By Sarah Fleming

Stephanie Paulsell is the Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School and interim Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church of Harvard University. Her latest book, Religion Around Virginia Woolf, explores the religious milieu that surrounded Woolf throughout her life, from her evangelical heritage to the artistic communities she fostered. Approaching Woolf’s novels and essays as sacred text, Paulsell situates Woolf as a religious thinker—and writer—for our time. HDS student Sarah Fleming sat down with Paulsell to discuss religious reading practices, books as portable pilgrimages, and what reading Woolf can teach us today.

Bulletin: To start, how did you first come to Woolf?

Stephanie Paulsell: Virginia Woolf was always somebody that I wanted to read and wanted to like. But I found her novels very difficult when I was young. My first winter break home from college, my mother gave me the first volume of her letters as a Christmas present. And I just got completely caught up in those letters. I can remember sitting on an old couch under the eaves of my parents’ house, wrapped in a blanket, reading these letters all throughout the break. It was just like reading a novel—there was this whole cast of characters that kept showing up again and again, and Woolf’s voice was so vivid.

What really came through in those letters was this sense of Virginia and her sister trying to make themselves into artists. Their mother had died, and their father was busy with his own work, so they got to spend their mornings doing what they wanted, which was painting for Vanessa and reading and writing for Virginia. The portrait that emerged from those letters of the two of them in each other’s company, apprenticing themselves to the things that they loved—that was really attractive to me. I wanted to follow that path.

After I’d read a couple of volumes of her letters and some of her diaries, I was able to go back to the novels and begin to understand how Woolf was writing so as to get me to read in a certain way, which was not just to gobble the book down but to read with attention and to really immerse myself in her language and her recurring images and let them work on me. When I did that, her work became revelatory to me.

Bulletin: What have you learned from letting Woolf reteach you how to read?

Paulsell: The first time I tried to read To the Lighthouse, I kept realizing I didn’t know whose head I was in. I’d be hearing one character’s thoughts, and, suddenly, I’d be hearing another character’s thoughts, and if I let my attention wander, then I really had no idea what was going on. And so I had to learn to bring more attention to the page.

Woolf also has these great scenes of reading within her novels that offer guidance on how to read. In To the Lighthouse, for instance, she contrasts the way that Mr. Ramsay reads—reading for the plot and manfully turning the pages—with the way Mrs. Ramsay reads, letting the text wash around inside of her as the words, the form, and the rhythm do their work on her.

Sometimes Woolf slows me down so that I really pay attention—so that I read not to find out what’s going to happen next, but to try to follow the “flight of the mind,”¹ as she puts it, and to take pleasure in discovering what’s inside these characters and let that be enough. And sometimes she teaches me to give myself over to the text, whether I understand it or not, as Mrs. Ramsay does—to see the light and the beauty of it, as well as the way it connects to the world around me.

She’s so good at describing the interior lives of her characters. That was one of her great achievements, along with asserting that what’s going on inside us is as important as what’s going on around us. Reading Woolf makes me realize that everybody is full of secrets and things that I have no access to. There’s a reverence that reading her work creates—a reverence for what we can’t know about each other. Woolf teaches us to honor that, too, and believe it’s worthy of literature.

Bulletin: The way you describe that reverence is almost mystical. What resonances have you found in reading Woolf alongside Christian contemplatives? And how did Woolf herself read?

Paulsell: When I first went to graduate school, I wanted to write about Virginia Woolf. But then I began reading Christian mystical writers, especially women. I found that when I read Woolf, it helped me see how literary these medieval women writers were. I could more easily understand that they were making writerly choices—deliberate choices about words, about form—rather than just having the text pour out of them in some magical way. And then when I read the mystical writers, I could more clearly see the religious dimensions of what Woolf was doing.

Woolf draws on a long history of religious reading practices in her work. Some of them come out of her evangelical Christian inheritance, with its family devotions and reading circles. And then some of them go further back. In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway takes a little bit of Shakespeare out of a book she sees in a shop window and carries it with her throughout the day to meditate on, the way a monk might do with a bit of scripture. Woolf’s work has echoes of these ancient religious reading practices that hardwire sacred texts into the body through repetition and meditation.

Reading and writing were really the foundational spiritual practices of Woolf’s life. She figured out very early on as a child that she could reorient her life through reading. And so, at times of great stress, she would take on these huge reading projects. When her half-sister, Stella, was sick, Woolf would say, “I’m reading Mr. Henry James to steady me.”² And then when Stella died, she started reading a 12-volume history of England as a way to mourn. She definitely read as a kind of prescription for herself.

Toward the end of her life, when she was battling depression, she wrote in her diary that what she needed was “a good hard rather rocky book. . . . This is my prescription.”³ And in the notes that she left behind for her husband and her sister after her death, she told them she could no longer read or write. Feeling like she had lost those bedrock practices must have contributed to her despair, because that was an important part of how she navigated the world and how she navigated her emotional landscape—through reading.

And it was also how she navigated the political landscape. In A Room of One’s Own, she imagines Shakespeare’s sister as also a great artist, but one who lies buried, having never written a word because the way had not been prepared for her as it had been for her brother. And she says if Shakespeare’s sister is going to rise up and write, then women must prepare the way for her.

And so we’ve got to write. Women have got to write. And as women write, generation after generation, we prepare the way for Shakespeare’s sister to be able to find her voice and her pen and do her work. When Woolf describes this process, she writes, “I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals.”⁴ And she does have this sense of a common life that we’re all a part of, the ways that the small effects we have on one another really matter. That’s one of the things that I love about her—that sense of the common life, which is the real life, that doesn’t end at the boundaries of our own lifetimes, our own births and deaths.

So Woolf knew there was a lot at stake in how we read and how we write. But I also think that maybe she lost a little faith in those practices during the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Those were such discouraging years, and you can see it in her work—a worry that reading wasn’t getting us as far as she hoped it would. There’s a scene in one of her late novels where two people are reciting a poem together, and they seem on the verge of one of those revelatory moments of being Woolf is so interested in, and suddenly their conversation devolves into this anti-Semitic awfulness. She seems to be saying that reading together may not be enough. We’re going to need more than that if we are going to change.

In 1940, though, she wrote an essay called “The Leaning Tower,” where she tries to look beyond the war. Speaking to a worker’s association in Brighton, she tells them that the war is going to end, and there’s going to be life on the other side. She places her faith in the income tax and the public libraries, which she believed would open up access to literature to everyone. At the close of that essay, she writes: “Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.”⁵ I think that’s a beautiful expression of the confidence she had in reading—the hope that, if everybody is just set loose among literature, free to trespass, we’ll find our way.

Bulletin: That common ground can become the basis for the common life—for new communities that can reenvision a way forward. How have communities of reading and writing shown up in your life? Have you ever had a Bloomsbury Group of your own?

Paulsell: I’ve had various permutations of a Bloomsbury Group. When I was a kid, my father was a college teacher in eastern North Carolina, and he used to take his students to the Abbey of Gethsemani to experience monasticism. He had visited there as a graduate student and met the monk, writer, and social activist Thomas Merton and had been very inspired by him. Back at the college, these students and my dad started a monks’ group, where they got together twice a week to chant the Divine Office and discuss a book, often one by Merton.

At that time I was very young, and I would walk from my school to my ballet lesson and then over to the monks’ group where I would sit in the back of the room. And I would listen to these students talking about books and about things that mattered. This was during the Vietnam War, and they were all hoping not to get drafted. A lot of them were resisting the war. And all of these things—prayer, the war, civil rights—they just seemed all bound up together. And I learned that through sitting in the back of the room and listening to them.

If I had to say what my first Bloomsbury Group was, it would be those students and my parents. I loved sitting among them as a child, with my little sister. Sometimes they would come to our house, and all of them would be talking about the things they cared about the most, together. I’m sure I would not be a professor if it weren’t for those gatherings—everyone talking at once, then falling silent, and laughing, and asking questions.

And then when I was in graduate school, I was surrounded by lots of brilliant people, some of whom are now my colleagues at HDS, including Kevin Madigan and Amy Hollywood. Amy and I were in the Women’s Caucus, and we would get together in each other’s apartments and cook dinner for each other and talk about books. And that’s where I learned a lot of literary theory—those women taught me how to read difficult texts. So that was another reading group that had a decisive influence on me that may have been akin to what Virginia Woolf had.

And now I’ve been trying to run my classes like reading groups! During COVID, I’m only teaching classes where we read one author at a time, like Virginia Woolf or Thomas Merton. Woolf really loved the feeling of befriending, and being befriended by, the author that she was reading. And I’m trying to create something like that process of befriending in my classes.

Bulletin: You’ve adapted your Woolf course to be more Woolfian! What are some of the changes you’ve made in reframing your classes as reading groups?

Paulsell: The biggest change I’ve made is integrating writing workshops into the course. I’m experimenting with the idea that if we try to do what she was trying to do, then we’ll understand it a little bit better—that if we can get a little closer to her project, we’ll understand what she’s trying to do. We’re trying to experiment with writing as a way of reading. And that’s very Woolfian, because for her, reading and writing were very fluid. And writing was definitely a way of reading.

When she began imagining To the Lighthouse, Woolf was living near a park called Tavistock Square, and she walked around and around and around and around and thought up To the Lighthouse, just made it up in her head while she was walking. She was wrestling with the question of how to write about history—how to write about war—without focusing on battles and politicians. She loved this kind of problem, and she wrote in her diary, “A new problem like that breaks fresh ground in one’s mind; prevents the regular ruts.”⁶ So with these workshops and exercises, we’re trying to break fresh ground in our minds while we’re all cooped up and not able to be together in the way we’re used to.

Bulletin: It’s almost like a pilgrimage!

Paulsell: Yes, I feel like reading a book can be a pilgrimage, and that’s one way to travel together. Vanessa Zoltan and I ran a Woolf pilgrimage in 2018 where we went to England, and we walked and hiked through her landscape and visited her house and her sister’s house and various important Woolf landmarks. But we also read To the Lighthouse together every day. We worked our way through the book over the course of the week, and that was its own kind of pilgrimage.