Between the Acts [Paperback]

Virginia Woolf (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 1970

In Woolf’s last novel, the action takes place on one summer’s day at a country house in the heart of England, where the villagers are presenting their annual pageant. A lyrical, moving valedictory.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Here, in her last book, is Virginia Woolf at her most tenuous, elusive, unreal. The various terms which have been applied to her art seem all to apply - "evocative", "fragile", "unsubstantial", "eclectic". The scene and the compass of this book is a pageant in a small English village, alternating with the actors of the local pageant are the figures in a private pageant of spectators:- Giles, stockbroker, at odds with his wife, Mrs. Manress, hearty, blowsy woman of forty who assumes the role of child of nature; Giles' father, withered, dry, his sister a vague old lady, etc. There is no action, save in the pageant which is reproduced now in poetry, now in prose. The quality of the book lies in its nuance, its shadows, its reflections, its aestheticism. There is an ethereal, haunting, beauty, strangely distant. Sharply limited market. (Kirkus Reviews )

'Together these ten volumes make an attractive and reasonably priced (the volumes vary between L3.99 and L4.99) working edition of Virginia Woolf's best-known writing. One can only hope that their success will prompt World's Classics to add her other essays to the series in due course.' 

(Elisabeth Jay, Westminster College, Oxford )

Book Description

Unlike most previous editions, the Cambridge edition returns to the final version of the novel as Woolf left it. With detailed explanatory notes, a chronology and an informative critical introduction, this volume will allow scholars to develop a fuller understanding of Woolf's last work. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (October 21, 1970)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 015611870X
• ISBN-13: 978-0156118705
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #304,138 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The summing up, October 2, 2002

By 

A.J. (Maryland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Between the Acts (Paperback)

"Between the Acts" was the last novel Virginia Woolf wrote, and it appropriately feels like a swansong; a sorrowful farewell to a country on the eve of a war that very well might have spelled its devastation. While it uses the modernist experimentation that characterized "To the Lighthouse," it is very easy to follow, but still invites several rereadings to explore its depths more fully.

The novel takes place on a single day in June of 1939 at an English country manor called Pointz Hall, owned by the Olivers, a family with such sentimental ties to its ancestry that a watch that stopped a bullet on an ancient battlefield is deemed worthy of preservation and exhibition. Every year about this time, the Olivers allow their gardens to be used by the local villagers to put on a pageant for raising money for the church. This year, the pageant is supposed to be a series of tableaux celebrating England's history from Chaucerian times up to the present.

The Olivers themselves are tableaux of sorts, each a silent representation of some emotion separated from the others by a wall of miscommunication. Old Bartholomew Oliver and his sister, Lucy Swithin, both widowed, are now living together again with much the same hesitant relationship they had as children. Oliver's son Giles is a stockbroker who commutes to London and considers the pageant a nuisance he has no choice but to suffer. Isa, his discontented wife, feels she has to hide her poetry from him and contemplates an extramarital affair with a village farmer.

Attending the pageant is a garrulous woman named Mrs. Manresa, who is either having or pursuing an affair with Giles. She has brought with her a companion named William Dodge, whose effeminate sexual ambiguity is noticed with reprehension by Giles and with curiosity by Isa. The somewhat romantic interest Isa shows in Dodge implies that she knows Giles would be annoyed less by her infidelity than by his being cuckolded for a fop like Dodge.

The other principal character is not an Oliver at all, and this is Miss La Trobe, the harried writer and director of the pageant. At first, she appears to serve the mere purpose of comic diversion, as she frustrates herself over details that nobody in the audience notices anyway; however, when the pageant is over, a new aspect of her character is revealed, one that has made her an outcast among the village women. Nevertheless, she graciously accepts the role of a struggling, misunderstood woman artist, and in this sense, she echoes the character of Lily Briscoe in "To the Lighthouse," as does Isa with her repressed poetry.

At the end of the pageant, to celebrate the "present," Miss La Trobe has planned something special and startling: She has the players flash mirrors onto the audience as if to say, "Look what England has become. Shameful, isn't it?" Likewise, with this novel Woolf holds up a mirror to humanity, reflecting our unhappiness in her characters. It's not a cheerful notion, but it's a fitting one to sum up the career of a writer like Woolf, one of our greatest chroniclers of sadness.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A work of mature genius by a great writer, August 1, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Between the Acts (Paperback)

This under-appreciated work is slowly gaining the recognition it deserves from Woolf critics... but I would say that, since I wrote my dissertation on it! Woolf's fiction is never light reading, but Woolf lovers will here find a masterful synthesis of descriptive power, her exhaustive knowledge of English history and literature, her feminism, her passionate hatred of war and her conviction that only aesthetic experience can enable humanity to question the status quo and *perhaps* create a better world... interested readers might consider reading it alongside The Years, Three Guineas, Moments of Being, the last volumes of the diary, or such Woolf essays as "Thoughts on Peace During an Air Raid," as well as Shakespeare's Tempest. This slim novel speaks volumes; it is a work of mature genius by one of the 20th century's greatest writers.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars one of Woolf's most exciting and experimental, June 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Between the Acts (Paperback)

This book is not about what goes on outside the play so much as it is about Woolf's new expression of her continued criticism of English society. There is humor in the book. Her Victorian policeman is a biting and explicit critique of the sexism, racism, and general destructive intolerance that was actively supported by the Victorian imperialist discourse. I only wish she'd lived so we could see what she would have tried next.