Between The Acts

Between the Acts (1941) is Virginia Woolf’s final novel. It was published posthumously, four months after the writer’s death. It is a modernist novel that takes place on one June day in 1939, on the eve of World War II. Set in the English countryside, the novel focuses on the residents of a village who are preparing for their annual pageant at a time of looming international tension and domestic unease. Since much of the action in the novel takes place in the form of the play within it, it is classified as “theater fiction.” Virginia Woolf died before she could revise or edit the novel’s manuscript, leading some critics to consider this an unfinished work.

This study guide uses the 2014 HarperCollins The Virginia Woolf Library e-book edition.

Content Warning: The source text depicts characters with colonial, racist, patriarchal, and anti-gay attitudes, and it also contains references to rape and death by suicide.

Plot Summary

The novel begins one evening in June 1939. Bartholomew “Bart” Oliver, a retired member of the Indian Civil Service, is at his estate named Pointz Hall, which is located in a small English village. He is talking to Mrs.