VIRGINIA WOOLF’S LITERARY masterpieces assume a culture and a milieu of modern secularity, with her central characters (mostly) untethered to what she considered to be the restrictive dogmas and illusions of traditional religious beliefs. Woolf herself has primarily been understood as an atheist, with a statement she makes in her posthumously published autobiography, ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1941), that there is ‘no God’, taken as retrospective evidence and confirmation of a thoroughgoing conviction. Both her fictional and non-fictional prose, though, are deeply traversed with cautious but persistent explorations of sacred experience. Woolf celebrates the expansiveness of the ‘human spirit’, believes in an immaterial ‘soul’, and conveys intimations of a singular oneness with an inexplicable ‘real’ ‘behind appearances’ (‘Sketch’ 72); her work is permeated with visionary, transformative ‘moments’ characterised by quasi-religious feelings of ‘rapture’ and ‘ecstasy’, while she emphasises the miraculous in the everyday. Her diaries, letters and novels also include frequent mention of chapels, churches, cathedrals and prayer. Terms like ‘revelation’, ‘illumination’ and ‘vision’ recur so often in her writing that they begin to seem like key words to grasping the meaning of her oeuvre. The visionary artist of To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe, laments that the ‘great revelation had never come’, but she, like Woolf, finds consolation in and sustaining gratitude for epiphanic glimpses of ‘little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark’. Later in the novel Lily’s claim about the miraculous becomes more expansive: ‘all was miracle’ (180), and even ordinary objects – a chair, a table – make her feel ‘It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy’ (202).

Woolf also frequently ruminates about a theistic Absolute; indeed, a varied pantheon of monotheistic and pagan gods appears across her novels and short stories. References to ‘God’, ‘goddesses’ or ‘gods’ occur thirty times in Mrs Dalloway alone, beginning with Septimus Smith’s declaration about his ‘revelation’ that ‘There is a God’.