Reading Order
Between the Acts Reading Order
Between the Acts (1941) by Virginia Woolf is her final novel — completed in February 1941, two weeks before she drowned herself in the River Ouse — and one of her most formally surprising: a village pageant performed in the grounds of a country house on a summer day in June 1939, as Europe stands on the edge of another war. The novel is organized around the pageant (written by Miss La Trobe, a lesbian theater director, and covering the whole of English history from the Elizabethans to the present) and the audience's response to it — the thoughts and feelings of the Olivier family (Bartholomew, his sister Lucy, his son Giles, and Giles's wife Isa) that play against the performance. The novel is simultaneously Woolf's most comic and her most elegiac, and its final image — 'Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight' — is among the most beautiful and most devastating in her work.
Where to start
Between the Acts (1941) — the complete novel. Best read after the other major Woolf novels (Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves); it is her most allusive and formally complex work, and its resonances are deepest for readers who know her development well. The Hogarth Press first edition is the standard text; most modern editions follow it
Complete Between the Acts Book List
- 1Buy
Between the Acts
Virginia Woolf·1941·The final novel — the village pageant covering English history performed in the grounds of Pointz Hall on a June afternoon in 1939, with Woolf's most compressed and allusive writing. The posthumous companion to The Waves as Woolf's two most formally demanding novels - 2Buy
The Waves
Virginia Woolf·1931·The necessary companion — Woolf's most formally ambitious earlier novel, in which six characters speak in interspersed dramatic monologues across their lifetimes. Between the Acts extends the method of The Waves into a more comic and more fragmented form, and the two novels are best read in order - 3Buy
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf·1929·The essential non-fiction companion — Woolf's extended essay on women and fiction, drawn from lectures at Newnham and Girton Colleges in 1928. Miss La Trobe in Between the Acts is the completion of the female artist that A Room of One's Own theorizes, and reading the two works together illuminates both - 4Buy
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf·1925·The earlier parallel — where Between the Acts organizes a day around a public event (the pageant) and the private thoughts that play against it, Mrs Dalloway organizes a day around a party and the private thoughts that play against it. Both novels are organized around a woman's consciousness responding to a performance or gathering, and both end with the gathering's conclusion and what it leaves behind - 5Buy
The Years
Virginia Woolf·1937·The immediate predecessor to Between the Acts and Woolf's most underrated novel — the Pargiter family across fifty years (1880-1937), in a series of chapters each set in a different year. The Years is more conventionally novelistic than Between the Acts but shares its elegiac tone and its concern with what is lost across time; it was the novel that most nearly broke Woolf before its eventual publication - 6Buy
Passage to India
E.M. Forster·1924·The companion in the tradition of the English novel about the collapse of a social gathering and what it reveals — the Marabar Caves expedition and its catastrophic aftermath in Forster's novel about the impossibility of connection between English and Indian under colonialism. Between the Acts and A Passage to India are the two most important English novels organized around a collective gathering that becomes the occasion for a crisis - 7Buy
The Cherry Orchard
Anton Chekhov·1904·The theatrical precursor — Chekhov's final play, in which a family gathers at their estate for the last time before the cherry orchard is sold. The Cherry Orchard and Between the Acts share the same elegiac structure (a gathering that is also a farewell to a world that is ending) and the same formal method (comedy and elegy in the same breath, laughter at the characters we are simultaneously mourning) - 8Buy
Woolf, Virginia: Selected Letters
Virginia Woolf·1978·The biographical companion — Woolf's letters show the state of mind in which Between the Acts was written: the fear of another mental breakdown, the second war beginning, Leonard's anxiety about her deteriorating health. The novel is more fully understood as a document of that crisis as well as a formal achievement; the letters reveal the courage that the novel's humor required
Between the Acts — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Between the Acts about?
Between the Acts is set on a single summer day in June 1939 at Pointz Hall, a country house in rural England. The novel's central event is a village pageant organized by Miss La Trobe that covers the whole of English history from the Middle Ages to the present; the Olivier family (Bartholomew Oliver, his sister Lucy Swithin, his son Giles, and Giles's wife Isa) watch it, and the novel moves between the pageant itself and the characters' private thoughts and feelings. The title refers both to the intervals between the pageant's acts and to the spaces between human connection — the things that happen, or fail to happen, between the moments of public performance. The novel is Woolf's most compressed and allusive work, and also one of her funniest and most tender.
Why is Between the Acts Woolf's last novel?
Between the Acts was completed in February 1941 and was the last work Woolf finished before her death by suicide on 28 March 1941. Woolf had suffered severe depression throughout the writing of the novel and had experienced a serious mental breakdown in the summer of 1940; she and Leonard were also living under the direct threat of German invasion (their Mecklenburgh Square house had been damaged in the Blitz), and she was increasingly convinced that another, potentially permanent breakdown was imminent. She drowned herself in the River Ouse near Rodmell, Sussex, leaving notes for Leonard and her sister Vanessa. Leonard Woolf published the novel posthumously in July 1941, as Woolf had wished, but without the revisions she would have made; the published text is thus slightly rougher than Woolf's finished novels typically were.
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