While other interpretations abound, one plausible explanation for the success of the Brexit movement, leading to the Conservative Party's sweep of the 2019 elections, may be the linkage to Thucydides’ concept of deos. It entails a rational if ill-defined and intangible fear of a distant threat. Trained in the classics, the Prime Minister at the time, Boris Johnson, would have been one of few to recognize the association. Alas, though knowledgeable in the classics, his role as Tory Prime Minister lasted from 2019 and 2022 though some influential Conservatives said he would be back.

Virginia Woolf's Prescience

Similarities exist between a sense that England was at peril in the late 1930s and a fear that the country had come under threat in the 2010s. The comparison comes from the pen of a brilliant author—as English as English may be—Virginia Woolf. Living a very English life in a townhome in Bloomsbury near the British Museum, as well as in a modest cottage in a small insular and adorable village in east Sussex, she was pampered and praised by a host of English high society representatives, from renowned economist John Maynard Keynes to art critic Clive Bell, fellow writer Lytton Strachey, and socialite Vita Sackville-West. Add to this her husband Leonard Woolf and we are in the company of well-bred intellectuals with progressive if quaint ideas.

Virginia Woolf would have recognized a rational threat to the shakiness of Englishness some eighty years ahead of Brexit. It was certainly not like the immediate threat of bombs exploding over London and firestorms blazing in the East Sussex Downs between her Rodmell cottage and the English Channel. A weakening of Englishness in England needed more time.

Woolf's last work was a jumbled “pageant embedded in a play” titled Between the Acts. Despite herculean moral support from her husband, she did not live to see the day when her pageant saw the light of day. In late March 1941, she drowned herself near her cottage by the River Ouse. Her body was discovered three weeks later floating down the river, at the village of Southease, by several children.

Had she been cut off from the mainstream, as she had attributed to England in her play? How did fear of international politics that were spinning out of control in the later 1930s contribute to her suicidal state that year?