Book 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.
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.
