Novels of Comfort: Woolf, Winnicott and the Work of Consolation

Abstract

The bibliotherapeutic publication that is central to this chapter is Katharine Smyth’s All the Lives we ever Lived, a touching memoir of her father’s illness in which the reading of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse provides the necessary consolation. The topic of literature’s consolatory powers is related in this chapter to Donald Winnicott’s analyses of ‘comforters’, what the British pyschoanalist labels ‘transitional objects’. The chapter also engages in a discussion of what David James calls ‘discrepant solace’.