Religion Around Virginia Woolf by Stephanie Paulsell (review)

Stephanie Paulsell has long explored the intersection between literature and Christianity as faculty in the Harvard Divinity School, and this book is the result of long immersion in Woolf's writing. It is a measured, knowledgeable study of Woolf's ambivalent engagements with Christianity, agnosticism, and related bodies of thought, and will be useful for scholars and religious readers. But it also raises difficult methodological questions about religious interpretations of literature, including questions about the category of religion itself and the sort of claim one is making by identifying "the religious dimensions of [a] literary project" (2). While this book has the virtue of avoiding polemics—and while there is no doubt that Woolf was keenly aware of religious phenomena around her—Paulsell's arguments bear significant unresolved tensions, most crucially between the possibilities of rejecting religion for secular world-making and of revitalizing religion through internal critique.

Paulsell's approach to the religious significance of Woolf's work is most thoroughly grounded in biography, rendered by interweaving Woolf's autobiographical writing, her journals and letters, and biographies about her and her milieu. From this material, we gather an intricate sense of Woolf's recurring, if guarded, engagements with Christian sentiment and intellectual history. Paulsell offers a subtle portrait: she dwells, for example, on Woolf's Clapham Sect ancestors and her warm relationship with Caroline Stephen, her aunt, an influential member of the British Quakers during its evangelical revival. Similarly, Paulsell connects several of Woolf's enthusiasms for texts posing religious questions, such as Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean and Jane Harrison's studies of ancient religion. But Paulsell also consistently reminds us of Leslie Stephen's agnosticism, Woolf's own disavowals of faith and the church, her reactions against T. S. Eliot's and others' conversions, and her impatience with her cousin Dorothea Stephen's proselytizing. In Paulsell's view, although Woolf is highly critical of religious institutions and rhetoric, she is also open to specific aspects of religious experience, whether or not they went by this name.

Paulsell demonstrates that Woolf can offer pleasure and inspiration to readers with religious sensibilities, those seeking representations of mystical experience, the sacred within the everyday, and theological resonances of beauty. Much of Paulsell's textual work focuses on Woolf's lyrical moments which suggest non-rational modes of knowing and loss of self; she gathers "the moments of being that saturate ordinary life with presence; the moments in which the boundaries between one person and another, or between human beings and the natural world, become, for a moment, crossable" (8). In this approach, Paulsell addresses others who read Woolf within mystical traditions. This aspect of the book, as a non-dogmatic guide to Woolf for religious readers, challenged my own sense of what constitutes literary scholarship. Paulsell affirms that Woolf can offer religious affect and pictures of grace to readers, whether or not these experiences are recognized by disciplinary categories of meaning or hold widely-recognized research value. In this sense, this criticism serves a different function than many approaches to Woolf in literary studies.

In this approach to Woolf as a resource for religious readers, the dominant portrait we have of her involves spiritual passion: she is attuned to the sacred dimension of art, ritualistic about reading and writing, reverent toward existence, seeking communion with others, and questing for the real. Readers may find this religiously-inflected portrait of Woolf appealing, a model of existential adventuring toward ultimate meanings. Paulsell writes that "Woolf felt her way along the path of the permanent quest to which she was committed by binding and connecting the fragments she found within her and around her. … Religion provided some of those fragments, but so did much else" (14). But Paulsell's analysis ultimately depends on interpretations of her fiction as bearing specific religious meanings or expressing identifiable religious sentiment, and this interpretive line of argument faces difficult challenges. Many of Paulsell's interpretations remain assertions or gestures, pointing toward...