Abstract
Among readers with a passing familiarity with Virginia Woolf, the idea of a monograph devoted to this famously irreligious author’s Christianity might come as a surprise. For many Woolf enthusiasts, her rejection of the church and its patriarchy is a point of pride, a way that Woolf challenged the powerful, repressive institutions of her age: church, government, military, university. Thus, putting Woolf into a Christian context might not just read her against the grain but actually undermine one of her most cherished attributes.
Jane de Gay faces these challenges from page 1 of her study Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture, which begins by rehearsing the oft-told anecdotes. After Woolf’s friend T. S. Eliot converted to Anglo-Catholicism, she wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell that Tom “may be called dead to us all from this day forward … there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God” (Letters Volume Three, 457–58). In a similarly puckish spirit, she recounted to her nephew Quentin Bell that at a party celebrating her friend Ethel Smyth’s composition of Mass in D, she “roared into [Smyth’s] deaf ears” that “I hate religion” (Letters Volume Five, 282). Lest de Gay be accused of a fool’s errand, she notes at the outset that her “book does not seek to claim that Woolf had secret leanings towards Christianity or that she lamented her distance from it” (2). Instead, de Gay claims that “Woolf’s debates with Christianity form a more powerful undercurrent in her work than has been acknowledged and that this was because she had detailed knowledge and understanding of the faith” (2). It is an invigorating and largely persuasive claim, instructive for experienced Woolfians, as well as being an engaging introduction to Woolf’s writings in their historical and theological contexts.
Across seven deeply researched chapters plus a substantial introduction and conclusion, de Gay’s study provides comprehensive detail about the depth of Woolf’s engagement with “Christian culture.” Though Woolf was by no means a closeted Christian, her attacks on Christianity were more nuanced and learned than is often assumed—especially if those jabs at her Christian friends are the only evidence. To read Woolf in her particular Christian context opens a new vista upon her writings, as well as on British Christianity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
De Gay is especially well positioned to write this book. She is a well-respected Woolf scholar whose previous monograph Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past (2006) demonstrated how Woolf’s vast literary knowledge shaped her innovative writing. And she holds a dual vocation as both a professor of English at Leeds Trinity and as an Anglican priest. Her initial approach to the project was going to employ her theological training as a theoretical lens for analyzing Woolf’s works, until she realized that what most scholars had missed was the wealth of specific engagement Woolf had with the Christianity of her time and place. By grounding Woolf’s work in this particular historical moment, de Gay offers a significant and very welcome supplement to other recent scholarship that considers religion and modernism.
Concomitant with this religious turn in modernist studies has been an erosion of the long-held view that Woolf was a staunch atheist. Mark Gaipa claimed in “An Agnostic Daughter’s Apology: Materialism, Spiritualism, and Ancestry in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse” (2003) that her 1927 novel is better understood as an expression of tentative agnosticism that rivaled the certitude of her father’s devout atheism. In “Writing in the ‘White Light of Truth’: History, Ethics, and Community in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts” (2016), J. Ashley Foster thoroughly documented Woolf’s relationship with Quakerism that had its largest connection in her aunt Caroline Emelia Stephen, a Quaker leader and theologian. And, Pericles Lewis argued in Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (2010) that Woolf, along with several other canonical modernist novelists—Joyce, Proust, Kafka, and James—was far less “secular” than has often been assumed. Not just not an atheist, Woolf might now be found tiptoeing into the company of postsecularists like Beckett.
What makes Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture such a significant addition to this changing dimension of Woolf studies is its historical richness that acts as a rejoinder to studies such as Pericles Lewis’s. Lewis pounded another nail into the coffin of the “secularization thesis”—the much-derided sociological claim that modernity has enabled an ever-expanding path of unbelief and secularity—by showing the importance of “religious experience” to a group of unbelievers at the core of modernism. But his book rarely used a lens more focused than the vague terminology of William James, asserting a general “religiousness” without looking specifically at the practices, theologies, and historical particularities of early twentieth-century Christianity. If Lewis gave a satellite picture of Woolf’s faith, then de Gay has given another view through a microscope.
Across her seven chapters, de Gay traces Woolf’s engagements with Christianity with each chapter offering a theme or topic that unifies Woolf’s reflections on religion. Chapter 1 reevaluates the Christian traditions of Woolf’s family of origin. Chapter 2 historicizes Christianity in Britain during the first 40 years of the twentieth century, showing how Woolf was mindful of specific theological debates during her adult life. Chapter 3 considers Woolf’s representations of clergy and feminist imagining of prophetess figures, while chapter 4 offers a similar approach to her descriptions of churches and cathedrals. Chapter 5 argues that domestic spaces are made sacred in Woolf’s fiction. Chapter 6 examines Woolf’s varied responses to the Virgin Mary, and chapter 7 discusses Woolf’s general theories of reading in relation to her particular reading of the Bible. De Gay’s strategy is informative, richly historical, and makes extensive use of archival materials, including the Woolfs’ personal library housed at Washington State University, which “contains seventeen volumes which are either bibles or books of the Bible, making it the book with the most duplicate copies in the entire collection” (186). In each of her chapters, de Gay provides significant evidence that Woolf’s grappling with Christianity is far more complex, ambivalent, and various than has previously been assumed.
For instance, de Gay challenges the prevailing notion that the agnosticism of Woolf’s father Leslie Stephen was a totalizing force in her (ir)religious upbringing. Instead, de Gay asserts, the Stephens’s agnosticism was in dialogue with competing strains of Christianity that were embraced by various members of her family. Anglicanism, the evangelicalism of the Clapham Sect, and Quakerism were all present. While de Gay acknowledges that one of Woolf’s foils was the patriarchal Church of England, she argues that the evangelicalism of the Clapham Sect formed the most significant theological perspective to which Woolf responded. This echoes Vincent P. Pecora’s similar claim in Secularization and Cultural Criticism (2006), but de Gay reads Woolf alongside writings by Woolf’s Quaker aunt Caroline Emelia Stephen, who served as “a mentor, a confidante and a spiritual influence” (41). Thus, Woolf’s inheritance from her Christian family members was mixed. She certainly resisted the austerity and patriarchal dominance of Clapham beliefs, but de Gay argues that lingering strains of evangelicalism persisted in Caroline Emelia’s thought and that “Woolf’s heritage … reveals some more subtle ways in which the customs and attitudes of Evangelical Christianity had influenced her practices as a writer” (48). Specifically, de Gay notes the Clapham Sect’s emphasis on the sacredness of the home and the similarity between “the evangelical practice of keeping a spiritual journal” and Woolf’s own diaries and private memoirs (48). Though the connections here between evangelical practices and Woolf’s values may at times seem strained, de Gay offers an important lens through which to consider her writing, suggesting that Woolf’s rejection of evangelical Christianity did not mean simplistic avoidance.
Her chapter on “Sacred Spaces: Churches and Cathedrals” is particularly compelling, deftly moving from Woolf’s diary entries about sacred buildings she visited into analyses of Woolf’s depiction of such sites in her fiction. Woolf was drawn to these sacred spaces, though she disliked being present for worship services and often skewered the exclusionary gender dynamics of churches where women could have no official role. De Gay contends that Woolf’s visit to the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia in 1906 was a crucial moment, “hugely significant to the growth of her vision and imagination,” and references to Constantinople and this specific cathedral would recur throughout her works (118). Even the familiar churches of London, such as St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, emerge as ambivalent spaces—signs of the domineering patriarchy but also sites of refuge in the novels for urban wanderers seeking sanctuary. De Gay reads Woolf as a kind of reformer who “frequently breaks down the metaphorical walls that have been constructed to restrict access to the sacred” (140). Readers with a more thoroughly materialist view of Woolf might not be entirely persuaded by this interpretation, but de Gay contributes immensely toward reconsidering Woolf’s position as more complicated than simply being a hostile critic of Christianity.
The only chapter of Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture that elicits some reservations is the fifth, on “Domestic Sacred Spaces.” Its argument that Woolf was deeply attentive to the spiritual and mystical qualities of particular places and that domestic space could be the site of transcendent experience is, on the whole, unobjectionable. But in a study that achieves so much of its freshness and insight from thickly historicizing Woolf’s engagements with Christianity, the turn toward a vaguer notion of the spiritual—unmoored by any particularly Christian theology or practice—seems like a move that belongs in a different monograph. In this chapter, de Gay seeks to build on Christopher Reed’s Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity (2004) by asserting that “Woolf was interested in reconfiguring private spaces to free women to reflect, write and have spiritual experiences” (144). While it does seem clear that Woolf valued women’s domestic spaces, this notion is widely accepted and the more controversial suggestion that this space is “sacred” and informed by “Christian culture” never gains traction.
This concern aside, de Gay has written a very valuable study with much for seasoned Woolfians and for anyone interested in the breadth of Christian experience in early twentieth-century Britain. Woolf emerges from this book as a vigorous intellect immersed in the most important debates of her time and place—including theological debates in a rapidly changing Christian culture. Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture points out several avenues for further religious studies and theological approaches to this essential British novelist.