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.” These words were strong but not atypical, for Woolf expressed passionate hostility toward all forms of traditional Christianity. Woolf endows some of her characters with her horror of churchgoing and religious belief, which clearly relates to the problem of mortality. (Because he believes in immortality, Eliot is “dead to us,” less credible than “a corpse.”) Woolf directs her strongest sense of disgust, however, not at generalized religious feeling but at what she calls “this old savage,” God. In A Room of One's Own (1929), Woolf writes of the necessity for women writers to escape from “Milton's bogey” – a phrase that explicitly refers to Milton himself (whom Woolf seems, incidentally, to have associated with her own father), but also conjures Milton's portrait of God, the ultimate patriarch.

Yet, if Woolf found the more dogmatic and intolerant aspects of religion to be repugnant, she also understood the uses of enchantment.