Writing and Mystical Experience in Marguerite d'Oingt and Virginia Woolf

Abstract

COMMENTATORS have often noted the quality (Morris Beja 112) of the writings of Virginia Woolf. A term so laden with religious connotations may seem badly chosen to describe the works of a writer who maintained a thoroughgoing skepticism toward matters religious, and who was the daughter of Leslie Stephen, one of Victorian England's most famous agnostics. Yet Woolf complained that her father and his agnostic friends lacked imagination (Diary 3: 246), and her novels seem to many readers to be punctuated by moments of insight into the presence of a hidden reality. Beja preferred James Joyce's notion of epiphany to describe these moments, rather than the concept of mysticism, which he limited to a sense of union with God (24). Recent feminist scholarship, however, has returned to the category of the mystical in interpreting Woolf's work. Drawing upon the resources of women's history and the writings of women mystics, many studies have attempted to examine Woolf's mysticism historically. Jane Marcus has demonstrated the influence on Woolf's thought and writing of Quaker spirituality, embodied in her Aunt Caroline Stephen and her friend Violet Dickinson; and Catherine F. Smith has attempted to place Woolf in the tradition of English visionary women's prophetic writing, exemplified by the seventeenth-century mystic,Jane Lead. Such studies offer new forms of contextualization for Woolf which