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7 - Modernism and religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2011

By
Pericles Lewis
Edited by
Michael Levenson
Michael Levenson
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Summary

In February, 1928, soon after T. S. Eliot had converted to Anglo-Catholicism, Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell:

Then I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there's something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.

Seeing Woolf's unmistakable personal hostility towards God, certain critics have understood her work as distinctively atheist. Woolf's revulsion against Eliot's religious beliefs may seem part and parcel of her rejection of patriarchal authority: what better representative of patriarchy than God the Father? Yet, Woolf's putative atheism is complicated by her relation to her own father, Leslie Stephen, the most famous agnostic in Victorian England, against whom much of her work rebels.

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The Cambridge Companion to Modernism , pp. 178 - 196
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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