Abstract
Virginia Woolf, in her essay “Montaigne”, represents the “soul” as “all laced about with nerves and sympathies which affect her every action” (Woolf 1929, 56). Attempts by Woolf and other female authors to map the “soul” as the essence of being reveal dynamic tensions between mainstream institutional religion and women’s felt sensation, so throwing into relief critically overlooked intersections of sexual difference, cultural creativity and mystical perception. Hope Mirrlees, whose experimental poem Paris (1920) was published as a slim booklet by the Woolf’s Hogarth Press, scrutinizes these correspondences through the lens of Jane Ellen Harrison’s feminist classicism. This act had potentially crucial implications for the women’s movement at a time that many feminist public intellectuals interpreted as a new Hellenistic Age when numerous orthodoxies (as well as heresies and heterodoxies) were subject to flux (see Koulouris 2013).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Anderson, Elizabeth. 2013. H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Anon. 1916. “The Brook Kerith.” Times (7 September): 3. The Times Digital Archive, 1785–2009. Web. (accessed 24.07.2015).
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 1973. Letters and Papers from Prison. London: SCM Press.
Bramble, John. 2015. Modernism and the Occult. London: Palgrave.
Braude, Anne. 2001. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America, 2nd edn. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Brittain, Vera. 2000. Honourable Estate. London: Virago.
Britten, Emma Hardinge. 1999 [1900]. Autobiography of Emma Hardinge Britten. Stansted Mountfitches: SNU.
Butts, Mary. 1973. “Thinking of Saints and of Petronius Arbithe.” Antaeus 12, 41–42.
Cannon, Katie G. 1998. Black Womanist Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Clukey, Amy. 2014. “Enchanting Modernism: Mary Butts, Decadence, and the Ethics of Occultism.” Modern Fiction Studies 60: 1, 78–107.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. 1952. Pastors and Masters. London: Victor Gollancz.
Connor, John T. 2014. “Hope Mirrlees and the Archive of Modernism.” Journal of Modern Literature 37: 2. 177–182.
Daly, Mary. 1978. Gyn/Ecology.Boston: Beacon.
Detloff, Madelyn. 2009. The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ellmann, Richard. 1982. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Engels, Friedrich. 2006. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. New York: Mondial.
Farr, Florence. 1907. “Superman Consciousness.” New Age, 6 June: 62–5.
Fortune, Dion. 1925. “The Deeper Issues of Occultism.” The Occult Review 42: 373–77.
———. 1931. “Power Centres of Britain.” The Occult Review 53: 106–110.
Freer, Scott. 2015. Modernist Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Freidman, Susan Stanford. 1987. “Against Discipleship: Collaboration and Intimacy in the Relationship of H.D. and Freud.” Literature and Psychology 33: 89–108.
Garrity, Jane. 2003. Step-daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Graham, Sarah. 2007. "Falling Walls: Trauma and Testimony in H.D.’s Trilogy." English: Journal of the English Association 56: 299–319.
Greene, Dana. 1990. Evelyn Underhill: Artist of Infinite Life. New York: Crossroads.
Harrison, Jane Ellen. 1913. Ancient Art and Ritual. Home University Library of Modern Knowledge 70. London: Williams Norgate.
———. 1925. Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. London: Hogarth Press.
Hobson, Suzanne. 2011. Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960. Palgrave MacMillan.
Holtby, Winifred. 1930. “English Literature and the Bible.” The Realist: A Journal of Scientific Humanism 1.5: 107–119.
Holtby, Winifred. 1928. Eutychus or the Future of the Pulpit. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Moses, Man of the Mountain. New York: Harper, 1991.
Ingman, Heather. 2004. Women’s Spirituality in the Twentieth Century: An Exploration through Fiction. Oxford: Peter Lang.
——— 2010. “Religion and the Occult in Women’s Modernism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers. Edited by Maren Tova Linett, 187–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jackson, Paul. 2012. Great War Modernisms and “The New Age” Magazine. London: Bloomsbury.
Jameson, Storm. 1936. “Crisis.” The Left Review, 2.4 (January), 156–159.
Joannou, Maroula. 2012. The History of British Women’s Writing, 1920–1945. London: Palgrave.
Joannou, Maroula, ed. 2013. The History of British Women’s Writing, 1920–1945. Volume Eight. London: Palgrave.
Johnson, R. Brimley. 1920. Some Contemporary Novelists (Women). London: Leonard Parsons.
Katz, Daniel S. 2007. The Occult Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Present Day. London: Pimlico.
Koulouris, Theodore. 2013. Hellenism and Loss in the Work of Virginia Woolf. Farnham: Ashgate.
Lazenby, Donna J. 2015. A Mystical Philosophy: Transcendence and Immanence in the Works of Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch. London: Bloomsbury.
Lipsey, Roger. 1988. An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art. Boston: Shambhala.
May, William. 2010. Stevie Smith and Authorship. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marsden, Dora. 1918. “The Science of Signs—XVI (VIII): Our Philosophy of the ‘Real’—IV. Space and Substance.” The Egoist 5, September: 101–05.
McGuinness, Patrick. 2012. “Review: Collected Poems by Hope Mirrlees”, The Guardian, (Friday 13th April), 15–16.
Mirrlees, Hope. 1924. The Counterplot. London: Alfred Knopf.
Mitton, Matthew. 2013. “Review: Rediscovering Hope Mirrlees.” Women: A Cultural Review 24.4: 368–70.
Mortimer, Raymond. 1942. “Painting and Humanism.” New Statesman and Nation 23: 579 (March 28th), 208.
Pasley, Malcolm, ed. 1978. Nietzsche: Imagery and Thought, A Collection of Essays. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Peacock, Sandra J. 1989. Jane Harrison: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Phillips, Paul T. 1996. A Kingdom on Earth: Anglo-American Social Christianity, 1880–1940. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Radford, Andrew. 2011. “Mary Butts and the ‘Secret Map’ of Interwar Paris: Exile on Queer Street.” Journal of Modern Literature 35.1: 79–98.
Raitt, Suzanne. 2000. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Robinson, Matte. 2016. The Astral H.D.: Occult and Religious Sources and Contexts for H.D.’s Poetry and Prose. London: Bloomsbury.
Roden, Frederick. 2002. Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Sinclair, May. 1907. The Helpmate. New York: Henry Holt.
———. 1917. A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions. London: Macmillan.
———. 1980. Mary Olivier: A Life. London: Virago.
Scarborough, Dorothy. 1917. The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. New York: Putnam’s.
Sorin, Claire and Laurence Lux-Sterritt. 2011. “Women and Spirituality in Twentieth-Century Writing.” E-reá Online 8.2. [accessed 10/ 20/2015].
Sterenberg, Matthew. 2014. Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain: Meaning for Modernity. London: Palgrave.
Sword, Helen. 2002. Ghostwriting Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Tonning, Erik. 2014. Modernism and Christianity. London: Palgrave.
Vetter, Lara. 2010. Modernist Writing and Religio-Scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy and Toomer. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wallraven, Miriam. 2015. Women Writers and the Occult in Literature and Culture: Female Lucifers, Priestesses and Witches. London: Routledge.
West, Rebecca. 1926. “My Religion.” My Religion. London: Hutchinson. 19–24.
———. 1933. St. Augustine. London: Denham.
———. 1953. “This I Believe.” This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of One Hundred Thoughtful Men and Women in All Walks of Life. Ed. Edward Morgan. London: Hamish Hamilton. 100–101.
———. 1980. The Judge. London: Virago.
———. 1982. The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911–17. Ed. Jane Marcus. Bloomington: Indiana University.
Winick, Mimi. 2014. “Report: Women Modernists and Spirituality, University of Stirling (22–23 May 2014).” http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/research/researchcentresandnetworks/snms/pastevents/ [accessed 30/10/2015].
———. 2015b. “Scholarly Collaboration for a Feminist New Age in Jane Harrison’s and Jessie Weston’s Alternative Histories.” Relations, edited by Julie Fuller, Meechal Hoffman, and Livia Woods, Special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 11: 45–56
Woolf, Virginia. 1929. “Modern Fiction.” In The Common Reader, 184–95. London: Hogarth Press.
———. 1977–1984. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell with Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols. London: Hogarth Press.
———. 1992c. To the Lighthouse. Edited by Stella McNicholl. London: Penguin. Originally published by the Hogarth Press,1927.
Young, Tory. 2013. “Myths of Passage: Paris and Parallax.” In The History of British Women’s Writing, 1920–1945. Volume Eight. Edited by MaroulaJoannou, 275–290. London: Palgrave.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Anderson, E., Radford, A., Walton, H. (2016). Introduction: The Intricate Persistence of Strange Gods. In: Anderson, E., Radford, A., Walton, H. (eds) Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53036-3_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53036-3_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-53035-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-53036-3
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)