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For Sinclair, the past was a wound. She feared being unable to escape it, and she feared in turn her own persistence in a form that she could not control. Mystic ecstasy – what she called the “new mysticism” – was a way of entering a timeless realm in which there was no longer any past to damage her. But she was also fascinated by what could never be left behind – hence her interest in heredity, the unconscious, and the supernatural. However, the immanence of the future can also emancipate us from the past, in Sinclair’s view, and this is the key to why mystical experience was so immensely appealing to her. Mystical experience could take the self out of the body and thus out of past traumas and into the future. False dying – like that which creates ghosts – traps the psyche in its own pain and forces it to re-experience the suffering of its life; real dying – mystical dying – involves forgetting the self and the world.

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Virginia Woolf's writing has generated passion and controversy for the best part of a century. Her novels-challenging, moving, and always deeply intelligentremain as popular with readers as they are with students and academics. This highly successful Cambridge Companion has been fully revised to take account of new departures in scholarship since it first appeared. The second edition includes new chapter on race, nation and empire, sexuality, aesthetics, visual culture and the public sphere. The remaining chapters, as well as the guide to further reading, have all been fully updated. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf remains the first port of call for students new to Woolf's work, with its informative, readable style, chronology and authoritative information about secondary sources. s u AN s ELLERS is Professor of Engli hand Related Literature at the University of St Andrews. With Jane Goldman, she is General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf; he is also the author of Vanessa and Virginia (2008), a novel about Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

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