Dwight A Lindley

Virginia Woolf was clearly interested in the life and poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but almost no one has investigated the thematic connections between them. This chapter suggests that, in spite of her own atheism, Woolf pursued a fruitful engagement with Hopkins’ theological aesthetics, as worked out in his poetry. In particular, her dramatization of individual moments of revelation in Mrs. Dalloway follows the model set forth by Hopkins in his poems and theorized in his prose. Reading her authorial choices next to his reveals how much Woolf relied on Christian views of creation, gift, and transcendent experience.