Religion Around Virginia Woolf

Religion Around

by Stephanie Paulsell

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theology

248 pages, Paperback

Published September 17, 2019

About the author

Stephanie Paulsell teaches at Harvard Divinity School. She is the former director of ministry studies and senior lecturer in religion and literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and is a minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

Reviews

[Laila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant!

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

This wonderfully illuminating book is part of Penn State University Press's Religion Around series. As they put it on their website, "Books in this series examine the religious forces surrounding cultural icons from all facets of world history and contemporary culture. By bringing religious background into the foreground, these studies will help give readers a more complex understanding and greater appreciation for individual subjects, their work, and their lasting influence. "

Stephanie Paulsell's contribution, on religion around Virginia Woolf, is wonderful. If you want a small taste of what this is about, I recommend this quick article: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor....

My main complaints are that: (1) there aren't enough blank pages at the end to write out all my notes (or, shall I say, my florilegium); (2) the margins too small for all my marginalia, and; (3) the book ends.

I first heard some of Stephanie's thoughts on religion, sacred practices, and the secular, through listening to the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast (highly recommend). I then met her while doing the first reading-walking pilgrimage with Common Ground, a for-profit offshoot from the HP podcast. The pilgrimage was about a 16-17 months before this book came out and was centered on Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse (perhaps my favorite novel of all time). Stephanie came on as the Virginia Woolf expert (of sorts). It was a pleasure to read this book after hearing some of these idea nascent in our discussions back then. But even during the trip, and having read To The Lighthouse a number of times on my own before, Stephanie's reflections on it and the author significantly complexified my own views on the work and the themes I was most interested in (purpose of living in the face of only occasional 'matches struck in the dark', how and why we connect and create communities of meaning, understanding beauty, how to have religiosity without god, etc.). It was thus a pleasure to see these conversations extended and developed in this book.

If you are interested in Virginia Woolf at all, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I think reading this in conjunction with Hermione Lee's autobiography would be the makings of a fantastic course of study, inside or outside the ivory tower.

To give a little sense of what I got out of it, I'll write a few headlines/subject lines for the pages and page of notes I took while reading this:
- sacred, community, meaning-making [en passim, esp. chapters 2 and 5]
- sacred reading [en passim]
- the limits of reading and writing [pp.112; 120]
- self-transcendence [102-103; 121]
- class
- moments of being ("matches struck unexpectedly in the night") and our hope for them, response to them
- creativity
- point of art, literature [en passim]
- aesthetics, art [en passim]
- community (includes both Woolf's views and those of others, like T. S. Eliot, within the ecumenical movement c.1910, her aunt Caroline Stephen, and Jane Ellen Harrison)
- community and art (interesting points made about VW's view of them going hand-in-hand, art made as joint work between authors and audience) [pp. 180-189]
- beauty (77, 82-83, 90, 93 ...)
- religious history, related to VW views
- religious history, related to secular community today (the search for community and ritual beyond religion is not new. One example is European thought in the wake of Darwin's Origin of Species. Indeed (and this isn't in the book), that work alone is probably the most significant influence on American philosophy during the rise of Pragmatism)
- religious longings (e.g. creating something permanent, or at least something we can return to through ritual; crossing distance between heaven and earth, etc. [pp156])
- relevant history of philosophy (e.g. George Santayana, G.E. Moore, Alfred Whitehead)
- ways of knowing/diverse epistemic states (e.g. faith as a faculty, concept of orienting, having a posture toward, feeling as way of understanding)
- commercial, consumer activism (only very briefly mentioned in the start [pp12] in relation to the plane flying overhead in Mrs. Dalloway. But Paulsell says such interesting things, I wish very badly there was more on this given (1) my own academic interest in the topic and (2) the ubiquity of commercial/for-profit enterprises appropriating the language of meaning, transcendence, etc. for the sale of goods and services, and (3) the constant stream of consumer boycotts we see on, e.g., Twitter.
- quotes (so many beautiful ones!)
- people and books to look up (like Harrison and her book, Ancient Art & Rituals; Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society; Marius the Epicurean [p63])

I hope that helps. And I look forward to reading what others took from this wonderful book.

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for a research paper on Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse . It's a highly revealing book on the religious background of Woolf. Very helpful for understanding where Woolf is coming from, and how her relational background influenced her art and her philosophy. A good portion of it is biographical, which is highly illuminating on understanding her novels, and the other portion is a close reading of several texts. The analyses of To the Lighthouse was particularly helpful.

Paulsell makes many interesting connections between Woolf and her contemporaries. One surprising connection was between Woolf's early conceptions about God and later conceptions about aesthetics and the process philosopher A. N. Whitehead's conceptions about God and religion. Another interesting connection is between her and Russian painter Kandinsky, which is more commonly acknowledged and accepted. Obviously another interesting relational connection was between Woolf and T. S. Eliot. Here, Paulsell pits Woolf against Eliot, which I found helpful for understanding Woolf's distinctions vis à vis Eliot, but it felt somewhat like an unfair caricature in ways. I enjoyed the little discussion about their similarities, though I wish there was more said on that. Most helpful of all is the contextualization of Woolf's characters into the molds of the people in her family: Mrs. Ramsay as her mother Julia Stephen, Mr. Ramsay as her father Leslie Stephen, and Lily Briscoe as her sister Vanessa Bell. Obviously, contextualization doesn't exhaust the meaning of novel, and the later close readings exemplify the intricacy of her religious thoughts in the novel, especially in relation to community, art, and darkness (apophatic theology).

Overall, this was a very interesting read, and I would highly recommend for anyone interested in learning more about Woolf. It has given me a larger appreciation for who Woolf was and the work that she produced, even though I hold to a very different set of preconceptions than Woolf and Paulsell does. It's also got me interested in the other books in this series... maybe I'll read the one on Shakespeare in the future.