I've briefly explained the word "Hellenism" in the title of Koulouris' book, so it remains for me next to explain the word "Loss" in his title.
When Virginia's mother died, Virginia was thirteen (page 70, note 94). No doubt the custom of funeral orations delivered in public to a live audience at a funeral or a memorial service continued in Great Britain during Virginia Woolf's entire lifetime. However, her father, Leslie Stephen, was famously an agnostic. His agnosticism ruled out church services for him and his family, including his daughter, Virginia Stephen. (But Koulouris is silent about any funeral orations that may have been part of the family's graveside burial service.)
Koulouris explains that "after her mother's death Woolf suffered her first mental breakdown" (page 37). Bereavement due to the death of a significant person in one's life such as one's mother is a powerful experience for anyone to undergo at any age. But Virginia was only thirteen, and she was not a paragon of psychological strength. In any event, her experience of bereavement due to her mother's death was more than she could handle psychologically, resulting in her first mental breakdown, the first of several. Under the enormous impact of bereavement due to her half-sister's death and her father's death and her older brother's death, Virginia had to endure a lot of psychological suffering.
Over a span of eleven years, Virginia lost not only her mother but also her half-sister and her father and her older brother (page 7).
For an example of a voluble and public form of mourning someone's death, Koulouris discusses the voluble Jacques Derrida's memories following the death of Paul de Man, as an expression of mourning (page 69; also see page 10). To be sure, Derrida's memories of Paul de Man were published in a publication. The word "publication" does contain the word "public." So Derrida's memories of Paul de Man are available to the reading public.
However, for an example of a voluble and public form of mourning, I would have thought that Koulouris would have mentioned Pericles' famous funeral oration, as reconstructed from memory by Thucydides in his HISTORY OF THE PELOPENNESIAN WAR. But Koulouris does not mention Pericles or Thucydides.
But Pericles delivered his famous funeral oration in public to a live audience. To be sure, we Americans today still have the custom of having funeral orations delivered in public to a live audience at a funeral or a memorial service. In the case of somebody as important to our civic enterprise as Hector and Beowulf were to their respective civic enterprises, funerals or memorial services might even be broadcast by television or radio, so that the funeral orations might reach people who were not present in the live audience at the funeral or memorial services, just as printed funeral orations might reach people who had not been present.
However, in addition to bereavement due to the deaths of four significant persons in her life, Virginia also had to undertake to mourn other significant losses in her life that were not due to the death of an significant person in her life, but were all the same significant losses in her life. For example, the losses in her socio-cultural life due to her gender.
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