Consolation Refused: Virginia Woolf, The Great War, and Modernist Mourning

This essay argues that Woolf\u27s engagement with the war\u27s legacy prompted her to represent a new kind of mourning practice, one that spurns consolation and closure. In critiquing the consoling rhetoric of God, king, and country, Jacob\u27s Room articulates a politics and ethics of mourning linked to Woolf\u27s feminist aims. To the Lighthouse turns the question of consolation back upon Woolf\u27s own medium, showing how a female painter deconstructs the notion of redemptive art and represents a perpetual mourning of loss.