This wide-ranging study demonstrates that Woolf, despite her agnostic upbringing, was profoundly interested in, and knowledgeable about, Christianity as a faith and a socio-political movement. Jane de Gay provides a strongly contextual approach, first revealing the extent of the Christian influences on Woolf's upbringing, including an analysis of the far-reaching influence of the Clapham Sect, and then drawing attention to the importance of Christianity among Woolf's friends and associates. It shows that Woolf's awareness of the ongoing influence of Christian ideas and institutions informed her feminist critique of society in Three Guineas. The book sheds new light on works including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves by revealing her fascination with the clergy, the Madonna, churches and cathedrals; her interest in the Bible as artefact and literary text; and her wrestling with questions about salvation and the nature of God.

Virginia Woolf was not a religious person in any traditional sense, yet she lived and worked in an environment rich with religious thought, imagination, and debate. From her agnostic parents to her evangelical grandparents, an aunt who was a Quaker theologian, and her friendship with T. S. Eliot, Woolf’s personal circle was filled with atheists, agnostics, religious scholars, and Christian converts. In this book, Stephanie Paulsell considers how the religious milieu that Woolf inhabited shaped her writing in unexpected and innovative ways. Beginning with the religious forms and ideas that Woolf encountered in her family, friendships, travels, and reading, Paulsell explores the religious contexts of Woolf’s life. She shows that Woolf engaged with religion in many ways, by studying, reading, talking and debating, following controversies, and thinking about the relationship between religion and her own work. Paulsell examines the ideas about God that hover around Woolf’s writings and in the minds of her characters. She also considers how Woolf, drawing from religious language and themes in her novels and in her reflections on the practices of reading and writing, created a literature that did, and continues to do, a particular kind of religious work. A thought-provoking contribution to the literature on Woolf and religion, this book highlights Woolf’s relevance to our post-secular age. In addition to fans of Woolf, scholars and general readers interested in religious and literary studies will especially enjoy Paulsell’s well-researched narrative.

Virginia Woolf was deeply interested in the past - whether literary, intellectual, cultural, political or social - and her writings interrogate it repeatedly. She was also a great tourist and explorer of heritage sites in England and abroad. This book brings together an international team ofworld-class scholars to explore how Woolf engaged with heritage, how she understood and represented it, and how she has been represented by the heritage industry.

Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf offers an expansive interdisciplinary study of spirituality in Virginia Woolf's writing, drawing on theology, psychology, geography, history, gender and sexuality studies, and other critical fields. The essays in this collection interrogate conventional approaches to the spiritual, and to Woolf’s work, while contributing to a larger critical reappraisal of modernism, religion, and secularism. While Woolf’s atheism and her sharp criticism of religion have become critical commonplaces, her sometimes withering critique of religion conflicts with what might well be called a religious sensibility in her work. The essays collected here take up a challenge posed by Woolf herself: how to understand her persistent use of religious language, her representation of deeply mysterious human experiences, and her recurrent questions about life's meaning in light of her disparaging attitude toward religion. These essays argue that 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.

Examines the apparent contradictions in the world and explains how the invisible, natural, and supernatural worlds might interact and affect people's daily lives.

Modernism After the Death of God explores the work of seven influential modernists. Friedrich Nietzsche, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, André Gide, and Martin Heidegger criticized the destructive impact that they believed Christian sexual morality had had or threatened to have on their love life. Although not a Christian, Freud criticized the negative effect that Christian sexual morality had on his clinical subjects and on Western civilization, while Virginia Woolf condemned how her society was sanctioned by a patriarchal Christian authority. All seven worked to replace the loss or absence of Christian unity with non-Christian unifying projects in their respective fields of philosophy, psychiatry, or literature. The basic structure of their main contributions to modernist culture was a dynamic interaction of radical fragmentation necessitating radical unification that was always in process and never complete.

"Barry Spurr's eagerly-awaited, definitive study of T.S. Eliot's Anglo-Catholic belief and practice shows how the poet is religion shaped his life and work for almost forty years, until his death in 1965. The author examines Eliot's formal adoption of Anglo-Catholicism, in 1927, as the culmination of his intellectual, cultural, artistic, spiritual and personal development to that point. This book presents the first detailed analysis of the unique influence that Anglo-Catholicismis doctrinal and devotional principles, and its social teaching, had on Eliot's poetry, plays, prose and personal life. An informed presentation and discussion of Anglo-Catholicism at the time of Eliot's conversion and through the subsequent decades of his Christian faith and practice. Significant new material from correspondence and diaries which sheds light on Eliot's thought, poetry and prose. This book is essential reading for all scholars and readers of T.S. Eliot and his circle; for students and devotees ofAnglo-Catholicism, and scholars of the interaction between literature and theology, especially in the twentieth century. It will also be of use to senior and Honours-level undergraduates and postgraduate research students working in the fields of Modernism and its principles and belief systems, and for students of religion, especially Western Christianity and Anglicanism."