Between the Acts

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Between the Acts is Virginia Woolf's last novel, and in her own opinion it was more quintessential than any of her others. Set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village pageant at Poyntz Hall, the book weaves together the musings of several disparate characters and their reactions to the imminence of war which is to change the pattern of history. That history is celebrated by the pageant, the work of Miss La Trobe. A genuine though not a successful artist, who knows the inevitability of failure, she cannot help cherishing her dream. Yet even in her moment of deepest dejection she experiences a vision of her next work, her attempt to present as a unity the tragic disconnectedness of the world. Before the book was published in the spring of 1941, Virginia Woolf had taken her own life.