Between the Acts
by Virginia Woolf
Summary
Over a single June day in 1939, the Oliver family and their neighbors gather at Pointz Hall, an English country house, to watch the village's annual pageant, written and directed by the fierce, unappreciated Miss La Trobe. Bartholomew Oliver, a retired officer of the Indian army, hosts the event with his sister Lucy Swithin, a scattered, gentle believer in a vaguely mystical unity of all things. His son Giles arrives from London in a fury he cannot name, married to Isa, who privately writes poetry and privately longs for a local farmer named Rupert Haines while staying, unhappily, his wife. The pageant itself moves through English history in three broad scenes, an Elizabethan play, a Restoration comedy, a Victorian tableau, performed by villagers on a makeshift stage with the weather and passing cows constantly threatening to undo it. Its final act, titled Ourselves, turns mirrors and fragments of glass directly on the audience, forcing them to see themselves reflected rather than any historical costume, and the pageant closes to bewildered, half offended applause rather than the ovation Miss La Trobe wanted. As the guests disperse into the dusk, Woolf leaves Miss La Trobe alone in the pub composing the opening words of a new play while Giles and Isa are left alone together in the darkened house, their marriage neither ended nor resolved.
Woolf's prose here is looser and more fragmented than in her earlier novels, cutting between overheard pageant dialogue, birdsong, and the private thoughts of half a dozen characters within the same paragraph, so that a reader has to work to tell which voice belongs to whom. It reads quickly on the surface, a single day with a comic amateur pageant at its center, and slowly underneath, since almost every character is privately dreading the war the novel never names outright. The unfinished quality of the prose, which Woolf had not yet revised for the printer when she died, gives some pages a rawness her earlier novels do not have.
Woolf finished the manuscript in November 1940 and drowned herself in the River Ouse on 28 March 1941 before revising it further. Her husband Leonard Woolf prepared it for publication later that year, adding a note explaining that she had not made her final corrections but that he did not believe she would have changed it substantially, a claim scholars have argued over ever since, given how unfinished some of its transitions feel.
Historical Context & Significance
No prize marked Between the Acts on its publication by Hogarth Press, the small press Woolf ran with Leonard, in the summer of 1941, months after her death. Woolf herself won exactly one literary prize in her lifetime, the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse in 1928, and it went to To the Lighthouse rather than to any of her later novels. She was British, which placed her outside the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an award restricted at the time to American citizens regardless of where a book was published; the 1942 Pulitzer went instead to Ellen Glasgow's In This Our Life.
Reviewers in 1941 read the novel inevitably through the fact of its author's recent death, and its reputation since has grown mainly as the last thing Woolf wrote rather than as a work judged fully on its own separate terms, a frame later critics have pushed back against as her late style has drawn more sustained attention. It remains her most fragmented and least conventionally plotted novel, closer in method to The Waves than to Mrs Dalloway, and it is now read as her clearest response, however oblique, to the war she did not live to see.