Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture

Jane de Gay is an Anglican Priest. She was Professor of English Literature at Leeds Trinity University from 2017-25 and she is currently an Associate Lecturer at the Open University. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture (2018) and Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past (2006), and editor of eight books including Virginia Woolf and Heritage: Selected Papers from the Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, with Tom Breckin and Anne Reus (2017), and Voyages Out, Voyages Home: Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Virginia Woolf Conference, with Marion Dell (2010). She has published articles in Woolf Studies Annual and Christianity and Literature, as well as chapters in collections such as The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives (2024), The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth, and Religion (2023), The Oxford Handbook to Virginia Woolf (2021), and Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf (2020).

• AbbreviationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Family Background: Clapham and After 2. Contemporary Conversations 3. Reverend Gentlemen and Prophetesses4. Sacred Spaces: Churches and Cathedrals5. Domestic Sacred Spaces 6. The Purple Triangle and Blue Madonnas: The Virgin Mary 7. How Should One Read the Bible? Conclusion: A New Religion? BibliographyIndex

With wisdom and conviction, De Gay shows how seriously Woolf engaged with Christianity and, especially, with what it means to renounce faith. For readers of Woolf and for all who care about the literature of agnosticism, this will be a book that matters.