5. Virginia Woolf
I have only now figured out that I have really neglected the fairer gender. Virginia Woolf – apart from being a brilliant writer, was a brave woman as well. The fact that there aren’t many notable female atheists as there are male atheists can be accredited to the system of value which had always favored men. Women were rarely allowed to express their beliefs, but Virginia Woolf didn’t allow the same thing to happen to her as well. Her quote: “For most of history, anonymous was a woman” proves the aforementioned statement. The fact that she was an atheist, however, can be proven from her 1928 letter about Thomas Stearns Eliot, to their mutual friend. Here she says: “I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.”
