Consolation Refused: Virginia Woolf, The Great War, and Modernist Mourning

This essay argues that Woolf's engagement with the war's legacy prompted her to represent a new kind of mourning practice, one that spurns consolation and closure. In critiquing the consoling rhetoric of God, king, and country, Jacob's Room articulates a politics and ethics of mourning linked to Woolf'sfeminist aims. To the Lighthouse turns the question of consolation back upon Woolf's own medium, showing how a female painter deconstructs the notion of redemptive art and represents a perpetual mourning of loss.