To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf - Martin Corner (essay date 1981)

Martin Corner (essay date 1981)

SOURCE: “Mysticism and Atheism in ‘To the Lighthouse,’” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 13, Winter, 1981, pp. 408–23.

[In the following essay, Corner discusses what he sees as Woolf's intersection of atheism and mysticism in To the Lighthouse, finding that the characters come to have faith in a greater pattern but still recognize the universe as other.]

I

Virginia Woolf was an atheist: she was also a mystic. Both the mysticism and the atheism are there in some words that she wrote not long before her death. She is talking about the sudden shocks that life delivers, and of how she no longer finds in them “an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life”; instead, they are “a token of some real thing behind appearances. … From this I reach what I might call a philosophy … that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected...

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