Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf

Kristina K. Groover is Professor of English at Appalachian State University, USA.  She is author of The Wilderness Within:  American Women Writers and Spiritual Quest (1999) and editor of Things of the Spirit:  Women Writers Constructing Spiritualities (2004).

• 1. Introduction—Desire Lines: The Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf.- 2. “Some restless searcher in me”: Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Mysticism.- 3. A God “in process of change”: Woolfian Theology and Mrs. Dalloway.- 4. “The thing is in itself enough”: Virginia Woolf’s Sacred Everyday.- 5. Virginia Woolf Reads “Dover Beach”: Romance and the Victorian Crisis of Faith in To the Lighthouse.- 6. Woolf and Hopkins on the Revelatory Particular.- 7. “Perpetual Departure”: Sacred Space and Urban Pilgrimage in Woolf’s Essays.- 8. Quaker Mysticism and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.- 9. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Dostoevsky: The Sacred Space of the Soul.- 10. “She heard the first words”: Lesbian Subjectivity and Prophetic Discourse in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Between the Acts.- 11. Sensibility, Parochiality, Spirituality: Toward a Critical Method and Ethic of Response in Woolf, Spivak, and Mahmood.