Walter Pater, the Stephens and Virginia Woolf's Mysticism

This essay looks at Virginia Woolf as a mystical writer who represents her inner truth by way of idiosyncratic expressions in literature. Based on Meisel's discovery, described in The Absent Father:” Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater”, of her father Leslie Stephen's and Walter Pater's influences on Woolf, I further extend Meisel's argument by showing how Stephen's and Pater's Platonic morality and aesthetics promoted Woolf's acceptance of her Quaker aunt Caroline Stephen's religious vision, and how these three influences joined together to give Woolf's writings a distinctively mystical dimension.