How Should One Read the Bible?

This chapter reveals the extent of Virginia Woolf’s knowledge and interest in the Bible, both as text and as artefact, starting with an examination of the collection of Bibles in the Library of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, now housed in Washington State University, Pullman. It situates Woolf’s interests within competing scholarly understandings of the role and significance of the Bible that were in circulation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Making close readings of Woolf’s use of biblical allusion, the chapter demonstrates that Woolf’s responses to the Bible were both complex and varied. These readings include her use of rhetoric in her essays, ‘Modern Fiction’ in particular, and her engagement with the Passion narrative in her novels as a way of exploring questions about salvation.