Varieties of mystical experience in the writings of Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1995 by Julie Kane

Despite accusations of fraud by the Society for Psychical Research (founded in London in 1882 by a group of Cambridge philosophers to investigate psychical phenomena using scientific methodology), the Theosophical Society flourished. It attracted - though did not always manage to retain - distinguished members and hangers-on including Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, and Thomas Edison. Between 1897 and 1921, Besant and a fellow Theosophist, C. W. Leadbeater, together and singly wrote dozens of books on related mystical topics. Virginia Woolf could not have missed reading Theosophical Society news and book reviews in The Times and other major British periodicals.

The influence of Eastern philosophy was furthered by Swamy Vivekanda, who came to Chicago in 1893 to lecture on Hinduism to the World Parliament of Religions. His visit sparked the founding of the Ram Krishna Movement and Vedantic societies in the West. The Bengali "mystical" writer Rabindranath Tagore made several lecture trips to England between 1912 and 1920. Enthusiastically promoted by Yeats and Ezra Pound, he received the Nobel Prize in 1913, and was knighted by King George V in 1915. Richard Kennedy, a teen-aged helper at the Hogarth Press who later published his memoirs, noted that a Mr. Palme Dutt dropped by the office in 1929 to inquire about his book on Tagore (67). Virginia Woolf mentioned that Yeats was quoting Tagore at a party in 1930 (Diary 3:329). But realist Leonard Woolf, champion of Indian political independence, was indifferent to Indian mysticism. His 1926 Nation and Athenaeum review of Edward Thompson's Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist confessed that:

I have never been able to see anything in Tagore's poetry, and this complete survey of it leaves me still blind and deaf to any merit which it may possess. There is not a single quotation in this book which does not seem to me second-rate and tiresome.(1)

Between 1906 and 1914, the Woolfs' good-friend-to-be T. S. Eliot was studying ancient Indian philosophy at Harvard, "reading Sanskrit and Pali under the guidance of Charles Lanmann and studying Patanjali's metaphysics under James Houghton Woods" (Singh 1). The influence of ancient Indian philosophy upon such poems as "The Waste Land" and "Four Quartets" is evident, and Eliot was to call the Bhagavad-Gita "the next greatest philosophical poem to the Divine Comedy within my experience" (Singh 22). But there is no evidence that the close-mouthed, intensely private poet ever discussed his mystical leanings with the Woolfs.

Even Virginia Woolf's cousin Dorothea Stephen went off to India and penned a book entitled Studies In Early Indian Thought, which was published in 1918. But Woolf's loathing for the woman - her "fat religious cousin" (Letters 1:85), a "ponderous elephant" (88), "cumbersome square footed cousin" (193), a "pullulating monster (2:474), and "that clodhopping woman you used to admire" (3:324) - did not predispose her to embrace the metaphysics contained therein. Although Stephen pushed too hard to find parallels to Christianity in the Vedas and Upanishads, her book is otherwise intelligent and insightful and should have interested Woolf even if its author had not been a close relation. Woolf's feigned ignorance of Stephen's authorial venture is rather shocking in light of her own continual need for validation as a writer: