How Should One Read the Bible?

This chapter reveals the extent of Virginia Woolf’s knowledge and interest in the Bible, both as text and as artefact, starting with an examination of the collection of Bibles in the Library of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, now housed in Washington State University, Pullman. It situates Woolf’s interests within competing scholarly understandings of the role and significance of the Bible that were in circulation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Making close readings of Woolf’s use of biblical allusion, the chapter demonstrates that Woolf’s responses to the Bible were both complex and varied. These readings include her use of rhetoric in her essays, ‘Modern Fiction’ in particular, and her engagement with the Passion narrative in her novels as a way of exploring questions about salvation.

The Purple Triangle and Blue Madonnas: The Virgin Mary

This chapter examines Woolf’s appreciation of the complex role played by the Virgin Mary in Western cultures, particularly as she has been represented in art from the Renaissance to the modernist era. The chapter shows that Woolf was deeply critical of the way in which society has used the Virgin Mary as an impossible role-model for women, but also interested in ways in which Mary can be regarded as an empowering figure. The chapter focuses particularly on Woolf’s allusions to the figure of the Madonna in Renaissance religious art in To the Lighthouse and The Waves, and also considers her encounters with ritual and art on her visits to Italy.

Reverend Gentlemen and Prophetesses

This chapter reveals the extent of Woolf’s critical interest in the clergy. It demonstrates that the clergy remained important within middle-class life during Woolf’s lifetime and that Woolf reflected this in her novels. It draws attention to the element of social criticism in Woolf’s novels The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, The Years and Between the Acts, as she represents the variety of roles played by the clergy: the cure of souls, the conduct of worship, the burial of the dead, and conserving English heritage and historical buildings. The chapter also examines Woolf’s detailed critique in Three Guineas of the decision of the Church of England to continue to exclude women from ordination in the Church Commissioners’ 1936 report The Ministry of Women. It also shows that Woolf was supportive of women’s ministry, both in her examination of the historical precedent for this in Three Guineas, and in her representation of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse as a prototype female priest.

Domestic Sacred Spaces

This chapter examines Woolf’s conceptualization of the home as a sacred space. It analyses her critique of Victorian domestic architecture in the light of Evangelical understandings of separate spheres, with the home as a place to which the paterfamilias could retreat to be ministered to by his wife. In doing so, it draws attention to the theological subtexts of Woolf’s essays ‘Professions for Women’ and A Room of One’s Own. The chapter then examines how Woolf sought to challenge these boundaries both in A Room of One’s Own, and in her organization of her own living space at Monk’s House. It demonstrates the influence of Woolf’s aunt Caroline Emelia Stephen on her writings about home as sacred space, as well as revealing the significance of the work of her little-known ancestor Sarah Stephen. The chapter also provides readings of Woolf’s representation of the home as sacred space in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.

Introduction

This chapter sets out the complexities and challenges of making connections between Virginia Woolf and Christian culture, but demonstrates that there are closer links than many scholars have allowed. It also shows that Christianity played a more significant and more complex role in modernist culture than has often been assumed. The chapter then demonstrates how Woolf’s responses and attitudes towards Christian culture are relevant to an understanding of three dimensions of her work: the political and ethical; the cultural and literary; and the spiritual. Throughout this discussion, the author summarizes and engages with a wide range of scholarship on Woolf’s connections with religion, spirituality and mysticism, to articulate an approach to Woolf’s relationship with Christianity that recognizes it as complex, uneasy and liminal.

Conclusion: A New Religion?

This chapter provides a summary of the deeply ambivalent responses that Woolf takes towards Christian culture, before moving on to provide a nuanced account of Woolf’s views and how they sit with Christian ideas. It then argues that a useful way of understanding Woolf’s complex response to Christianity is to see it as a form of feminist theology: just as she is widely recognised for having paved the way for the concerns and arguments of second-wave feminism, so she also anticipated more radical approaches to religion.

Contemporary Conversations

This chapter demonstrates that Woolf was highly informed about the ways in which Christianity continued to be an important cultural and political influence throughout her lifetime. Acknowledging that Christianity took many different forms – including progressive as well as conservative trends – the chapter shows that Woolf’s reaction varied accordingly. Woolf’s life and career is considered in four stages: the years of her adult life before the First World War; the War years; the 1920s; and the 1930s. In each section, the chapter sets out ways in which the public face of Christianity shifted, and how Woolf reacted to it (for example in Three Guineas), along with exploring ways in which Woolf responded to the faith and witness of people she knew. As the chapter demonstrates, Woolf’s close female friends – Violet Dickinson, Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth – all played a role in shaping her spirituality and her views on religion. The chapter also shows that Woolf was aware of contemporary debates about the existence and nature of God, seen not least in her famous statement in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ that ‘certainly and emphatically there is no God’.

Sacred Spaces: Churches and Cathedrals

This chapter examines Woolf’s conceptualization of sacred space in relation to her interest in the gendered division of space, and her interrogation of the concept of the sacred, with its implications of both exclusivity and holiness. The chapter examines Woolf’s experiences of churches and cathedrals, starting with her early journals and her formative encounter with Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in 1906. It then discusses her frequent references to English places of worship, most significantly St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, both as symbols of patriarchal and imperial power, but also as places for reflection, sanctuary and even prayer.

Family Background: Clapham and After

This chapter demonstrates that, although Woolf’s own parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen, were famously agnostic, her wider family was rooted in the Evangelicalism of the Clapham Sect. The chapter presents a detailed history of the involvement of Woolf’s family in the evolution of the Sect, starting with the influential theologies of her great-great-grandfather Rev Henry Venn, and continuing with the anti-slavery activities of her great-grandfather and grandfather, James and Sir James Stephen. Concentrating on her feminist-pacifist essay, Three Guineas, the chapter shows that although Woolf was critical of her ancestors for their religious, patriarchal and imperialist agendas, she also appropriated some of their values. The chapter then explores how conservative values – about women’s roles in particular – persisted, even as later generations of Stephens parted with the faith. It concludes by considering the important role played by Woolf’s Quaker aunt, Caroline Emelia Stephen, in the development of both her spirituality and her feminism.