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Between the Acts
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August 2025: Family Drama > Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf - 3 stars

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Joy D | 10271 comments Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf - 3* - My Review

Set during a single June day in 1939, the novel follows the Oliver family and their community as they prepare for and attend a village pageant at the Oliver’s country estate. The Oliver family’s dysfunction, interpersonal dynamics, and conflicts are on full display. Each character is experiencing an internal crisis. Miss La Trobe, the pageant's creator, attempts to present a unified vision of English history, yet it is constantly interrupted by technical difficulties, weather, and the audience's wandering attention.

The main attraction of this book, for me, is the way time is both compressed into a single day and expanded to encompass centuries of English history within the embedded pageant. It is written in such a way that the reader feels “present” at the event. The novel's 1939 setting, with war looming, adds a note of foreboding. Characters listen to news broadcasts and discuss politics, while the pageant's celebration of English pastoral life hits a note of nostalgia.

Throughout the day, characters move between indoor spaces and the outdoor pageant grounds, and Woolf's prose alternates between detailed social observation and lyrical descriptions of natural phenomena. The novel abandons conventional plot development in favor of a mosaic-like composition of moments, impressions, and fragments. It is not a particularly dynamic novel, but Woolf certainly knew how to turn a phrase. I enjoyed thinking about it afterward more than the actual experience of reading it. This book is Virginia Woolf's last novel, published posthumously in 1941 (before she had made the final revisions).


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