2 - Virginia Woolf and Christianity

Summary

FOR MANY DECADES, Virginia Woolf was regarded as an atheist who was hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular. After all, she declared T. S. Eliot ‘dead to us all’ on becoming an Anglo-Catholic, adding that ‘there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God’; she shouted ‘I hate religion!’ at Ethel Smyth after hearing her Mass in D; and in her late memoir ‘A Sketch of the Past’, she stated that ‘certainly and emphatically there is no God’. Yet, these statements can all be counterbalanced with others: her admiration of Beatrice Webb for having ‘causes in her life: prayer, principle’; her curiosity about Ethel Smyth’s faith, ‘How I’d like to see what you see when I say Heaven!’; and her many speculative comments about the existence of God, even if it is to suggest that he must be cruel if he exists at all (on the General Strike: ‘What one prays for is God […] to say kiss & be friends’; on her headaches: ‘he smashed his fist on my head. Lord, I said, I will write. Then he altogether took from me the power of adding word to word’). Recent scholarship has moved beyond the slogans to present a more nuanced and complex view of Woolf and religion: Pericles Lewis included her among novelists who were interested in ‘re-enchantment’, and Stephanie Paulsell, Kathleen Heininge and the author of this chapter have suggested that Woolf may have been more curious and open-minded about religion than had been assumed. Paulsell points out that when Woolf’s anti-religious statements are used as ‘the only lens through which to examine Woolf’s relationship to religion, they serve to obscure her lifelong interest in it, its influence on her writing and the religious dimensions of her own literary project’.