf’s
fictional repertoire.”
2
Woolf’s essay was written for, and initially published in, the communist newspaper The
Daily Worker. For additional discussion of Woolf’s essay, see Briggs (2006), Marcus (1977).
10 “SHE HEARD THE FIRST WORDS”: LESBIAN SUBJECTIVITY… 169
artist “even if he be ineffective, is by no means apathetic” (227). As Woolf

continues, she makes clear that her claims are tied to the rise of authoritar-
ian regimes. Repeating three times, in one paragraph, the paired threats she
has spotted—“Germany and Spain,” “Hitler and Mussolini,” and “com-
munism and fascism”—Woolf textualizes the inescapability of those threats.
By further stating that the artist’s very survival is at risk (“in peril”), Woolf’s
solidifies her point: the interwar period’s artist has the right, even the duty,
to speak about the political climate (228). The artist is a fighter against
oppressive regimes, and the war is waged through language.
Woolf’s decisions regarding the lesbian subject can be traced to her
intellectual contemporaries, specifically female writers who used the les-
bian literary subject to challenge institutional operations and structures.
In the aftermath of Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 trial, writers who composed the
lesbian subject were witnessing, as Laura Doan explains, “the beginning of
an important shift in the visibility of lesbianism in English legal discourse
and its public arena” (2001, 32). Lesbian subcultures—Natalie Barney’s
Paris salon, for instance, and Sylvia Beach’s bookstore—also contributed
to changing the public discourse. Such subcultural spaces, as they offered
material locations for gathering, helped in solidifying a sense of commu-
nity, as Joanne Winning perceptively notes: “these spaces function in such
a way that [participants] […] can actively control cultural production”
(2013, 142). In sum, a network was developing, and with it an increased
confidence in the viability of a lesbian identity. The period’s lesbian writers
were taking on institutions that threatened to thwart this very progress.
Djuna Barnes did just that with Nightwood (1936), in which she situated
her novel’s dispossessed characters—ranging from lesbians to the disabled
to a transvestite—against their historical persecution, figuring “by
absence,” as Jane Marcus famously claims, “the authoritarian dominators
in Europe in the 1930s, the sexual and political fascists” (1991, 221).
Sylvia Townsend Warner took a similar anti-institutional track when, in
Summer Will Show (1936), she created a lesbian character who left her
aristocratic life to pursue a Marxist revolution, only to face immense loss
and ultimately death, thus illumining the failure of a totalitarian system.
In a similar vein, lesbian authors of the period set themselves to unearth-
ing the subversive potential of Roman Catholicism’s female saints. In
her libretto Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), Gertrude Stein linked the
sixteenth-century saint and Doctor of the Church, Teresa of Avila, with
the (imagined, female) St. Settlement. When performed, the opera’s
Tableau VI, directly recalled Bernini’s famous sculpture of Teresa’s
170 M. SULLIVAN
orgasmic state of rapture: “St. Teresa II in ecstasy” (Thomson 2016, 23).

The result was that Stein claimed Teresa, as Jane Davison explains, for a
non- normative audience: “Four Saints provided Stein with a vehicle
through which to convey her coded meanings to an emergent lesbian
audience” (2017, 114). Irish writer Kate O’Brien took a similar position
on Teresa of Avila. She too saw Teresa as a rebellious force. In her 1937
work Farewell Spain, O’Brien portrayed Teresa as resistant to authority:
“She was everything … preacher, teacher, lawyer, cashier, politician, poet,
tramp … She was a fighter and a schemer …” ([1937]2006, 109–110).
Perhaps most significant, however, in her portrayal of the radical female
religious, was a person important to Woolf both personally and profes-
sionally: Vita Sackville-West. In Saint Joan of Arc (1936), Sackville-West
highlights Joan’s woman-centered desire and her challenges to gendered
expectations: Joan sleeping with Marguerite La Touroulde “on terms of
considerable intimacy,” for instance, and choosing masculine clothing not
for practicality but rather as a “matter of principle” (101, 319). What
comes of such challenges to normative sexual and gender identities,
Sackville-West indicates, is liberatory opportunity: “[Joan of Arc] makes
us think; she makes us question. She uncovers the dark places into which
we may fear to look” (343).
All of these literary endeavors, ones that shaped the climate in which
Woolf was living, reading, and thinking, share an interest in framing the
non-normative woman as disruptor of patrilineal tradition. Woolf’s Three
Guineas (1938) demonstrates that she too found in the disruptive woman
(the Outsider, as Woolf calls her) potential critiques of religious and patri-
archal systems. In an argument that revolves around linguistic engage-
ment, Woolf makes the point that the resistant Outsider must speak, yet
doing so brings intrinsic challenges. Woolf’s words about her famous
“Society of Outsiders” are useful for spotting the dynamic at work: “By
criticizing religion they would attempt to free the religious spirit from its
present servitude, and would help, if need be, to create a new religion
based, it might well be, upon the New Testament but, it might well be
very different from the religion now erected upon that basis” (1938, 113).
Clearly, Woolf sees this resistant female as locating, in her critiques of reli-
gious tradition, a new sort of authenticity, what Christine Froula aptly calls
“a radical interpretation of the Gospels and the sacred” (2005, 262).
Woolf’s linguistic choices, however, suggest another point of view. Writing
a winding sentence, one in which prepositions continually interrupt prog-
ress, and the twice-repeated “might well be” invokes only conditionals
and possibilities, Woolf suggests that no direct, linear progress attends to
her goal. Aestheticizing hesitancy, Woolf complicates this new religion.

“Elasticity is essential” she states only a few lines later, thus confirming
that these Outsiders usefully recognize the uncertainty inherent to any
innovative religio-cultural formation (1938, 113).
Woolf further develops her point about the risk of vocal opposition as
she contrasts Paul’s proclamation that women preachers must be suitably
veiled with the women Outsiders who have used their voices to revise the
socio-religious order. She calls up early church “prophetesses”—among
them Lydia, Chloe, and Euodia—and explains that their words disap-
peared, “became extinct,” as they were expelled from their teaching posi-
tions in the Church (Woolf 1938, 122). Woolf also invokes a deaconess,
whose prayer she quotes (“she pray[ed] that the Church would grant unto
her the Holy Spirit”) but makes the point that this woman is unnamed,
anonymous (123). Woolf does, however, locate one successful voice:
Emily Bronte, whom Woolf calls “the spiritual descendant of some ancient
prophetess.” (124). Recounting Bronte’s words, and the personal pro-
nouns that suggest a faith unbeholden to ecclesial Church—“No coward
soul is mine, /No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere;/I see
Heaven’s glories shine”—Woolf characterizes Bronte, this speaker about
her religion, her experience of heaven, as an authoritative speaker, a
“prophetess” uncontained by silencing structures (123).
Thus Woolf finds, in these women attempting to communicate despite
authoritarian attempts at quieting them, a potential counter to an oppres-
sive ecclesial tradition. Woolf’s rhetorical choices themselves further this
stance: creating a text in which words seem endlessly to proliferate, where
paragraph breaks are a rare occurrence, and repetition abounds, Woolf,
just like her textual subjects, refuses to stop speaking. Elsewhere recom-
mending that the Outsider “testify from her own experience” and commit
“to a conspiracy, not of silence, but of speech,” Woolf, through both form
and content, insists that linguistic engagement is vital, if this Outsider will
stake out a place for herself (124).
While Woolf’s Outsider is not directly identified with lesbian subjectiv-
ity, she shares a proximity to figural representations of a lesbian-identified
woman. The Outsider is opposed to systems of patriarchy, to the kinship
systems that Gayle Rubin calls “social machinery,” “a set of arrangements
by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is
shaped by human, social intervention” (1975, 165). When biological
procreation extends into a mode of socio-political organization, an implic-
itly heterosexual paradigm takes shape. Georgia Johnston perceptively
172 M. SULLIVAN
summarizes the compulsory heterosexuality that develops, and against

which the Outsider is situated: “Woolf exposes the patriarchy as a con-
structed political force, with its own reproductive procedures. If the fam-
ily romance worked successfully, a child would become heterosexual and
a daughter would become dependent” (2007, 84).
With the above background in mind—Woolf’s idea of the lesbian sub-
ject as disruptor of inherited Christian and patriarchal tradition and her
determination that the Outsider woman must speak—let us return to The
Waves and Between the Acts, specifically the paired narratives of two les-
bian, prophetic subjects: Rhoda and Miss La Trobe. Among Rhoda’s first
remarks in The Waves are words that illumine her character: “The birds
sang in chorus first,” she says. “Off they fly, off they fly like a fling of seed.
But one sings by the bedroom window alone” (Woolf [1931]1959, 10).
Rhoda’s words, even before the text of The Waves has begun to unfold,
hint that her experience will resist location in logical, linguistic formula-
tions. Hearing both birdsong and a subtly Greek “chorus” (and thus those
wise speakers from Greek tragedies) in sounds that escape human lan-
guage, Rhoda accesses a meaning unavailable to most listeners. Also
emerging is Rhoda’s irrefutable singularity, an “alone[ness]” that sepa-
rates her—just as it separates that one bird, still singing—from those who
have left. Intensely reflective about what cannot be named, and withdraw-
ing into her own difference, Rhoda is uncontained by the limits of reason.
The mystical Rhoda appears in a text, The Waves, with vast religious
resonances. Christine Froula has rightly called The Waves a “transfigura-
tion of Genesis 1.1,” Woolf’s “reimagination of the garden” (1988, 215),
and Julia Briggs has wondered if the text might be a “variet[y] of reli-
gious experience” (2006, 247). But Rhoda’s desire extends into realms
both spiritual and physical. Desiring, for much of the novel, Miss Lambert,
whom she envisions as encased in a “purple light,” an “amorous light,”
Rhoda also is lesbian (Woolf [1931]1959, 33). Rhoda’s narrative signifi-
cance depends on joining the two subjectivities: lesbian Outsider interwo-
ven with consummate mystic (and striving to enunciate her reordering of
foundational Christian narratives), Rhoda foregrounds both the desire
implicit in the mystical encounter and the difficulty, even the danger, of
rethinking inherited belief systems. That, ultimately, she is unsuccessful, is
itself instructive: brave Outsider and desiring woman, Rhoda ultimately
illumines the deeply embedded power of inherited Christian narratives.
The lady at Elvedon, a figure sharing Rhoda’s challenge to Judeo-

Christian narrative tradition, hints at a stagnation attendant to originating
religious stories. The lady’s location, Elvedon, is marked by significant bib-
lical inversions.3 Rather than the abundant foliage of Eden—“every plant
yielding seed,” “every tree with seed in its fruit” (Genesis 1:29, NRSV)—
Elvedon evidences degeneration: “some primeval fir cone falling to rot”
(Woolf 1931, 17). Additionally, both gardens contain apples, yet while
Eden’s apples are “pleasant to the sight and good for food” (Genesis 2:9,
NRSV), Elvedon’s are “rotten” and “age[d]” (Woolf [1931]1959, 17).
The children are expelled from the garden, just as were Adam and Eve, yet
at Elvedon is terror, the fear that in the garden is a force of death “Run!
[…] We shall be shot […]. We are in a hostile country” (17). Christine
Froula argues that Elvedon is “a rewriting of Genesis […] with a symmetri-
cally exclusive female authority” (1988, 215), and Briggs explains that
Elvedon “is close to the Biblical Genesis”; it “concerns flight from the
garden” (2006, 243). Both critics offer valuable interpretations. Indeed,
Elvedon calls up, only to reconfigure, Genesis, the creation myth, and (in
Woolf’s words) the “story of the world from the beginning” (1976, 6).
The lady’s act of writing furthers the problematic religious discourse
already developing. Situated at the center of this inverted Eden—“over
the wall […] between two long windows, writing”—the lady is an arche-
typal author, a creator. As Briggs puts it, she “creates the very characters
who are watching her” (2006, 245). As such, the lady connects with a
foundational Judeo-Christian figuration: the implicitly male God-the-
Father who spoke the world into being. Much about the lady, however,
demonstrates her distance from the originating story. She is unnamed, for
instance, and undescribed physically—effectively, denied representation in
this patriarchal shell of a story. Additionally, the lady makes no progress
with her writing: although she reappears several times, Woolf’s subsequent
designations repeat, almost verbatim, the original citation: “a woman sat
at a table writing” (124), “the lady sat writing” (240). Thus the lady is a
static subject: engaged in a cultural struggle with a foundational Judeo-
Christian text, the lady is trapped in her garden.
Soon, Rhoda narrates her own garden, one that transforms the lady’s
stagnating space, suggesting the possibility of liberatory change. Rhoda
substitutes a porous gate for Elvedon’s impassable wall, for example, and
3
For a discussion of Elvedon, Biblical references, and Rhoda’s soliloquy in a different
context, see Sullivan (2011).
174 M. SULLIVAN
a “luminous” coloring (45) replaces the light that was earlier “gloom[y]”
and “fitful” (14). A “pond” now substitutes for the dry land formerly
“swept” by the gardeners, and even the amphibians of this second garden
recall the first, yet with a difference (17). Unlike Elvedon’s “giant toad
[flopped] in the undergrowth” (17), with its suggestion of monstrosity,
even a state near death, Rhoda’s new garden has a less ominous “frog”
gently perched on a leaf (45). Perhaps most notable is Rhoda’s relentless
return to the term “change,” and how—always—Miss Lambert is its
agent. “Everything changes and becomes luminous […] when Miss
Lambert passes,” she states, as well as “suppose she saw that daisy, it would
change”; “wherever she goes, things are changed under her eyes”; “she
sees a frog on a leaf, and that will change”; and “she makes the daisy
change” (45). By pinning such adjustments to the lady’s garden on the
woman she desires, Rhoda makes the point that hers is a lesbianized chal-
lenge to Eden’s shaping myth. Rhoda’s garden, because it foregrounds
female-centered desire, has “changed” the originating text. Here we are
invited to read differently. This sacred garden, it seems, will not be defined
by blissful heterosexual union.
Such seeming bliss makes Miss Lambert’s startling disappearance from
the text into a troubling commentary on the power of Eden’s implicitly
heterosexual orientation (“male and female he created them,” as Genesis
1 puts it) (Genesis 1:27, NRSV). Rhoda’s next soliloquy references “Miss
Lambert, […] vanishing down the corridor,” but after that she simply is
gone. In a strange choice, then, Woolf installs a puzzling emptiness in
what seemed to be shaping up as a woman’s paradise. If, as Suzanne Raitt
argues, other lesbian writers reconfigured Eden—“[writers] looked to the
rural setting for images of an originary, Edenic relationship, […] for a
nostalgic golden world, pre-war, Edwardian”—then Woolf’s decision to
eliminate Miss Lambert complicates this paradigm (1993, 13). By creating
a woman’s retreat, but then backing away from that space, Woolf high-
lights the impossibility of reshaping (again, “changing”) the universalizing
heterosexism implicit in the garden’s ideology.
Among Rhoda’s final utterances are words that solidify the continuing
power of originating, hegemonic discourses. “Let there be rose leaves; let
there be vine leaves,” Rhoda says, “I covered the whole street, Oxford
Street and Piccadilly Circus, with the blaze and ripple of my mind, with
rose leaves and vine leaves” (204). Rhoda’s words manipulate the point of
view implicit in her previous “changes” to the garden. Now speaking as an
“I,” and thus as a unified, self-reflective subject, Rhoda seizes for herself the
language God-the-Father used in Genesis 1. In the Biblical creation myth,
God created by repeating, seven times, some version of the phrase “let
there be.” “Let there be light,” God said, as well as a string of other “let
there be” utterances, ones that culminate in the pinnacle of creation: God
made man and woman—Adam and Eve—the first, paradigmatic hetero-
sexual couple, and the couple that God, in Genesis 1.22, commanded to
“be fruitful and multiply.”4 Rhoda, however, speaks into being not the first
heterosexual couple, but rather a construction central to her identificatory
system: the roses that, for centuries, have evoked blossoming female sexual
desire.5 Again, therefore, Rhoda lesbianizes an originating Biblical text; she
locates, for her lesbian “I,” a place in the paradigmatic heterosexual story. It
might therefore seem that Rhoda, finally, has displaced the power of a foun-
dational heterotext. But, what soon follows for her—a suicide that Woolf
chooses not even to write—demonstrates just the opposite. Rhoda’s rapid
removal announces that Rhoda, this lesbian creative force, simply cannot
transgress the power of God-the-Father’s hegemonic discourse.
The Waves’ concluding soliloquy, Bernard’s “summing up,” joins with
Rhoda’s religious refigurations as an indicator that Rhoda, if she fails to
disrupt patriarchy’s authoritative citations, exists only as subordinated
subject (238). Words and phrases associated with Rhoda pepper Bernard’s
address. Bernard remarks on the “arrows of sensation” he experiences,
for instance, and thus calls up Rhoda, who describes herself as “pierce[d]
[by] a million arrows” (239, 105). Bernard also associates himself with
water: he remarks on the “deep below,” the “rushing stream of broken
dreams,” and concludes that “we float,” “we float” (258). As Annette
Oxindine has proven, water permeates Rhoda’s story, especially Woolf’s
portrayal of her lesbian desire: from the “flow of [her] being, a deep
stream [that] presses” to the “tight-folded, flooding free,” water signifies
Rhoda as desiring woman (57). Rhoda also appears when Bernard, in a
series of remarks devoid of his usual self-assurance, states that he “could
not collect himself,” “could not recover from that dissipation” (279) and
4
Also relevant is Augustine of Hippo’s idea, in On the Good of Marriage, that procreation
is the highest good in marriage, which is referenced in Pope Pius XI’s encyclical, Casti
Connubii, and Thomas Aquinas’s similar proclamation: “marriage is chiefly directed to the
begetting of offspring.” See Augustine of Hippo (1955), Pius XI (1930) and Aquinas
(1922).
5
See Bennett (1993).
176 M. SULLIVAN
“finds himself failing” (282).6 Such phrases evoke Rhoda, specifically her
repeated declaration that she has “no face” (33), “no body” (43), and has
suffered the “dissolution of [her] soul” (204). While several critics read
Bernard’s soliloquy as the novel’s penultimate articulation of a unified
“we,” I want to concentrate on Bernard’s self-proclaimed intention to
“order” all the characters’ stories, to “sum [them] up” (239) and tell the
story that happened “in the beginning” (105).7 Joining with Jane Marcus
and Gabrielle McIntire, I see Bernard’s final statement as a demonstra-
tion of his “literary hegemony” (Marcus 1992, 402), his assumption of
“the point of view of an author-god” (McIntire 2005, 34). Determining
what will, or will not, be said of these varied lives, as well as how those
lives will be interpreted, Bernard subsumes others into his own ideologi-
cal formation. Thus, although Rhoda resurfaces in Bernard’s final “order-
ing,” her reappearance—just as with her reconfiguration of Biblical
narratives—is contained within a deeply patriarchal discursive system.8
That system is Bernard’s, one derived from a history that has endowed
him the right to speak of those around him. No longer trying to disrupt
patriarchal tradition, Rhoda has been made docile, curtailed by the
authority of the ordering male.
Rhoda’s narrative, from her garden to her suicide to her reappearance
in Bernard’s soliloquy, establishes that chipping away at tradition, if such
efforts fail to displace an existing hierarchical framework, reinscribes the
power of the originating story. Although Rhoda briefly seizes the author-
ity of Biblical heterotexts, she does not survive the experience. And, while
Rhoda’s voice dots Bernard’s final soliloquy, all its disruptive power is
gone. Both points indicate that Rhoda’s discursive strategies, while admi-
rable in their liberatory potential, ultimately do little to displace the mas-
tery of patriarchal, Western “ordering” systems. “Singing by [her] window
alone,” Rhoda’s efforts are futile when faced with the power of Western,
patrilineal tradition (11).
Almost 10 years later, in Between the Acts, Woolf returned to the les-
bian prophetic figure, this time with Miss La Trobe. As has been well
established, Between the Acts is deeply engaged with the political and
6
Andrea Harris and Meg Jensen present convincing readings of Rhoda’s reappearance in
Bernard’s final soliloquy. See Harris (2000) and Jensen (2007). Jensen has noted the similar-
ity between Rhoda’s assertion that “my spine melts like soft wax” and Bernard’s “the wax
that coats the spine melted” (2007, 122).
7
See Hussey (1986), Richter (2015), and Warner (1987).
8
See Bernard’s remark: “how impossible to order them rightly” (256).
cultural turmoil that had overtaken Europe. Hitler had been named
Führer of Germany, concentration camps had been established at loca-
tions including Dachau and Buchenwald, and Hitler and Mussolini had
formed the Rome-Berlin axis. At the same time, Woolf (as she suggested
in “The Artist and Politics”) was using her art, specifically the butch, les-
bian figure of Miss La Trobe, as a site of resistance. Generating, but then
fragmenting, her own version of English heterosexist history, and using
that creation to challenge the self-perceptions of her pageant’s audience,
La Trobe ultimately functions as a disruptor of the patriarchy that, as
Woolf indicated in Three Guineas, culminates in fascism.9
La Trobe’s “tampering with the expected sequence” results also in her
position as prophetic, activist voice (Woolf [1929]1981, 89). By the end
of La Trobe’s pageant, when her voice echoes “from the bushes” in a
“loud-speaking affirmation” (Woolf [1941] 1969), she delivers a reconfig-
ured sermon similar to the preacherly utterances that Pericles Lewis says
characterize religious discourse in Modernist novels. Analyzing the multi-
layered and critically positioned sermons in texts such as Joyce’s A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man and Barnes’s Nightwood, Lewis notes the
authors’ complex attitude toward religious speech: “In each case, although
great parodic energy goes in to the mimicking of the preacher’s voice, the
sermons are not quite parodies. The authors of these novels seem to stand
in awe of the pure power of the preacher’s words” (2010, 24). Lewis’s
point aligns with what Brueggeman says of prophetic speech: “acts of
imagination [that] offer alternative worlds” (2001, x). Both authors spot
a contestatory element in religio-prophetic speech. Whether parodying
traditional ecclesial forms or energizing the listener to imagine other ways
of living, prophetic utterances challenge listeners to abandon subservience
before a dominant culture. Connecting prophecy’s active cultural chal-
lenges with La Trobe’s address helps in following her as a disruptive
prophet. When La Trobe recruits a heteronormative audience to act a
pageant that parodies their own history, and when she inserts into that
strange spectacle a jumbled, yet far from random, manifesto, La Trobe
intervenes in the system with the goal of overturning it. Anticipating later
liberation theologians, with their push for interpreting religion through
the eyes of the marginalized, La Trobe demands that her audience see,
from the specific, social perspective of a lesbian “outsider,” the oppression
created by their long, heterosexist history.
There are many strong analyses of La Trobe and the dynamics of dispersal and unity.
9
Among them are: Eisenberg (1981), Zwerdling (1986), and de Gay (2006).
178 M. SULLIVAN
The use of fragments and interruptions as structuring devices in Between

the Acts suggests Woolf’s resistance to totalization. The title itself evokes
the spaces between certainties; as Geoffrey Hartman says, “the whole
novel turns on what is between the acts” (1961, 28). Additionally, ellipses
are common across Woolf’s oeuvre, but in Between the Acts, Woolf makes
her most extensive use of such textual interruptions. “There is, in fact, no
other novel that uses the ellipsis so freely,” James Naremore explains
(1973, 281). The novel contains no chapter breaks, furthermore, and the
lack of transitions between scenes create narrative disruptions.10 Even the
novel’s repeated references to the gramophone, to the music that, as Woolf
puts it, “makes us see the hidden,” reinforces an interest in significatory
gaps ([1941] 1969, 120). Calling up the famous dictum, variously attrib-
uted to Mozart and Debussy, that “music is not in the notes, but in the
silence between them,” the novel’s repeated references to music suggest
that the open spaces in a piece’s composition are key to shaping that very
composition. At work, in all these instances, is a Heidegger-like “void
[that] does the vessel’s holding,” or the role of the non-representable in
shaping the thing-ness of an item (Heidegger 1971, 167).
Miss La Trobe, from the moment she enters Between the Acts, is con-
nected with such acts of omission. Uttering, as her first words, a sentence
fragment (“The very place”), then trailing off into those ever-present
ellipses (“Winding in and out between the trees …”) and waving her hand
at the “bare,” “leafless” trees, La Trobe’s entry into textual representation
depends on what is not present ([1941]1969, 57). The narrative voice’s
rumination on her (“Where did she come from?” [57], “Very little was
actually known about her” [58]) further develops La Trobe as existing in
the margins of a significatory system.11 Radically dependent, as a textual
subject, on the act of exclusion, this “outsider” figure signals deliberate
gaps in the communication of meaning.
The villagers’ reaction to La Trobe, whom they see as “all agog to get
things up,” continues to develop her as a figure of difference (1941, 57).
Responding to La Trobe’s idea for a pageant, the crowd’s utterances evi-
dence a startling repetition (six times in one page) of the term “we” (59).
10
I am building on many scholars who have made similar observations. For additional
discussion of Woolf’s authorial strategies, see de Gay (2006), Caughie (1991), and Olk
(2014).
11
Much critical work has been done on La Trobe’s uncertain origins and their connections
with lesbian signification. See Garrity (2003), Abraham (1996) and Weil (1997).
Explaining that this “we” has done everything from “provide the tea” to
“remain seated” to remembering when “we wrote [an earlier] play our-
selves,” the crowd’s responses establish La Trobe as a marginalized subject,
a precursor of the “gaps” and “dissonances” Eve Sedgwick, many years
later, would attribute to the queer subject (8).12 At first glance, this “we”
might seem to call up Woolf’s famous vision of a “we” that betokens “all
life, all art, all waifs and strays” (Woolf 1984, 135). However, when consid-
ered in the light of what comes immediately after, its end result is to suggest
that the communal “we” easily shifts into an oppressive, even perilous,
force: “Words this afternoon ceased to lie flat in the sentence,” the narrative
voice next says. “They rose, became menacing, and shook their fists at you”
([1941]1969, 59). It’s an unusual narrative choice—a direct address that
creates a metanarrative structure—and one that Woolf uses to highlight the
anxiety already forming around this excluded, “outsider” woman.
La Trobe’s fragmented, often satiric pageant, during its actual perfor-
mance, demonstrates her direct challenge to heteronormative and patriar-
chal tradition. Centered around domestic plots, and shifting frequently
into snatches of song, poetry, and unfinished sentences, the pageant
ostensibly presents “scenes from English history” (81). Yet, in keeping
with the perspective offered by the narrative voice—“for another play
always lay behind the play she had just written”—what the pageant actu-
ally contains, as Karen Schneider has perceptively argued, is a satiric, and
at times aggressive, critique of a heterosexist culture and history (63).13
The play moves from Elizabethan England, and the comingling of the
faltering, “unpinned” Queen Elizabeth (85) with a convoluted love plot,
through the Restoration, where the ridiculous comedy of Lady Harpy
Harraden and Sir Spaniel Lilyliver culminates in the “palaces [that] tum-
ble, […] Babylon, Ninevah, Troy” (139), and into the Victorian age,
when Budge the Publican, “wield[ing] his truncheon,” overshadows the
romance of Eleanor and Edgar (162). In all these scenes, what consis-
tently appears is anxiety-ridden heterosexual coupling intermixed with
dominating ideologies. Thus La Trobe, this “outcast,” one that “nature
had somehow set her apart from her kind,” writes heterosexual courtship,
12
In a dynamic related to the “we” that separates La Trobe from the villagers, Between the
Acts contains numerous references to a similarly divisive “them.” For two examples, see
pages 74–78 and 81–82.
13
My argument builds on Schneider’s perceptive analysis of “love and war.” See Schneider
(1997, 114). Others who have commented on the dynamic of heterosexual coupling in the
pageant include Naremore (1973) and Scott (1995).
180 M. SULLIVAN
during England’s history, through a series of buffoons (211). By recog-

nizing heterosexual history, and forming from it a play obviously at odds
with the villagers’ daily experiences, La Trobe aggressively breaks up the
force inherent in England’s comfortable domestic life. This drive to con-
test heterosexist history demonstrates what Jodie Medd says about the
Modernist lesbian subject: she “un[does] cultural institutions of the
period” (2012, 14).
La Trobe’s cultural contestations broaden into religious contexts when
she speaks as a voice “from the bushes” (186).14 In many respects, La
Trobe’s testimonial seems nearly indecipherable. Not only are the lines are
broken by frequent ellipses, italics, and parentheticals that shift between La
Trobe’s voice and that of the narrator but the utterances themselves seem
determinedly chaotic. She haphazardly violates decorum, for instance, as
she references “some pimpled, dirty little scrub,” yet provides no context
for her remarks (188). Additionally, she launches into her own self-criticism
(“do I escape my own reprobation”), only to conflate that with numerous
critiques of the villagers (“Mrs. E’s lipstick and blood red nails,” “Mr. H
scraping the dunghill for six-penny fame”) (187). There’s even a non-logi-
cal bounce into sophomoric, doggerel verse (“at the wall, how’s this wall,
the great wall, which we call”) (188). Among the address’ seemingly cha-
otic fragments, however, is a carefully manipulated pattern, one that high-
lights the address as, in fact, a religiously themed utterance. Philosophical
referents from Woolf’s earlier works pepper the address, as do Biblically
resonant phrases. Furthermore, the address is linked (both linguistically and
chronologically) with Reverend Streatfield’s “summing up” (190), deliv-
ered from his “soap-box” (189). Thus, La Trobe’s fragmented address ulti-
mately turns out as quite deliberate in its purpose: by using the material of
religious and philosophical imagery, collecting it into a Benjamin-like con-
stellation, and always preserving a fragmented presentation, La Trobe uses
the seeming dislocation for positive results. Like the musical articulation
that depends on the timing of what comes between, La Trobe insists that
the “point” will be found when “something half known, half not” takes the
place once reserved for the grand narratives of patriarchal history (182).
The philosophical and mythological referents embedded in La Trobe’s
address demonstrate that it is far from random jibberish. “Let’s talk in
words of one syllable,” La Trobe says in the opening few words of her
14
Woolf’s phrase “from the bushes” calls up Exodus 3:4, and God’s voice that called to
Moses “out of the bush” (NRSV).
speech (187). It’s a loaded phrase, one that calls up primordial woman-
ness throughout Woolf’s oeuvre. In the phrase is Mrs. Dalloway and the
ancient woman’s “ee um fah um so” ([1925]1981, 82). Also present are
the “words that are hardly syllabled yet” and the “organism under the
shadow of a rock these millions of years” from A Room of One’s Own
([1929]1981, 85), as well as To the Lighthouse, and Mrs. McNab’s song,
“robbed of meaning, […] like the voice of persistency itself” ([1927]1981,
130). By installing, amid what seems a random barrage of words, this
multi-layered, quasi-mystic voice of consciousness, Woolf suggests a pri-
meval female force, much like what she envisioned, for The Waves, as
“some semi mystic very profound life of a woman” (Woolf 1980, 118).
Some elemental power, like what Harvena Richter calls “the voice of his-
tory, myth, legend,” something that escapes worldly perception, there-
fore, haunts La Trobe’s address (2015, 15). La Trobe’s next words, ones
that encourage her audience to “break the rhythm and forget the rhyme,”
further develop such a woman-centered world view (187). The words
again call up A Room of One’s Own, now Mary Carmichael, who had simi-
larly “broken the [expected] sequence” ([1929]1981, 91). Again, Woolf
hints toward the primordially female, specifically the “woman’s sentence”
that she says “takes the natural shape of her thought without crushing or
distorting it” ([1929]1981, 96). The effect is much like the opening
phrase, with its call for an ancient language: in both cases is a centuries-
long quest to find the voice, and history, of a woman.
La Trobe’s address, as it puts forth a string of Biblical references, hints at
a clash with inherited religious texts. The references, most of which are pre-
sented only as snippets, are best read as ironic references to an antiquated
text. Not only does La Trobe quickly reference “thieves,” “the poor,” “the
rich,” and “the innocency of childhood,” but she advices her audience—in
phrases of vital importance—to “consider the sheep,” “consider the gun
slayers, the bomb droppers here or there” (187). The pace of the refer-
ents—all appearing in only nine lines of text—highlights the deliberateness
of the rhetorical choices. By packing together the thieves from Jesus’s
Crucifixion, the poor named in the Sermon on the Mount as “blessed” (and
the associated rich, with their difficulty in entering the “kingdom of God”)
and the children, both beckoned by Jesus to “come unto [him]” and slaugh-
tered in the massacre of the innocents, La Trobe encloses, in her own ver-
sion of a religious story, some of the most familiar parts of the New Testament
(Luke 6: 20, NRSV; Matthew 19: 14, NRSV). The result, when this mar-
ginalized lesbian aggressively fragments the texts that have shaped much of
182 M. SULLIVAN
Western culture and belief, is not only religious transgression, but also polit-
ical weaponry: La Trobe dismantles the originating texts and exposes the
fissures in the culture that developed from them.
When La Trobe offers advice regarding what her audience should “con-
sider”—the sheep and the gun slayers—she most clearly contests the texts
of religious tradition (187). The phraseology hones in on a Biblical com-
monplace, one that Kierkegaard, in 1849, centered an entire book around:
“consider the lilies of the field” (Matthew 6: 28, NRSV). La Trobe, how-
ever, advises her audience to consider not the lilies that led Kierkegaard to
“encounter[ing] the moment” and “divinity in [the] silence” (Kierkegaard
2016: 24, 22). Instead, she points to a herd of mindless followers—“consider
the sheep”—and hence the war machine (the “gun slayers” and “bomb
droppers”) that, because of such mindlessness, was threatening Europe
(187). Thus, in a masterful recontextualization of an originating phrase, La
Trobe deploys Biblical language in order to set in motion the process of its
disintegration. When lambs and sheep become guns and bombs, we have
reached a place in which the originating text has been emptied of all mean-
ing. Again, therefore, what appears is the power of fragmented and discon-
tinuous: La Trobe, through her purposeful disintegrations of inherited
religious meaning, makes present an ontological frame in which religious
tradition becomes incoherent. In a dynamic that differs vastly from Rhoda’s
performatives and refigurations, both of which seek to change a system
from within, La Trobe has made religious content absurd.
La Trobe’s purposeful linguistic strategies contrast dramatically with
another religiously themed invocation: the “simplified absurdity” of Rev.
Streatfield’s “summing up” (190). Much like the pattern that Melba
Cuddy-Keane identifies elsewhere in Between the Acts—“the doubling
rhythms of call and response”—La Trobe’s address is echoed in Streatfield’s
words, but with a significant difference (2008, xlix). Both La Trobe and
Streatfield state a variation of the phrase “we are all the same,” and both
face an unhappy crowd (187, 192). For La Trobe, the crowd wonders if
they “must […] submit to this malignant indignity” (186), while
Streatfield’s listeners perceive an “intolerable constriction” (190). Both
make use of Biblical allusion, furthermore, and both are unable to con-
clude their addresses—their unfinished final sentences trail off into
ellipses.15 In Streatfield, however, is an attempt at authoritative speech that
15
See Mark Hussey’s discussion of Biblical allusions in Streatfield’s address (Woolf 2008,
note 130).
descends into uselessness (“his command over words seemed gone”)

(140) and a predictable appeal to what Woolf, in Three Guineas, calls “the
money motive” (1938, 96). “But there still is a deficit,” Streatfield says as
he requests additional funds to “for the illumination of our dear old
church” (193). When Woolf intermingles, into Streatfield’s address,
phrases that mock the very act of putting words together (“the reporter
reported,” “the swallows were sweeping […] they swept out of sight”)
(193), as well as a direct commentary on how “creepy it made one feel”
(192), she solidifies his difference from La Trobe and her call for an ancient
voice. Streatfield’s version of speech, it seems, “became drone” (193). As
Woolf writes, “he had no further use for words” (194).
Such a figuration of the Reverend Streatfield, a man associated with
mindless religiosity, as exiled from the realm of useful language illumines
the end of La Trobe’s narrative, specifically her final engagement with the
words of religious tradition. Worried whether her aggressive fracturing has
resulted in a “failure,” a “gift [that] meant nothing,” La Trobe ends up
at the local tavern (209). But there, amid the “acrid smell of stale beer”
that makes this an unlikely place for a quasi-religious vision, La Trobe real-
izes that something generative has come from her experience of darkness:
“Words of one syllable sank down into the mud. The mud became fertile.
[…] Words without meaning. Wonderful words. […] She heard the first
words” (211, 212). The language here is rich with religious suggestion.
Of course, it calls up the “words of one syllable” La Trobe has already
invoked (and thus the primordial voice that she substitutes for religious
orthodoxy), but specifically Biblical significations also are embedded in La
Trobe’s vision. As the words sink into the mud, which has become a source
of life (“fertile”), and as La Trobe hears a loaded phrase—the “first
words”—Woolf intermingles two stories of origins: the book of Genesis
and the Gospel of John. The fertile mud references Genesis’ creation myth
and the Hebrew term adamah (variously translated as mud, clay, soil) that
God used to give life to Adam. Also in the term, however, as James Frazer
pointed out only a few years before Woolf composed Between the Acts, is a
provocative linguistic androgyny: “the word for ‘ground’ (adamah) is in
form the feminine of the word of ‘man’ (adam)” (1918, 6). The result—
that Adam’s male-identified body is created from a feminine noun form—
only furthers the “mud’s” position as a multi-layered producer of life.16
16
See Loughlin (2007), especially pages 118 and following, for commentary on gendering
in the Creation story.
184 M. SULLIVAN
Such Biblical resonances culminate with the Johannine-influenced “she

heard the first words.” Echoing John’s hymn of creation—the Prologue
that opens with “in the beginning was the Word”—La Trobe’s “first
words” share with John an interest in the link between the creative utter-
ance and the surrounding world. Graham Jackman perceptively connects
John’s opening “Word,” with perlocutionary speech acts and a Searle-like
“world-to-word fit”: “We are […] bound to take at face value the term
‘word’ as genuinely referring to an utterance which finds concrete realiza-
tion in the physical world” (2016, 5). What results—that words have a
clear and discernible effect on visible reality—further illumines La Trobe’s
“first words.” Translating her private vision into a Biblically themed utter-
ance, one that has altered many histories in Western civilization, La Trobe
positions herself within the complex network of Judeo-Christian discourse.
Only a few pages earlier, we learn that Streatfield’s “first words […] were
lost”; for La Trobe, a powerful speech act replaces such erasure: in her
“first words” is an access to speech that extends into the right to shape a
world. “In the beginning” there were the originating, “first” words.
Earlier, I commented on Woolf’s claim, in Three Guineas, that Outsiders
would “criticiz[e] religion [in the attempt] to free the religious spirit from
its present servitude” (1938, 113). Indeed, Three Guineas, as a standalone
text, demonstrates Woolf’s hesitancy about individuals’ real impacts on
the systems of religion. But the final stages of La Trobe’s narrative dem-
onstrate how Woolf uses her to lessen that hesitancy. In La Trobe’s claims
to linguistic agency, as well as her religiously themed utterances that locate
a real world under threat—a world of bombs, guns, and sheep—is a
glimpse at a belief-system renewed and made militant. Lesbian, “bossy,”
and butch (63), La Trobe ultimately foregrounds the process of looking at
history, religion, and Englishness from the perspective of an identity that
has, all too often, been made nonexistent (“Miss Whatshername” as the
crowd calls her) (184).17
La Trobe’s linguistic agency returns us to this chapter’s overall focus:
the paired lesbian, and prophetic, subjects of Rhoda and Miss La Trobe.
Both individuals engage with religious narratives: Rhoda reconfigures
God’s creative words and La Trobe, using the language of religion, point-
edly critiques it as a system. Only one, however, survives the experience.
That divergence in narratives can be traced to active, and activist, use of
17
For important analyses of lesbianism and cultural/literary invisibility, see Zimmerman
(1981) and Castle (1993).
language. Rhoda reconfigures God’s words of creation. But, because

Rhoda preserves the linguistic and structural integrity of originating
utterance (she repeats, if from a lesbian’s perspective, that all-important
“let there be …”), she fails to overthrow its power. La Trobe, on the
other hand, fractures, and ultimately makes useless, the epistemic and
linguistic structures that comprise the operations of religion. La Trobe,
therefore, claims an activist position unavailable to Rhoda. Thus La
Trobe’s acts of contestation, when compared to Rhoda’s fragile mysti-
cism, demonstrates that only through linguistic altercations will the unre-
lenting “machine” of hetero-patriarchal history perhaps have the rotation
of its gears forever slowed.
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CHAPTER 11
Sensibility, Parochiality, Spirituality: Toward

a Critical Method and Ethic of Response
in Woolf, Spivak, and Mahmood
Benjamin D. Hagen
“… doomed to failure” (Woolf [1938] 2006, 3)

In the summer of 1940, as the Battle of France entered its final phase, Virginia
Woolf began her June 9th diary entry, “I will continue—but can I?”
(1977–1984, 5: 292). The contrast in this sentence between firm declaration
(“I will”) and autocorrective doubt (“but can I?”) sets the text trembling with
I started reading Saba Mahmood’s work in the spring of 2010, and since then I
have wanted to write something about her, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and
Virginia Woolf. This desire intensified when I had the privilege of studying with
her later that year at the School of Criticism and Theory. (She led a six-week
seminar entitled, “The Politics of Religious Difference.”) Her death early in
2018 shook me deeply. I was never, formally, her student. We never spoke again
after the end of the 2010 summer session. In subsequent years, I always had the
intention of writing to her. She had asked me, when we last saw each other, to let
her know where I ended up. I started emails several times, but I never finished
one. Never sent one. And now I never will. I should have let her know how
much her work has meant to me. My hope is that this essay can, in its own way,
serve as the now impossible response I had always meant to send her.

190 B. D. HAGEN
moving urgency. Despite the threat of the “furnace”—the not-too-distant

war machine—that hides “behind the sky” (5: 293), this urgency compels
Woolf at the end of the same entry to recall two projects that still require her
attention: namely, the proofs of Roger Fry: A Biography (1940) and her next
novel, Pointz Hall (later renamed Between the Acts [1941]). Her succinct
inventory of these tasks—“I correct Roger: send finally I hope tomorrow: &
could finish P.H.”—thus creates the condition of possibility that Woolf seeks,
a way to “continue” and to continue to do so, even beneath a “growl[ing]”
sky that veils inconceivable horrors (5: 293).
Despite the literary successes of this (daily) effortfulness, Woolf’s entry
also raises a problem related to but different from the threat of physical
destruction. She writes, “It struck me that one curious feeling is, that the
writing ‘I’, has vanished. No audience. No echo. Thats [sic] part of one’s
death … But it is a fact—this disparition of an echo” (5: 293). Woolf appears
to be outlining a violence here that unfolds beside other, more readily appar-
ent forms of death and destruction to which she also alludes in her June 9th
entry. These latter, more legible forms include the German army’s advance
toward Paris, of course, but also the concentration of Jews in death camps
and the Woolfs’ plans to gas themselves in their garage at Monks House
should England be invaded.1 The nonphysical “disparition” Woolf hits upon
concerns a fundamental link between writer and audience, that is, the very
sociality that makes possible [1] the reception of any writer’s work by any
reader and [2] the “echo” of a writer’s work in the readers’ own responses.
The death of “the writing ‘I’” entails, in short, not just the death of the
author, celebrated decades later by Roland Barthes,2 but also the death of
readership itself—the death, that is, of responsiveness when we understand
it as a social structure sustaining the viability of even the most unlikely and
untimely communications (including literary ones).
1
Woolf writes, “The pressure of this battle wipes out London pretty quick. A gritting day.
As sample of my present mood, I reflect: capitulation will mean all Jews to be given up.
Concentration camps. So to our garage … Last night aeroplanes (G?) over: shafts of light
following. … What we dread (its [sic] no exaggeration) is the news that the French Govt.
have left Paris” (1977–1984, 5: 292–93).
2
See Barthes (1977), 148.
B. D. Hagen (*)
University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, USA
11 SENSIBILITY, PAROCHIALITY, SPIRITUALITY: TOWARD A CRITICAL… 191
The death Woolf glimpses in the summer of 1940 thus intensifies the
difficulties of communication that Three Guineas (1938) anticipates a few
years earlier in its treatment of the question, “How in your opinion are we
to prevent war?” ([1938] 2006, 5). Though Woolf’s persona knows that
her attempt to respond to this question “is doomed to failure,” she still
makes the attempt, drawing the imagined addressee’s attention to “a prec-
ipice, a gulf so deeply cut between” them “that for three years and more
[she has] been sitting on [her] side of it wondering whether it is any use
to try to speak across it” (5–6). Two years later, when Woolf sits down to
her diary with invasion, concentration camps, suicide, and aeroplanes on
her mind, this gulf seems to have grown deeper and wider. Indeed, Woolf
later envisions a world not only in which educated men and their daugh-
ters rest on opposite sides of a gulf but a world that has been entirely
enveloped by this gulf. She has a “curious feeling” in the summer of 1940
that communication—the very possibility of writing, reading, and respond-
ing at all—has vanished.
In October 1940, however, the New Republic publishes Woolf’s late
essay, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” a piece that does continue,
carrying on with a meditation on the “queer experience, lying in the dark
and listening to the zoom of a hornet”—the young men engaged in fire-
fights overhead—“which may at any moment sting you to death”
(1994–2011, 242). This perspective recurs across Woolf’s late letters, dia-
ries, and memoir, and from this actual (and rhetorical) position beneath a
firefight she again crafts a response to an inconceivable and unreal present,
recalling the zooms of other hornets: voices in The Times (242–43), cries
over loudspeakers (243), placards on conference tables (244), a passage
from a soldier’s memoir (244), and an anecdote of a downed German
pilot enjoying tea and a cigarette with an Englishman and Englishwoman
(245). Interspersed among these remembered zooms, Woolf records the
sounds of droning planes, dropped bombs, wavering searchlights, and
rattled windows—all of which make it difficult, impossible, but still urgent
to “think peace into existence” (242). She develops her thinking in Three
Guineas here, insisting that young men must be freed “from the machine”
(245), that is, from their planes, their guns, and the compulsory education
and long traditions that foster their attachment to “the love of medals and
decorations” and war (244). Young men must learn, instead, to access and
use their “creative power” and “feelings” (244–45). Woolf is doubtful
that these bold suppositions will be heard in England (Three Guineas, as
she anticipated, had elicited hostile responses), yet she concludes with
192 B. D. HAGEN
some hope that her appeals might interrupt the restful sleep of Americans
not yet disturbed by the zooms that keep her and others awake (245).
What can we learn from the juxtaposition of Woolf’s ongoing responsive-
ness to the present in these late texts and the overwhelming sense in her
June 9th diary that no one, no audience, will have been there to receive her
words and respond back to her, no one to “shape” her notes “into some-
thing serviceable” (245)? How might the “curious feeling” (1977–1984, 5:
293) of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls “impossibility of response”
(2012, 372) or what Saba Mahmood calls the “incommensurable divide”
(2009a, 64) be turned into an occasion to respond otherwise? An occasion
to craft a critical method or critical ethics of response to fellow human beings?
I explore these questions in the following sections by linking Woolf’s
late writing on war in Three Guineas and “Thoughts on Peace in an Air
Raid” with the work of Spivak and Mahmood, specifically Spivak’s difficult
essay “Terror: A Speech after 9/11” (2012) and Mahmood’s primary
contribution to the volume Is Critique Secular? (2009a). The responses of
these scholars to our own troubling times have contributed much to a
body of interdisciplinary writing that challenges, reconceptualizes, and
sometimes reinforces discursive and political links and divisions between
secularism and religion. The tone of this critical and scholarly array is often
polemical, often urgent, and, indeed, it is the very sense of a common
urgency in the works of Spivak and Mahmood that first moved me to
begin reading them with late Woolf several years ago.
I triangulate these three writers not to pursue my own challenge to
secularization as an historical model, however (work already accomplished,
it seems to me, by so many).3 Rather, I show that a study of the problem
of response in their work can lead us to forge connections and communi-
cations among them (no matter the historical, disciplinary, and conceptual
gulfs that separate them). Indeed, three titular concepts emerge for me
from these critical resonances—sensibility, parochiality, and spirituality—
which, I contend, constitute a ground for an ethics of response (especially)
to occasions that baffle our capacities to respond at all. Late Woolf antici-
pates the respective projects of Spivak and Mahmood, I argue, and helps
bring into relief a common cause immanent in their wide-ranging body of
work: namely, the problem of imagining the other as a self, a problem
3
For an immersion in this scholarly discourse, visit The Immanent Frame blog. This site
was first developed in response to the publication of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007),
from which its title is taken.
which is itself, I contend, a necessary precondition for altering how we

might come to care about, respond to, and hope to affect exigencies here
and now, local and global.
“… this absence of familiar milestones”

(Mahmood 2005, 198)
Before introducing and elaborating sensibility, parochiality, and spiritual-
ity, however, I should introduce the immediate concerns and central argu-
ments of Spivak and Mahmood’s essays.
“Terror: A Speech after 9/11” was first published in 2004 in the jour-
nal boundary 2 and slightly revised for inclusion in Spivak’s later book, An
Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012). It offers “rumina-
tions” on a wide variety of issues: “America’s war on terror,” suicide
bombing, Immanuel Kant, as well as British romanticism (2012, 372).
But the essay’s central claim, which echoes several other essays included in
Spivak’s volume, is that the humanities has something vital to offer a world
caught between the calculations of warfare and law: the “training [of] the
imagination for epistemological performance” (122). This training entails
the exercise of literary and philosophical reading that interrupts the will to
know, a practice that simultaneously prepares one for “the eruption of the
ethical” (374) as well as “an uncoercive rearrangement of desires” (373).
These formulations are opaque, no doubt, but also compelling, so I will
risk a paraphrase. According to Spivak, the humanities can teach us, from
our reading and tarrying with the literary (“the singular and the unverifi-
able” [393]), how to shape and track meaning on the move, how to unset-
tle received ideas, how to delay the impulse to pin answers (and people)
down, how to accept surprise, how to approach the other (even the suicide
bomber) as a human being (a self) without presuming that one already
knows what to make of him. Or her (385–86). I think here of Woolf’s
challenge near the end of Three Guineas, holding up a verbal image of the
Dictator and insisting that we are not separate from that image. The image
is, she contends, a disquieting mirror, a reflection of us: “we cannot
dissociate ourselves from that figure but are ourselves that figure” (Woolf
[1938] 2006, 168). But how we do learn to see the other—even an other
from which we have been trained to recoil with terror or disgust—as a self?
For Spivak, the answer is the very sort of education that Woolf herself
received in her father’s library—that is, an aesthetic one.
194 B. D. HAGEN
Saba Mahmood’s essay, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect,” takes

up a matter closely related to the issues Spivak pools together in “Terror,”
though she carefully narrows the scope of her investigation by examin-
ing the manner in which Western intellectuals responded “to the publi-
cation of Danish cartoons depicting Muhammed in 2005 and 2008”
(2009a, 65). More specifically, she questions how these liberal responses
framed the ensuing controversy—and subsequent protests and vio-
lence—as a “conflict between secular necessity and religious threat” (65)
as well as “a clash between the principles of blasphemy and free speech”
(66–67). She covers much ground here, first surveying widely circulated
op-eds baffled by and dismissive of “what Tariq Ali pejoratively calls
‘religious pain’” and, second, reframing our understanding of Muslim
pain and outrage over the cartoons (71, cf. 68–69). Mahmood argues
that we learn little from reducing demonstrations of outrage to a matter
of trespassed beliefs or religious laws. In opposition to this secular frame,
she posits the cartoons as an offense “committed … against a structure
of affect, a habitus” (8), that is, a cultivated mode of “relationality that
binds the [religious] subject to the object of veneration” (77). Lastly,
Mahmood critiques the appeals to state law that characterize those seek-
ing to protect free speech from supposed fundamentalists (who must
learn, so the secular story goes, to distantiate themselves from their
beliefs if they wish to participate in democratic society) as well as reli-
gious subjects (not just Muslims) seeking legal protection under policies
of religious freedom and interdicts against hate speech. To turn to the
law, as Mahmood shows, is not a turn to a neutral arbiter, for the state
tends to privilege “majority religious sensibilities” whether in Egypt or
France, whether Christian or Muslim (87).
Key to Mahmood’s argument is her claim that a specific semiotic ideol-
ogy structures and aligns liberal responses to Muslim backlash with a
“juridical language” (67). According to this ideology, signs are under-
stood primarily as referential. Modern religious subjects, it is argued, must
understand that “religious signs”—reverential or satirical, icons or car-
toons—“are not embodiments of the divine but only stand in for the
divine through an act of human encoding and interpretation” (73).
Mahmood proposes that if we are to understand, rather than dismiss,
moral injury, we should consider adjusting our semiotic frame from a ref-
erential register (e.g., signifier/signified) to a semiotic of relationship—in
this case an “intimacy with the Prophet” and a careful imitation of “how
he dressed; what he ate; how he spoke to his friends and adversaries; how
he slept, walked, and so on” (75). What would happen if we take moral
injury seriously as an injury to this embodied relation and not merely as
sulky acrimony at the trespass of a referential interdict? As an attack on a
mode of existence, a threat to an intimate attachment?
“… the risk-taking of a real response”

(Spivak 2012, 379)
This overview of Spivak and Mahmood helps us glimpse a conceptual res-
onance in their and Woolf’s attention to the sensibilities of human others
(as objects of response), their call to recognize their own parochial attach-
ments and priorities (as subjects of response), and their demonstration of
a spiritual work of response that accesses what we might risk calling a
truer, more open vision of the world and its peoples.
“Sensibility” is a common term in Mahmood’s lexicon; she glosses it as
“ethos” (2005, 3) and as a “structure of sensitivities, affects, and commit-
ments” that gives form to moral will and moral direction (2009a, 148–49).
For me, sensibility also corresponds to an affective form of life. Developing
Mahmood’s use of it, sensibility can convey an open structure of potential-
ity that extends one’s body and mind among the world, allowing one to
touch, to harm, to be harmed, but also to learn from other bodies and
minds (which are themselves given some shape by their sensibility). It con-
stitutes, then, an extra-individual network of tendencies, influences, sensi-
tivities, affections, capacities, vulnerabilities, modes of joy and sadness, and
intensity. To respond to expressions of religious pain—including the expres-
sions of those who claim to have been injured by the Danish cartoons—
thus entails for Mahmood not so much the diagnosis of a psychology or the
interpretation of beliefs (which one can choose to adopt or not). It does not
entail a pedagogical project that denies the authenticity of the other’s pain.
Rather, it requires an imaginative effort (as well as a critical, intellectual, and
anthropological effort) of immersion “within the thick texture of … attach-
ments” that give form to the life of the other (2005, 198).
We see a micro-version of this immersive attention in “Thoughts on
Peace in an Air Raid” when Woolf addresses the “instincts” of young men
(1994–2011, 244–45). While this word tends to connote biological deter-
minism to twenty-first-century sensibilities, for Woolf instinct is not only
or primarily biochemical or evolutionary. Additionally, it is a product of
cultivation through “education and tradition” (244). Early in Three
Guineas Woolf anticipates this link between instinct and tradition, writing,
196 B. D. HAGEN
“For though many instincts are held more or less in common by both
sexes, to fight has always been the man’s habit, not the woman’s. Law and
practice have developed that difference, whether innate or accidental” (9).
And a few pages later, she asks, “What sort of education will teach the
young to hate war?” (28). If something like education might prevent war,
it needs to address a deeply rooted problem tangled in the developing
habitus of the young (and the older?), what Woolf calls, near the end of
Three Guineas, an “infantile fixation”—excused by “[n]ature, law and
property” and “protected by society” even as it afflicts this same soci-
ety (160–61).
In Spivak’s terms, sensibility is an arrangement of desire, an arrange-
ment that can undergo rearrangement in a number of educative ways
(coercively, uncoercively, didactically, intentionally, accidentally, grace-
fully, violently). Woolf enjoins her readers to just such a project of rear-
rangement when she argues that women must come up with ways to
provide “other openings for [the] creative power” of young men and
soldiers, to “give access to the creative feelings,” to “make happiness”
(1994–2011, 244–45). No doubt, there is more than a hint of a threat of
symbolic castration in her claim that they must “compensate the man for
the loss of his gun,” but there is also something quite sincere here insofar
as she insists on a counter-educative work of rearranging desire—of alter-
ing, rewiring, and challenging existing sensibilities (244). Though
Mahmood cautions against such pedagogical interference with the life-
world of others, Woolf’s project takes seriously the loss her solution
entails. To “think peace into existence” (242) might very well require
“political visions” that necessitate “the destruction of life forms” that
would then be in desperate need of “remak[ing]” (Mahmood 2005,
197–98). While Mahmood backs away from such a project as an anthro-
pologist in order to “comprehend … forms of life … distinct from” her
own, Woolf speculates that just such a project might be necessary within
her own society—the reeducation of young men—should we actually
wish to prevent war (Mahmood 2005, 198).
Attending to the sensibilities of others thus brings me to a second con-
cept that resonates across these three writers: namely, “parochiality.” “Our
ability,” Mahmood writes, “to think outside” the “limitations” and norms
enforced by “the civil law tradition … requires the labor of critique, a
labor that rests not on its putative claims to moral or epistemological supe-
riority but on its ability to recognize and parochialize its own affective
commitments” (2009a, 91, emphasis added).4 This claim fascinates me,

for it promotes a model of critique predicated not upon distantiation,
universalization, or generalization but an open model of amongness that
strives to localize oneself among other particularities. “Thoughts on
Peace” also performs this mode of critique (at least in part), for Woolf situ-
ates her reader beside her own “queer experience” of “lying in the dark
and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you
[her] to death” (1994–2011, 242). From this position—complete with its
blindnesses, blindspots, visions, intuitions, and creative (and always uncer-
tain though urgent) efforts—Woolf couples reason and affect as she
addresses her critique to land, sky, print, speech, searchlights, women,
men, England, Italy, Germany, the United States, others (whom she does
not presume to understand fully or surely) as well as herself for the sake of
others to come: “not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies
yet to be born” (242). This mode of critique, open to its own parochial-
ization, risks a good deal more than the liberal principle of toleration.
“Today’s soft option,” Spivak writes, “‘teaching tolerance,’ is of course a
good thing. But as Kant’s real efforts at tolerance two centuries ago …
show us, tolerance allows you to de-transcendentalize all other religions
but the religion-culture language that governs your own idiom” (2012,
393). Mahmood arrived at a realization much like this one when writing
Politics of Piety (2005), and she felt “compelled … to leave open the pos-
sibility that [her] analysis may come to complicate the vision of human
flourishing that [she held] most dear” (xii).
A response, then, that attends to sensibilities and admits the parochial-
ity of its own commitments takes something of a risk in its attempt to
“make ideas” (Woolf 1994–2011, 242), “to listen to the other as if it were
a self, neither to punish nor to acquit” (Spivak 2012, 374). Put this way
and read alongside Mahmood and Spivak, Woolf’s “Thoughts on Peace”
seems to be a pedagogical, manifold, and multi-localized effort of response
that might help readers sense that whatever their commitments—to a
culture, a religion, a secularism—they might come to see limitations and
complicities in themselves that they might not have otherwise seen,
thought, or felt.
But, of course, Three Guineas also takes this approach insofar as it repeat-
edly crafts a position that sits at the intersection (at least) of sex and class and
generation: “the daughters of educated men” (Woolf [1938] 2006, 7).
4
For more on Mahmood and her self-parochiality, see Keane (2018).
198 B. D. HAGEN
With this “clumsy term” (172), Woolf establishes a common ground with
her addressee (“we speak with the same accent” [7]), a complicity (47–49),
as well as a radical difference that cuts through the educated class, a differ-
ence that hinges upon women’s relationships to their fathers (who were
educated) and their alienation from their father’s education (which will be
enjoyed by their brothers). Woolf makes much of the limitations of this
subclass of (under)educated women, noting what they cannot know and
what they have not experienced, but she also turns this parochiality into a
frame within which to redefine various virtues—poverty, chastity, and deri-
sion—including a “freedom from unreal loyalties” (97) that inflects her ear-
lier description of “the world of professional, of public life” (23). Indeed,
from the “angle” of the “private house,” the public world “looks queer”—
which is to say decidedly not natural, thoroughly odd and just as parochial
as the world of educated men’s daughters (23). Thus the term “daughters
of educated men” might mark a limit that has traditionally made readers of
Three Guineas uneasy, but it is nevertheless a term self-conscious about that
limit, willing to admit parochiality as a mark of commonality, complicity, but
also (auto)critique.
* * *
If responses participate in the construction of the object they seek to know

and if some attention to one’s parochial self as the subject of response is
necessary for responding ethically, then it follows that responses also con-
stitute a work on oneself, a work that risks a transformation of the respond-
ing subject.
If to fashion a response involves a necessary transformation of oneself as
responder, then the mode of response falls under a definition of spirituality
that Michel Foucault develops late in his life:
… I think we could call “spirituality” the search, practice, and experience

through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on
himself [sic] in order to have access to the truth. We will call “spirituality”
then the set of these researches, practices, and experiences, which may be
purifications, ascetic exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking,
modifications of existence, etc., which are, not for knowledge but for the
subject, for the subject’s very being, the price to be paid for access to the
truth. (1984, 15)
My turn to Foucault is not unprompted. Stephen M. Barber’s work on

late Woolf, for instance, sounds out compelling affinities between Woolf
and Foucault.3 But Mahmood also leads me here. In Politics of Piety, she
deploys Foucault’s attention to the “spiritual exercises” of the ancient
Greeks as a motivation for her own description of the religious practices of
Muslim women (2005, 121–22). Foucault “draws attention,” she writes,
“to the contribution of external forms to the development of human ethi-
cal capacities, to specific modes of human agency” (29). Though Mahmood
never embraces the notion of “spiritual exercise” or “spirituality” for the
development of her own ethical approach to the Muslim women (with)
whom she studies, her epilogue nevertheless narrates a reorientation of her
certainties away from a sense of “teleological … improvement” and
enlightenment and toward a life-altering realization (198). “I came to
reckon,” she explains, “that if the old feminist practice of ‘solidarity’ had
any valence whatsoever, it could … only ensue within the uncertain, at
times opaque, conditions of intimate and uncomfortable encounters in all
their eventuality” (199).
What do we gain from thinking of the work of humanities education,
literary reading, anthropological conviviality and sympathy, attention to
the sensibilities of others, and the parochiality of the self under the cate-
gory, “spirituality”? Is this not an attempt to smuggle theology and the
divine into the study of those who distanced themselves from the theo-
logical? I hope, rather, that this attention to the spiritual puts us in mind
of Woolf’s concern with the soul, of the dimensions of human being, and
of “spiritual conversion” that Barber has tracked across her later diaries,
linking these concerns with the work of Woolf on herself as she completed
The Years (1937) and Three Guineas and transitioned to her final writings.5
Such a thought also compels me to retrace a certain cluster of intellec-
tual and emotional activity among these thinkers, an activity that admits
the limits of one’s own commitments and visions and opens one up to the
possibility of a profoundly (spiritual) transformation. I think of Foucault,
late in his life, defining “philosophy” as “the knower’s straying afield of
himself […] in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be
possible to think differently” (1984, 8–9). I think too of Mahmood and
her gesture toward “a mode of encountering the Other which does not
assume that in the process of culturally translating other lifeworlds [that]
one’s own certainty about how the world should proceed can remain sta-
5
See Barber, “Exit Woolf” (2004) and “States of Emergency” (2009).
200 B. D. HAGEN
ble” (2005, 199). To learn how to carry on, for Foucault and Mahmood,
involves straying afield, affirming uncertainty, and experimenting with
variable proximities and intimacies as the precondition of critical labor.
This observation moves me back to Spivak too, who attempts “to listen to
the other”—a suicide bomber—“as if it were a self” (2012, 374). This
effort to imagine, to resonate with, and to listen and respond to the other,
even “when everything in [her] resists,” is not just intellectually difficult
(387). It hurts, and it leaves her susceptible to changes that she cannot
foresee and to the possibility of a “rearrangement of desire” which might
transform her relations (my relations?) to others in the world (373).
Learning to respond to the other is difficult, for Spivak, for “[t]he response
is in the fire. You get burned if you are touched and called by the
other” (378).
It is Woolf, writing in her diary on June 9th, 1940 and, later that year,
writing about the young men fighting one another above Monks House,
who has taught me to link these (and other) disparate texts together, to be
sensitive in my reading and research to sensibilities, parochialities, and
spiritualities as well as to the vulnerabilities of mind and body that this
conceptual framework and ethical method of responsiveness affirms. I will
now outline some of the features of the method of response she shares
with Spivak and Mahmood.
“… another way of fighting for freedom without

arms” (Woolf 1994–2011, 242)
Impossible Beginnings
Three Guineas, “Thoughts on Peace,” “Terror,” and “Religious Reason
and Secular Affect” all position their authors between, on the one hand,
an urgent compulsion to respond to violent states of affairs and, on the
other, the problem of “how [to] respond in the face of the impossibility of
response” in the first place (Spivak 2012, 372). How to respond, in other
words, to the imminent threat of “young Englishmen and young German
men … fighting each other,” as Woolf paints it, “[u]p there in the sky”
(1994–2011, 242)? Or to “the picture of dead bodies and ruined houses
that the Spanish Government sends … almost weekly” (Woolf [1938]
2006, 167; cf. 14)? How respond to war (on terror), which Spivak terms
a “cruel caricature of what in us can respond” (2012, 372)? How respond,
as all of Mahmood’s work from Politics of Piety (2005) and on does, to the
legal, ethical, political, and historical problematics that arise when the ide-
als of religious freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom from the threats
of hate speech intersect volatilely with matters of religious difference, vio-
lence and counter-violence, minority rights, and the illegibility of certain
forms of harm to normative, juridical discourses? How respond, in short,
to conditions that baffle, scatter, or beggar one’s capacity to respond at all?
In short: Woolf, Spivak, and Mahmood all position themselves in a
place of gridlock, impasse, doom, or unanswerable violence where no
beginning seems possible—where one is always at risk to have to begin
again (to repeat oneself, to reformulate what was meant, to slow the dis-
missals they inevitably encounter).
Compulsion
Despite the impossibilities they respectively face, Woolf, Spivak, and
Mahmood also emphasize a compulsion to respond to war and peace, war
and terror, law and moral injury. Three Guineas concludes with a glimpse
of what, finally, brings the narrator to answer the long unanswered ques-
tion of how to prevent war: “A common interest unites us; it is one world;
one life. How essential it is that we should realise that unity the dead bod-
ies, the ruined houses prove. For such will be our ruin” if we do not realize
that the public and private worlds, “the material and the spiritual are
inseparably connected” (Woolf [1938] 2006, 168–69). An urgency moti-
vates the whole work.
And in “Thoughts,” Woolf situates us in a precarious scene—lying in
bed, listening to the “death rattle overhead”—a scene that “should compel
one to think about peace” (1994–2011, 242, emphasis added). In
“Terror,” Spivak likewise writes, “I started from the conviction that there
is no response to war … You cannot be answerable to war” (2012, 372).
She ends her short paragraph and begins the next, however, “Yet one can-
not remain silent. Out of the imperative or compulsion to speak, then, two
questions: What are some already existing responses? And, how respond in
the face of the impossibility of response?” (372, emphasis added). And
though Mahmood often seems less urgent in tone than Woolf or Spivak,
she closes her introductory section by admitting that she “felt compelled to
write this essay because of the immediate resort to juridical language as
much by those who opposed the cartoons as by those who sought to jus-
tify them across the European and Middle Eastern press” (2009a, 67,
202 B. D. HAGEN
emphasis added). All three thinkers begin where they might have to begin
again, where they might fail to respond, and they do so because they feel
they must. They cannot do otherwise: the world (as it is, as others see and
respond to it) cannot go on this way.
Response Inventory
So where to start? Spivak points the way: “What are some existing
responses?” (2012, 372).
Caught between an impossible beginning and the impossibility of
remaining silent, then, all three writers begin with inventories of pre-
existing responses. Woolf figures such responses as “hornets” that zoom
among the sounds of “the guns” above and the sounds of bombs dropped
in the distance (1994–2011, 242). She gathers, for instance, “a woman’s
voice” from The Times “saying, ‘Women have not a word to say in poli-
tics’” (242) with the univocal cry of “the loudspeakers” that promise free-
dom to those who will fight to destroy Hitler (243) as well as an appeal for
complete “Disarmament,” written “on a sheet of paper at a conference
table” (244). Woolf also records another voice from The Times; “subcon-
scious Hitlerism in the hearts of men,” the voice argues, rouses young
men to fight and thus threatens “Englishwomen” (like Woolf) thinking
and sometimes dying “in their beds” (243). An irony emerges in the col-
lection of these varied responses: the very thing that young Englishmen
seek to destroy (the Hitlerism arranging the young German men’s desires
to fight) lives in them too. And because it lives in them too, something
more radical than setting down guns (disarmament) might be needed.
This inventorying of responses should also bring to mind the extensive
research that underpins Three Guineas as a project as well as Woolf’s rhe-
torical turns to sources when, for instance, she addresses questions like,
“Why fight?” ([1938] 2006, 9).
In Spivak and Mahmood we see similar inventories of response that are
bound up with media, education, and the encouragement of war. Indeed,
war and suicide bombing, for Spivak, are modes of response complicit
with coercive arrangements of desire/education (2012, 381, 385). Thus,
literary reading—the engagement between reader and text, the training of
the former’s capacity to imagine the latter—is a counterresponse inimical,
at least ideally, to such violent exchanges. (Literary studies is, in this sense,
radically anti-war.) Spivak and Mahmood also frame “politico-legal calcu-
lation” (Spivak 2012, 374) as the primary mode of response common to

the dismissal of moral injury, to the demonization of young people trained
to drop/to be bombs. Turning to the law presumes a will “to know the
other … completely” (374) and demonstrates a surprising lack of atten-
tiveness to one’s own ethical entanglement and complicity in the lives of
other human beings (Mahmood 2009a, 70; b, 152).
For both Spivak and Mahmood, legal responses are not neutral. Rather,
they evade the difficult ethical work of a trained and prepared moral will
that might come to respond without deploying a disciplinary apparatus.
Even “Muslims who want to turn … [their] injury into a litigable crime,”
Mahmood cautions,
must reckon with the performative character of the law. To subject an injury
predicated upon distinctly different conceptions of the subject, religiosity,
harm, and semiosis to the logic of civil law is to promulgate its demise
(rather than to protect it). Mechanisms of the law are not neutral but are
encoded with an entire set of cultural and epistemological presuppositions
that are not indifferent to how religion is practiced and experienced in dif-
ferent traditions. (2009a, 88)
Responses Are Constitutive

The passage above suggests something fundamental about responses.
They do not simply describe and pronounce opinions upon an agreed-
upon reality. They are, rather, constitutive acts participating in the shaping
and the very make-up of the object(s) they purport to describe, discover,
and know. (Spivak calls this “epistemological performance,” something
literary critics can learn to enact with savvy self-awareness.) In “Thoughts
on Peace,” when Woolf refers to the loudspeakers’ exclamation, “Hitler!”
she quickly notes that these cries do not simply refer to a person or specific
leader. Rather, these responses instantiate the very Hitlerism they seek to
destroy—arranging desire, reinforcing tradition, and reproducing the
desire for honor and glory through education and the promise of reward
(destroy Hitler, gain freedom; become aggressive to kill aggression). We
can hear an implicit echo of these constitutive responses and promises
across Woolf, Spivak, and Mahmood: Destroy Hitler; make war on terror;
civilize and modernize Islam; dismiss moral injury as irrational/ undemo-
cratic/unfree. Spivak: “A response does not only suppose and produce a
constructed subject of response; it also constructs its object” (2012, 373).
204 B. D. HAGEN
Mahmood presses this point further in her distinction between referen-

tial and relational semiotics, for these competing ways of approaching and
framing signs entail distinct reading practices that adjust the very sort of
object that appears within the semiotic field. For those pleading with
Muslims “to stop taking the Danish cartoons so seriously, to realize that the
image (of Muhammed) can produce no real injury given that its true locus
is in the interiority of the individual believer and not in the fickle world of
material symbols and signs”—what is at stake for them is the regulation of
“what religion should be in the modern world” and what sort of objects
religious practice should entail (2009a, 74). For many Muslims, however,
the figure of Muhammed is not “a referential sign that stands apart from an
essence that it denotes” (76) but a model “of exemplarity” with which “the
ethical subject” (78) engages through a “modality of attachment” (76),
“an inhabitation,” and “a sense of intimacy and desire” (78). This mode of
interaction is less about interpretation than an emulation that “realiz[es]
the Prophet’s behavior … not as commandments but as virtues where one
wants to ingest … the Prophet’s persona into oneself ” (75).
We might say, then, that the distance we take from an object of response
informs how we respond and, even, what we respond to. This supposition
is immanent to Three Guineas, which from the very beginning imagines
the narrator’s addressee (“let us draw … a sketch of the person to whom
the letter is addressed” [Woolf [1938] 2006, 3]) and also performatively
shapes and frames objects of response—university life, military ceremonies
and dress, the serious public life of educated men—“through the shadow
of the veil that St. Paul still lays upon our eyes” (22–23).
Imagining the Enemy/Risking Outrage

Woolf responds to the public sphere and to the young pilots (English
and German) fighting in the sky above her home. Spivak imagines the
desire of suicide bombers (also young, vulnerable). Mahmood approaches
the morally wounded. It is important to clarify that, for these three writ-
ers, to ask how we might learn to respond to these figures and to these
conditions is neither to predict nor to foresee what we will ultimately say
or do. It is not an effort to establish—with epistemological certainty—a
way to continue or carry on. (As we see in Woolf ’s hesitancy to promote
the formalization of a Society of Outsiders.) Rather, to ask how we might
respond inaugurates an auto-pedagogical effort to make some space
(critical and ethical) in which to take a breath, take some time to learn
how to be ready to learn something from an other, even (and especially)
one who has been framed as an enemy.
But to imagine the (purported) enemy as a self—as a being we can
approach and imagine with sympathy—risks outrage. Spivak interrupts her
essay more than once to caution her reader to be patient. At one point she
even inserts a personal letter sent to a specific interlocutor, since her “com-
ments on suicide bombing have provoked so much hostility” when ini-
tially delivering them (2012, 382). In her reply to Judith Butler’s response
to “Religious Reason and Secular Affect,” Mahmood too offers a pointed
complaint:
But I am always struck by the fact that academics are seldom moved to aban-
don their normative evaluative frameworks despite training and exposure to
this kind of thought. Regardless of how many times I have presented this
paper about competing understandings of the Danish cartoons … most of
my academic audiences have a hard time putting aside their judgment that
Muslims acted irrationally and their fear that this kind of religiosity, if
allowed in the public sphere, would destroy the secular accomplishments of
European society. … To decenter this intransigence, resistance, inertia, and
suspicion I am afraid requires more than simply critique, and this is in part
what I am trying to get at when I speak about the ethical register of sensible
politics. (2009b, 152; cf. 2009a, 65)
The author of Three Guineas might very well have sympathized with
Mahmood here. After the book’s publication in 1938, Woolf noted (with
uncharacteristic immunity to criticism) hostile reviews as well as unusual
silences among her friends and correspondents. She sparred with Vita
Sackville-West (“… when you say that you are exasperated by my ‘mislead-
ing arguments’—then I ask, what do you mean?” [1975–1980, 6: 243])
and also confidently reassured herself of the book’s superiority to A Room
of One’s Own (1929) after Leonard Woolf shared his own tepid response
(1977–1984, 5: 134). Hostility and indifference would continue to frame
the reception of Woolf’s effort to craft an impossible response;
E.M. Forster, J.M. Keynes, Quentin Bell, and Nigel Nicolson: all thought
the book an overreach, a misfire, maybe even a danger. As Jane Marcus
warns, “KEEP OUT! THE IDEAS IN THIS DOCUMENT ARE
DANGEROUS. Are you wearing gloves?” (2006, lvi).6
6
For more on the reception of Three Guineas, see Black (2004), 146–71.
206 B. D. HAGEN
Perhaps a separate study will need to be done tracking the resonances

between Woolf’s defiant response in this work (and in “Thoughts on
Peace in an Air Raid”) and the theoretical and scholarly writings of Sara
Ahmed. (The meeting of two conceptual personae: the outsider and the
killjoy.) Indeed, the spirit of Three Guineas and Woolf’s effortfully and
boldly practiced immunity to criticism—her “philosophy of the free soul”
(1977–1984, 5: 68; cf. Barber 2009, 199–201)—no doubt anticipates
Ahmed’s own insistence, with which I close, that “to become feminist”
risks “caus[ing] a problem for oneself by making oneself one’s own cause”
(2017, 74).
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Barber, Stephen M. 2004. Exit Woolf. In Feminism and the Final Foucault, ed.
Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges, 41–64. Champaign: University of
Illinois Press.
———. 2009. States of Emergency, States of Freedom: Woolf, History, and the
Novel. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42 (2): 196–206.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York:
Hill and Wang.
Black, Naomi. 2004. Virginia Woolf as Feminist. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1984. The Use of Pleasure. Vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality.
Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage.
———. (2001) 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell.
New York: Picador.
Keane, Webb. 2018. Saba Mahmood and the Paradoxes of Self-Parochialization.
Public Books. www.publicbooks.org/saba-mahmood-and-the-paradoxes-of-self-
parochialization
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist
Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2009a. Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?
In Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, ed. Is Critique, 64–100.
Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities.
———. 2009b. Reply to Judith Butler. In Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury,
and Free Speech, 146–153. Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities.
Marcus, Jane. 2006. Introduction. In Three Guineas, ed. Virginia Woolf, xxxv–
lxxii. New York: Harcourt.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of
Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere (blog). Social
Science Research Council. https:/tif.ssrc.org/
Woolf, Virginia. (1938) 2006. Three Guineas, annotated and introduction by Jane
Marcus. New York: Harcourt.
———. 1975–1980. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne
Trautmann. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
———. 1994–2011. Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid. In The Essays of Virginia
Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie, vol. 6, 242–248. London: Hogarth.
Index1
A Bergson, Henri, 95n14, 96n14

Afterlife, 117 Bible/biblical, 22, 28, 113n14, 114,
Agnostic/agnosticism, 17, 18, 28, 134, 173, 173n3, 175, 176,
53n2, 70, 73, 80, 89n5, 105n22, 181–184
133, 137, 141, 142 Black, Naomi, 205n6
Ahmed, Sara, 206 Blotner, Joseph, 74n5
Alterity, 120 Body, 3–5, 10, 26, 36, 38, 41, 45, 47,
Annan, Noel, 142n14 48, 82, 89n5, 96, 98, 112, 121,
Arnold, Matthew, 8, 63, 70–83, 70n3 125, 156, 162, 183, 192, 195,
Atheist/atheism, 2, 56, 79, 95, 101, 197, 200, 201
104, 133, 139, 140, 142, 143, Briggs, Julia, 172, 173
151, 152, 163 Brueggeman, Walter, 168, 177
Authority/authoritarian, 5, 6, 6n5, 8, Butler, Judith, 2, 2n3, 125, 205
11, 17, 18, 21–23, 36n4, 41,
41n7, 116, 118n22, 136, 137n9,
168–171, 173, 176 C
Carpentier, Martha, 53n6, 74n5
Christian/Christianity, 1, 2n2, 7n6,
B 8–10, 16, 17, 21, 22, 36, 53,
Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 91 53n2, 56, 56n10, 67, 71–74, 79,
Barber, Stephen, 199, 206 80, 105, 113, 113n11, 113n14,
Barthes, Roland, 190 115, 124, 132–136, 132n2,
Bell, Quentin, 15, 139, 139n11, 205 136n6, 139–142, 140n13,
Bell, Vanessa, 56n10, 132, 152 144n16, 145–147, 168, 172, 194
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

of Virginia Woolf, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32568-8
210 INDEX
Church, 19, 21, 22, 53, 116, 117, Embodiment, 194

134, 136n6, 152, 154, 160, Enactment, 7, 36, 37
171, 183 Epiphany/epiphanic, 53, 61, 147, 154
Clapham Sect, 1, 17, 24, 133, 133n4 Eternity, 23, 25, 79, 144
Consciousness, 4, 7, 11, 23, 24, 26, Ethic/ethics, 2n1, 95, 125
35, 36, 38, 39, 39n6, 42, 46, 59, Everyday, 9, 41, 51–67, 109–111,
64, 91n7, 98, 132, 135, 138, 115, 120, 134n5, 138n9,
160, 181 159, 160
Conversion, 44, 47, 56n10, 132, 136,
151, 152, 162, 198
Cuddy-Keane, Melba, 182 F
Feminism/feminist, 7, 8, 17, 20, 70,
74, 80, 83, 118n21, 118n22,
D 139, 140, 199
Dalgarno, Emily, 70n3, 153 Feminist theology, 7, 36n4, 89n5
de Certeau, Michel, 9, 110–112, Fernald, Anne, 69n1
111n5, 119, 120, 125, 126 Flânerie, 118, 118n22, 119
de Gay, Jane, 3n4, 7n6, 8, 115, 116, Forster, E.M., 5, 205
132, 133n4, 134, 177n9 Foucault, Michel, 198–200
Death, 1, 3, 11, 17, 25, 26, 28, 29, Frazer, James, 183
39, 42–44, 47, 48, 48n8, 71, 77, Froula, Christine, 170, 172, 173
79, 81, 83, 88, 95, 97, 109, 116,
117, 124, 134, 136, 144, 146,
148, 154–159, 161, 162, 169, G
173, 174, 190, 191, 197 Gaipa, Mark, 70, 71, 75, 89n5,
Divine/divinity, 7–9, 15, 16, 22, 105n22, 132, 143, 145, 145n17
34n1, 36, 36n4, 37, 44, 52, Garnett, Constance, 152, 153
59n12, 71, 72, 74, 92, 93, 95, Gelfant, Blanche, 102n20
100–102, 104, 105, 113, 116, Gender, 11, 75, 80, 118n22, 170
126, 132, 135, 138–141, 138n9, Geography, 11, 47, 92, 119
140n13, 143–146, 154, 156, Gillespie, Diane, 163
158–160, 163, 194, 199 God, 6, 7, 11, 16, 17, 22, 26–28, 30,
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 9, 151–163 33–49, 54, 60, 70, 71, 73, 74,
79–83, 89–91, 89n5, 91n9, 93,
93n12, 94, 100, 101, 105,
E 132–134, 138–144, 146, 148,
Ecstasy/ecstatic state, 49, 59, 61–63, 151, 152, 154, 156, 158, 163,
61n13, 65, 103 175, 180n14, 183–185
Eliade, Mircea, 112, 112n9, 113 Goddess/goddesses, 44, 74, 80, 101,
Eliot, T.S., 56n10, 64, 72, 126n28, 102, 143
132, 151, 152 Goldman, Jane, 18
Ellipsis, 178 Gough, Val, 15, 16
INDEX 211
Griesinger, Emily, 8 Jews/Judaism, 113n14, 122n25, 190,

Grigg, Richard, 36, 37, 39, 48, 49 190n1
Gualtieri-Reed, Elizabeth, 3n4, 48 Jones, Rufus, 17, 19, 135–138,
137n7, 137n8, 137n9
Journey/journeys, 9, 38, 111, 112n8,
H 113, 114, 114n16, 117–120,
Harrison, Jane Ellen, 74, 82 123, 124, 141, 157
Heaven, 26, 39, 80, 94, 101, Judeo-Christian, 52, 53, 173, 184
102, 171
Heidegger, Martin, 61, 178
Heininge, Kathleen, 18, 133n3, 135, K
136, 138n10, 139 Kane, Julie, 16
Henke, Suzette, 152, 162 Keller, Catherine, 5
Herman, David, 38, 38n5 Kierkegaard, Soren, 182
Hobson, Suzanne, 110n3 Knight, Christopher, 3, 3n4, 89n5,
Holy/holiness, 114, 120, 125, 151, 132, 132n2
155, 156, 161, 163
Holy Spirit, 89, 171
Hopkins, George Manley, 8, 9, 27, L
87–105 Lazenby, Donna, 16, 18, 20, 54,
Howard, Douglas, 3n4 56, 59n12
Hungerford, Amy, 5, 6, 46 Leder, Drew, 36, 43
Hussey, Mark, 3, 58, 60, 61, 66, 67 Lee, Hermione, 10n8, 117
Lesbian, 9, 10, 167–185
Lewis, Pericles, 3n4, 6, 51–54, 53n4,
I 61, 132, 134, 135, 152, 160,
Illness, 4–6, 26, 43, 44, 65, 65n15, 162, 177
66, 72 Light, 3, 8, 9, 22, 25–27, 29, 41, 48,
Imagination, 39, 66, 89, 90, 94, 61, 73, 79, 89n5, 92, 98, 100,
95n14, 111, 114, 120, 121, 145, 116, 132, 138–141, 140n13,
160, 177, 193 143–148, 167, 174, 179, 190n1
Immanence, 22, 23, 66, 123, 139 Lighthouse, 8, 25, 69n1, 77, 78, 80,
Incarnation, 105 132, 135, 140–144, 140n13,
Inge, W. R., 19, 21, 22 146, 147
Intersubjectivity, 36, 124, 125 Liminal/liminality, 4, 46, 112n8, 125
London, 10, 38, 39, 41, 42, 46, 47,
95, 98, 117–119, 118n21,
J 122n25, 123, 135, 159,
James, William, 19, 21, 23 160, 190n1
Jesus Christ, 148 Love, Jean O., 160
212 INDEX
M Peat, Alexandra, 110, 114, 115,

Map/maps/mapping, 10, 38, 42, 119, 120
110, 119 Pecora, Vincent, 3n4, 132
Marcus, Jane, 17–19, 133n3, 135, Phenomenology, 54
136, 140, 169, 176, 205 Pilgrimage, 9, 109–126
Materialism/materiality, 9, 23, 54, Prayer, 22, 28, 58, 99, 171
89n5, 139, 145, 145n17 Prophecy/prophet/prophetess, 10,
McIntire, Gabrielle, 3n4, 34n1, 139, 156, 168, 171, 177, 204
142, 145, 176
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 35, 37
Metaphor, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 27, 40–42, Q
46, 47, 62, 90, 93, 100, 112n8, Quaker/Quakerism, 8, 16–19, 21, 22,
113, 114, 115n17, 116, 146 55n8, 131–148, 152, 163
Mills, Jean, 152, 153 Quest, 3, 20, 21, 35, 73, 154, 181
Moments of being, 6, 24, 30, 33–35,
37, 49, 52, 54n7, 61–63, 61n13,
101, 134n5, 147, 160 R
Moore, G.E., 20, 55, 55n8 Raitt, Suzanne, 16, 20, 174
Mutter, Matthew, 11n9, 39, 70, 80, 81 Redemption, 29, 139–141, 158
Mystery, 9, 18, 49, 53n4, 55, 66, 67, Religion, 1–3, 5–8, 6n5, 7n6, 10,
90–93, 91n8, 95, 99, 100, 113, 11n9, 17–22, 26, 30, 35–37, 41,
123, 132, 134 41n7, 44–46, 48, 53–55, 63, 66,
Mysticism, 8, 15–31, 53, 56, 57, 70, 74, 75, 79, 80, 82, 89n5,
66, 79, 80, 110, 125, 131–148, 105n22, 110, 110n4, 112–114,
168, 185 113n11, 123, 134–137, 139,
143, 143n15, 145n17, 146, 151,
152, 155, 162, 163, 170, 171,
O 177, 184, 185, 192, 197,
Orthodox/orthodoxy, 11, 54, 55, 63, 203, 204
117, 145n17, 148, 153, 154, Revelation, 6, 24, 40, 41, 43, 52,
156, 158, 163, 183 57–63, 90, 93, 95, 100–102,
Outsider/Society of Outsiders, 6, 134, 105, 137, 137n9, 147, 156
168, 170–172, 177–179, Richardson, Doothy, 20, 21, 28
184, 206 Richter, Harvena, 181
Owen, Alex, 34, 35 Ritual, 11, 27, 40, 63, 64, 82, 112,
125, 145
Romantics/romanticism, 8, 52,
P 53n4, 64, 70, 73, 78, 81, 132,
Parkes, Graham, 39 140, 193
Pater, Walter, 96n15, 105, 105n22 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 36, 36n4
Paulsell, Stephanie, 16, 89n5 Russian writers, 151, 153, 160
INDEX 213
S Stephen, Carolina Emelia, 16–20, 24,

Sackville-West, Vita, 16, 20, 21, 24, 28, 55n8, 131–138, 133n3,
25, 27, 170, 205 138–139n10, 140, 143, 148, 152
Sacred, 3, 6, 6n5, 7, 9, 24, 34, 37, 40, Stephen, Julia Duckworth, 53n2,
41, 46, 49, 51–67, 77, 80, 97, 69n1, 81, 136, 138n10
109–126, 145, 147, 151–163, Stephen, Leslie, 1, 2n1, 28, 53n2,
170, 174 69n1, 70, 75, 81, 105n22, 132,
Sacrifice, 21, 44, 90, 162 133, 135–137, 138n10, 141,
Sambrooke, Jerilyn, 11 142, 143n15
Science, 8, 44, 72, 133, 145, 145n17,
147, 151
Secularism thesis, 110 T
Secular/secularism, 8, 11, 11n9, 34, Taves, Ann, 6, 6n5, 41n7
52–57, 53n5, 63, 70, 73, 82, Taylor, Charles, 56, 56n11, 133, 136,
110n4, 113, 113n12, 114, 192n3
114n17, 117, 118, 133, 135, A Secular Age, 133
136, 139, 152, 163, 192, 194, Temporal/temporality, 22, 23, 47, 95,
197, 205 102n19, 119, 147
Sim, Lorraine, 9, 62, 63, 162 Theology, 5, 7, 9, 11, 34, 36, 36n4,
Sinclair, May, 20, 21, 28 37, 59n12, 82, 89, 89n5, 94,
Snaith, Anna, 18 105, 135, 139, 141, 145,
Solitude, 15, 28–30, 44, 78, 79, 148, 199
92n11, 97, 155, 160, 162 Thompson, Evan, 35–37, 48
Soul, 9, 21, 22, 25, 26, 36, 45–47, Time, 4, 5, 7n6, 10, 17, 21, 25, 27,
54–58, 60, 64, 66, 91, 92, 96, 29, 30, 34n1, 42, 46, 47, 55, 56,
102–104, 120, 121, 123, 132, 58, 60, 61, 63, 65, 66, 76, 77,
135, 138, 140, 144, 144n16, 82, 88, 92, 94, 95, 95n14, 97,
151–163, 171, 176, 199 98, 100, 101, 104, 105, 115,
Space 121, 124, 125, 141, 145–147,
sacred space, 24, 109–126 151, 153, 154, 160, 162, 163,
urban space, 110, 118n22, 120 167, 169, 173, 175–179, 192,
Spiritual/spirituality, 1–11, 15, 16, 199, 205
19–28, 30, 34, 34n1, 35, 37, 40, Toth, Naomi, 4
45, 49, 51–55, 56n11, 57, 58, 60, Transfiguration, 172
62, 66, 67, 73, 77, 79, 80, 89, Transformation, 48, 80, 113, 121,
89n5, 104, 110, 110n3, 110n4, 123, 141, 157, 198, 199
112–115, 113n14, 117, 118, 120, Truth, 2–6, 2–3n3, 18, 33, 34n1, 35,
121, 123, 124, 126, 132–139, 54–57, 60, 63, 67, 73, 78, 80,
145n17, 146, 147, 153, 154, 96, 98, 132, 133, 137, 139–141,
159, 160, 162, 163, 171, 172 143, 145–147, 156, 158, 198
214 INDEX
U essays; “Abbeys and Cathedrals,” 9,

Underhill, Evelyn, 19–25, 28, 135, 115, 117, 125, 126; “The Artist
144n16 and Politics,” 168, 177;
“Character in Fiction,” 96;
“Modern Fiction,” 3, 4, 23, 27,
V 39n6, 153; “The Moment,” 25,
Vetter, Laura, 110n3 27, 28; “On Being Ill,” 5, 25–27;
Victorian/Victorians, 9, 11, 69–83, A Room of One’s Own, 140, 205;
133, 136, 145n17, 160, 179 “A Sketch of the Past,” 1, 6, 10n8,
Vision, 15, 30, 34n1, 35, 36, 49, 30, 33, 40, 54n7, 60, 61, 61n13,
59n12, 73, 75, 77, 78, 99, 102, 63, 71; “Street Haunting,” 9, 109,
105, 141, 146, 147, 155, 117, 125, 126; “The Sun and the
157, 158, 179, 183, 184, Fish,” 25, 26; Three Guineas, 10,
195, 197, 199 19, 22, 134, 170, 177, 183, 184,
191–193, 195–197, 199, 201,
202, 206
W novels; Between the Acts, 9, 30,
War, 10, 19, 22, 35, 42, 43, 47, 97, 167–185, 190; Mrs. Dalloway,
100, 145, 146, 169, 182, 2n2, 7, 9, 33–49, 70n3, 89,
190–192, 196, 200–202 89n5, 93n12, 94–97, 101, 115,
Weil, Lise, 74n5 151–163, 181; To the Lighthouse,
Wilderness, 90, 123 8, 10n8, 23, 25, 34n1, 52, 57,
Wood, James, 34n1 63, 66, 69–83, 131–148, 181;
Woolf, Leonard, 133, 205, 206 The Voyage Out, 2n2, 21, 66, 134;
Woolf, Virginia The Waves, 4, 9, 15, 25, 28–30,
biography; Roger Fry: 56, 70n3, 80, 167–185; The
A Biography, 190 Years, 115, 199

Religion, Secularism, and Spiritual Paths

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Religion, Secularism,

and the Spiritual Paths

ISBN 978-3-030-32567-1 ISBN 978-3-030-32568-8 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Patricia Hamilton / Getty

I am grateful to the constellation of teachers, scholars, colleagues, stu-

1 Introduction—Desire Lines: The Spiritual Paths of

2 “Some restless searcher in me”: Virginia Woolf and

3 A God “in process of change”: Woolfian Theology and

4 “The thing is in itself enough”: Virginia Woolf’s Sacred

5 Virginia Woolf Reads “Dover Beach”: Romance and the

6 Woolf and Hopkins on the Revelatory Particular 87

7 “Perpetual Departure”: Sacred Space and Urban

8 Quaker Mysticism and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse131

9 Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Dostoevsky: The Sacred Space

10 “She heard the first words”: Lesbian Subjectivity and

11 Sensibility, Parochiality, Spirituality: Toward a Critical

Elizabeth Anderson is Lecturer in English Studies at the University of

publications on Bliss Carman, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde. She is

Lorraine Sim is Senior Lecturer in Modern English Literature at Western

© The Author(s) 2019 1

and its failure to explain or assuage terrible tragedies: in particular, the

questions—about life’s meaning, the inevitability of death, the ­impossibility

rather apt description of Woolf’s vernacular, which is so markedly characterized by “moments

this “belief in the nonsemantic powers of language” as “a world where

them so thoroughly blurred that her characters are “completed” by one

Woolf’s somewhat surprising a­dmiration for the work of the devoutly

Pecora, Vincent. 2006. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation,

“Some restless searcher in me”: Virginia

While critics have traditionally been reluctant to associate Virginia Woolf

© The Author(s) 2019 15

dogma,” and ready-made ways of expressing and conceptualizing the

with contemporary debates about mysticism across a range of her writ-

Caroline Emelia Stephen

new ideas provoked by Darwinism and other currents of thought. Noting

pacifist causes and founded the Metropolitan Society for Befriending

By criticizing religion [the daughters of educated men] would attempt to

Dean has shown. Evelyn Underhill in particular promoted mysticism: as

Spirituality and Institutional Religion

ship between the individual and institutional religion; the question of

The Site of Spiritual Authority

The Nature of Religious Experience

which is ‘it’” (Woolf 1977–1984, 3: 62). Woolf’s most explicit discussion

included Sackville-West (1986–2011, 4: 521). As the spectators gathered

This lyrical description of a bird’s flight echoes G.M. Hopkins’s “The

essay on the eclipse, so the capturing of fleeting glances of spiritual

Lazenby, Donna. 2014. A Mystical Philosophy: Transcendence and Immanence in

A God “in process of change”: Woolfian

In her autobiographical essay “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf

© The Author(s) 2019 33

But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and ­emphatically

In describing moments of being, Woolf voices a multifaceted “philoso-

Thompson argues, cognitivism “derives from taking what is in fact a socio-

the divine…to an unconscious, alienating projection or dismissing it as a

aging and death, simultaneously reflected in her faltering heartbeat and in

As in “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf combines a pointed denial of God

While this is not a “religious experience” in any common sense of the

Even as an obligatory and enforced patriotism silences Septimus, the

r­ eligiosity within an attitude of seething resentment. Clarissa regards Miss

Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and

Woolf’s playful and ambiguous language—“combine”, “create”, “offer-

­ ractice, characterized by weaving together diverse elements in an act of

Everybody was going out…it seemed as if the whole of London were

Woolf, who so often characterizes doorways and windows as liminal spaces

1 Introduction—Desire Lines: The Spiritual Paths of

2 “Some restless searcher in me”: Virginia Woolf and

3 A God “in process of change”: Woolfian Theology and

4 “The thing is in itself enough”: Virginia Woolf’s Sacred

5 Virginia Woolf Reads “Dover Beach”: Romance and the

6 Woolf and Hopkins on the Revelatory Particular 87

7 “Perpetual Departure”: Sacred Space and Urban

8 Quaker Mysticism and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse131

9 Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Dostoevsky: The Sacred Space

10 “She heard the first words”: Lesbian Subjectivity and

11 Sensibility, Parochiality, Spirituality: Toward a Critical

questions—about life’s meaning, the inevitability of death, the impossibility

Woolf’s somewhat surprising admiration for the work of the devoutly

But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically

r eligiosity within an attitude of seething resentment. Clarissa regards Miss

ractice, characterized by weaving together diverse elements in an act of

expression of pessimism, seen as emblematic of Victorian intellectual

particular ways.6 The human recipient likewise receives each inscape in an