Product Description

Outwardly a novel about life in a country-house in whose grounds there is to be a pageant, Between the Acts is also a striking evocation of English experience in the months leading up to the Second World War. Through dialogue, humour and the passionate musings of the characters, Virginia Woolf explores how a community is formed (and scattered) over time. The pageant, a series of scenes from English history, and the private dramas that go on between the acts, are closely interlinked. Through the figure of Miss La Trobe, and author of the pageant, Virginia Woolf questions imperialist assumptions and, at the same time, re-creates the elusive role of the artist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #98036 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From the Publisher
Woolf's last novel and, in her own opinion, "more quintessential" than any of her others.

About the Author
Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid. With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob’s Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women’s experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I-V, and selections from her essays and short stories.

Customer Reviews

A Parting Shot
Between The Acts was completed just weeks before Woolf's suicide, and it shows. The novel is dark and brooding - throughout there is a dark undercurrent that the villagers refuse to acknowledge - the upcoming war. While perhaps not reaching the same heights as The Waves or To The Lighthouse, it remains a breathtaking work. Out of all her novels that I have read, it is the one in which her radical ideas are set out most firmly. She deals with madness, homosexuality, the class system and of course (as always) the transience and futility of life. In particular, the last monologue of Miss La Trobe is pointed and cutting - a final message from Woolf to the world where she in essence cuts through the illusion and points out the dark, sick heart of "civilisation". Irreverant to the past, plunging headfirst into the future, it is certainly not just for Woolf fanatics. I would certainly rate it amongst her best.

Just another Stream of Consciousness
'Between the Acts' is Woolf's last book, said to be, in her own words, 'the most quintessential' of her works. Published posthumously, its characters show many of the classic traits in her previous novels. In many ways, Lucy can be likened to Mrs Ramsay from 'To the Lighthouse' and William Dodge has the untapped intellect and shy arrogance of Mr Tansley. Somehow we see a very different Woolf, one contemplating mortality and the gift of life with nature and the violence of war. Its characters show no signs of realisation of the war which is about to tear them apart and the pageant or play within the novel, rolls on under the guidance of the frustrated artist, Miss La Trobe.
A mysterious and introspective book, perhaps also a little depressing as the reader can, with hindsight, see how prophetic Woolf was being about herself.

excellent
This is beautifully written about the English way of life, its history, its class systems, about the nonsense we all talk about all the time. It writes about nature and spaces and places, at the end the reader feels part of the village and its all reflected back! Well worth reading.