Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf, Modernism and Religion

The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf, Modernism and Religion makes exciting interventions into debates about the beliefs and spiritual commitments of one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century. Although critics and readers have often assumed that Virginia Woolf is hostile or indifferent to religion, her work is, in fact, from early to late, traversed with reflections about religious, spiritual and sacred meaning and experience. Featuring twenty-eight new essays by established and emerging scholars, this Companion is the first to consider Woolf’s perspectives on global religious traditions including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Quakerism within the context of literary and cultural modernisms. The volume draws on a diverse range of theoretical and critical methods to showcase the multi-layered complexities of Woolf’s approaches to the sacred. Together the contributors provide a thorough re-assessment of the assumption that Woolf was an atheist and illuminate insights about her work in relation to twenty-first century critical discourse about religion, ethics, spirituality and mysticism while giving new attention to feminist perspectives, queer desire, sacred ecologies and narrative poetics.

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). Gabrielle McIntire is Professor of English Literature at Queen’s University, Canada. She is the author of Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (2008), Unbound (2021), and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land (2015). Her articles have been published in journals including Modernism/modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, Narrative, and Callaloo, and in book collections including The Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse (2014), Futility and Anarchy: British Literature in Transition, 1920-1940 (2018), The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf (2021), The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion (2023), and A History of the Bloomsbury Group (2025). The recipient of two teaching awards, McIntire has been interviewed by Radio Free Europe and other media outlets about her work in modernist studies. Also a creative writer, McIntire’s poems have appeared in journals and collections in the United States, Canada, England and France.