Reading Order
Between the ActsVirginia Woolf Between the Acts Reading Order
Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941) is her final novel — published posthumously in the month after her suicide — and one of the most formally original conclusions to any major novelist's career. Set on a single day in June 1939, the eve of the Second World War, the novel follows the inhabitants of Pointz Hall as they watch an amateur village pageant that retraces English history from the Elizabethans to the present. The 'between the acts' of the title refers to both the intervals in the pageant and the interval between the two world wars, a moment of suspension before catastrophe.
Where to start
Mrs Dalloway
Complete Between the Acts Book List
- 1Buy
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf·1925·The essential entry point — Clarissa Dalloway's single day in London; the formal model for Between the Acts's compression of a novel into a single day, and the best first Woolf before her last novel. - 2Buy
Between the Acts
Virginia Woolf·1941·The novel itself — Pointz Hall, the pageant, Isa and Giles Oliver, Miss La Trobe; Woolf's last word. - 3Buy
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf·1927·The companion masterpiece — the most emotionally profound of Woolf's novels and the one that shows the same interest in time, performance, and the relationship between art and ordinary life that Between the Acts develops in a more overtly political register. - 4Buy
The Years
Virginia Woolf·1937·Woolf's immediately preceding novel — the most overtly political of her mature work and the direct context for Between the Acts's concern with fascism and the approaching war; together they constitute the final decade of her fiction. - 5Buy
Woolf: A Life
Hermione Lee·1996·Lee's biography — the definitive life of Virginia Woolf; essential context for understanding Between the Acts, which was being revised when Woolf drowned herself in the Ouse River in March 1941, and which she had written in full knowledge of what she was ending. - 6Buy
The Hours
Michael Cunningham·1998·Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — three women on three different days organized around Mrs Dalloway; the most celebrated contemporary fiction in the Woolf tradition, and one of the few novels that directly engages with Woolf's death in its opening section. - 7Buy
Arcadia
Tom Stoppard·1993·Stoppard's play — two sets of characters in the same Derbyshire country house in 1809 and the present day — is the most celebrated contemporary work to share Between the Acts's interest in the country house as a site where English history accumulates and the relationship between art, time, and what is lost.
Between the Acts — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts about?
Between the Acts is set on a single June day in 1939, the eve of the Second World War, at Pointz Hall in the English countryside. The inhabitants — the Oliver family and their guests — watch an amateur pageant organized by Miss La Trobe that retraces English history. The novel is organized around the gaps and silences between the acts of the pageant, and between the characters' fragmentary attempts at connection.
Is Between the Acts Virginia Woolf's last novel?
Yes — Between the Acts was published posthumously in July 1941, four months after Woolf's suicide in March. She had been revising it in the months before her death and had not declared it finished. Her husband Leonard Woolf published it with minimal changes. It is both her most overtly political novel and her most formally experimental final statement.
Is Between the Acts a good starting point for Virginia Woolf?
Mrs Dalloway is the best starting point for Woolf — the most formally characteristic and emotionally accessible of her major novels. Between the Acts is better approached as a final novel once you know her work, when its valedictory quality and its dialogue with her earlier concerns can be felt most fully.
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