The Years / Between the Acts

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf's extraordinary last novel, Between the Acts, was published in July 1941. In the weeks before she died in March that year, Woolf wrote that she planned to continue revising the book and that it was not ready for publication. Her husband prepared the work for publication after her death, and his revisions have become part of the text now widely read by students and scholars. Unlike most previous editions, the Cambridge edition returns to the final version of the novel as Woolf left it, examining the stages of composition and publication. Using the final typescript as a guide, this edition fully collates all variants and thus accounts for all the editorial decisions made by Leonard Woolf for the first published edition. With detailed explanatory notes, a chronology and an informative critical introduction, this volume will allow scholars to develop a fuller understanding of Woolf's last work.

Genres: Fiction, Classics

413 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1941

About the author

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Reviews

[Almantė (Ravenclaw_of_Shire) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn't finish Between the Acts because I didn't understand what's going on, but The Years was good.

[Arthur Ivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My last piece of fiction by Virginia. Doesn't really standout among her other novels, contains all her recurring themes in all her works.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Years" was awesome, "Between the Acts" was slightly dull.

[Jack Deighton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review of The Years only:
This is another book with an unusual chapter structure. Here the sections - of varying length - are dated 1880, 1891, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, 1918 and Present Day (which would be 1937) and overall offers us fragments from the life of Eleanor Pargiter. It’s not quite a family saga but getting on for it. While spanning the years, the novel is not broad in scope (the Great War for example happens off-stage) and - though wider events are referred to in passing - the narrative limits itself to goings-on within the family.
Each chapter/section starts with a description of the weather on the day concerned (except for the first section, events confine themselves to that day.) The narrative is accompanied by Notes which explain things or institutions of which the reader is presumably assumed to be unaware though it is hard to see how anyone British would not understand references to the Palace, the Bar, the Bodleian, Balliol, Gladstone, Whitehall etc.
Eleanor is one of the daughters of Colonel Pargiter. He has one hand restricted in use due to losing fingers in the Indian Mutiny. In 1880 the family lives in comfort in Abercorn Terrace but Mrs Pargiter is dying. The Colonel has a mistress, Mina, about whom he feels a degree of guilt but who is necessarily kept secret from his children.
Deaths toll through the first few sections, of Mrs Pargiter, of Charles Stewart Parnell, of the King (Edward VII,) and of a servant’s dog, but in a novel titled The Years how could it not? The emphasis on personal life indicates that though history sweeps on people get by and do what they have to, live their lives regardless. Some of the family fall into reduced circumstances after the colonel’s death but most carry on their resolutely middle-class existence.
Social attitudes of the time are signalled by use of the word Jewess, the comment “‘They do love finery – Jews,’” a reference to dagos - the relevant note does say that’s offensive – and the description “‘burnt as brown as a nigger.’” We also have that Victorian use of a line in place of someone’s, or a place’s, name, as in “Miss ---.”
As a portrait of a certain stratum of society in the late Victorian, Edwardian and post-Great War eras this is fine but it’s not startling, nor indeed particularly memorable.

[Georgia Swadling · Rating 4 out of 5]

the years ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
this was gorgeous. the broad cast of characters and the way the narrative followed their lives through time felt a bit like a furthering of the style in ‘the waves’, probably my all time favourite woolf. there were also SO MANY instances of gorgeous vivid colour use which those who have heard me wax poetical about woolf will know i find endlessly fascinating. i mean listen to this:
“Very gradually the clouds turned blue; leaves on forest trees sparkled; down below a flower shone; eyes of beasts—tigers, monkeys, birds—sparkled. Slowly the world emerged from darkness. The sea became like the skin of an innumerable scaled fish, glittering gold. Here in the South of France the furrowed vineyards caught the light; the little vines turned purple and yellow; and the sun coming through the slats of the blinds striped the white walls.”
if anyone can paint with words it’s virginia woolf.
honestly yet another masterpiece from woolf and one i already know i’ll revisit again at some point and it’ll be like reading it for the first time all over again.

between the acts ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
potentially the most difficult woolf i’ve read which is saying something considering i’ve read nearly everything she wrote. it took me a long time to get through the 100 or so pages of this final, posthumously published, novel. once again she writes prose that makes me want to stop reading and read passages aloud to anyone near by so that they, like me, can marvel at her but i found this the most difficult to follow.
the setting of late 1939 creates this omnipresent lurking knowledge of brewing war despite the characters seeming unbothered. there is a constant lurking threat of rain, the play is interrupted by a plane overhead and there is an undertone of violence portrayed with the litter of references to a newspaper story of the sexual assault of a girl in a barracks.
really fascinating to read but not one for the faint of heart, i’m glad this wasn’t my first woolf and i approached this already in love with her.

[bojana · Rating 3 out of 5]

wow, this took forever. i thought of giving up, but i kind of got in the groove eventually. with "between the acts" being universally thought as not-as-good, didn't feel like going into it.
i do like a premise, following a family through random moments in time and not really focusing on one (maybe elleanor is kind of a glue?), but there was way too many people, i just start to get the hang of it and we move on to the next one and i have no idea how are they related, so at some point i just gave up on keeping track and just went on for a ride. i do think that the experience would be better on a second read, but i don't think i will decide to do that soon. i do want to read more of her stuff though.

[Andrey Reshetnikov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last two of Virginia Woolf’s novels seem to about the movement from the past into the present of mid-20th century. Concluding lines are drawn over the lives of individuals, whole families, generations, society. It is so sad, it is like there is no future; everything ends with the present moment which lacks perspective, which is dull and empty… If an opening does exist, it leads to a storm. Powerful destructive forces have been long consolidating to strike hard, finishing off relationships, lives, worlds. In 1941, it must have been a real scent of the devastating catastrophe Virginia Woolf caught finishing her last work.

[Louise Du Quai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ik ben The Years gaan lezen, omdat De Jaren van Annie Ernaux deels daarop gebaseerd was. Maar zo kort en bondig als Annie is, zo breedsprakig is Virginia. Erg veel natuurbeschrijvingen aan het begin van ieder hoofdstuk en heel veel personages, zodat je steeds terug moet bladeren om te weten wie wie is. Maar het is wel een goed boek vind ik, omdat het de veranderingen in de tijd, net als bij Annie, goed laat zien.

[Lindsey Sparks · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Years seems like something I would love so maybe it was just the wrong time. May need to revisit some day.

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was hard to read. I don't think I have found a harder book since reading Opium Eaters by de Quincey. I am really not sure what it was about, but it was at least mercifully short.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

i liked the years but between the acts bored me

[Katie Chisholm · Rating 2 out of 5]

i’m probably just too dense to understand

[Sabra Kadabra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely masterful.

[Lesley Tilling · Rating 4 out of 5]

In places the descriptions of London are so good it's like a time travel machine. You get into the hansom cab and get taken to Charing Cross station. You hear the hurdy-gurdy machine in the street. You see the trees covered in blossom and then you see the autumn leaves on the ground. You feel hypnotised. Every time chapter begins with a description of a season and it picks you up and enthrals you with its beautiful colours.

The house in Abercorn Terrace was exactly like Woolf’s descriptions of Hyde Park Gate where she grew up. Dark and formal. The daughters dutifully making a ceremony of tea every day. Eleanor always taking a hairpin and fraying the wick to make the flame bigger, and the kettle boil a bit faster. The reluctance of the kettle to boil seems to indicate emotional coldness within the house, and a general inertia, and the powerlessness of those young women put in charge of keeping the flame burning.

There are a number of brothers and you don't know what to expect from the elder ones, but the younger ones are needy for Eleanor's mothering, in place of the mother who dies. The young women become very singular and lonely when the family breaks up. Only Maggie and Sara, the cousins, stick together.

Delia is the daughter who can't bear hypocrisy, longs to tell her father he's acting a part as the widower, that he didn't love her mother all that much. She's loud and vibrant in the 1880s and then doesn't appear again until the end. She has a party in a house that seems to be in Bloomsbury. Reference is made to the trees in the Square.

There are siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts, some of the family is well-off and some is very badly provided for. One of the cousins, Sarah, speaks in a completely mad way which made me wonder if she was mentally disabled. There are times when her crazy conversation made me lose patience with it all. Books and tea are the constants for all the characters. Motor cars, telephones, cinemas and planes make their appearance. Servants disappear. A character dies in the war and it's forgotten very soon.

It's a very strange book and not the one VW started to write. She was going to write a book with a lot of facts in. I wish we could have the original version to see what she abandoned and what she was attempting to do with this version.

[Tamara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't a huge fan of Woolf.. then I read "The Years".

The last chapter does drag on a bit though.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I

[Saket Suryesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful book!! A writer who is in complete command of her craft. Longest of her novels and it grows slowly on you but once it does, there's no getting away