Between the Acts

What It's About

Set over a single day in June 1939, the novel takes place at Pointz Hall, an English country house, where the local community gathers for the annual village pageant performed on the lawn. As the pageant sweeps through episodes of English history, Woolf weaves in the private thoughts, tensions, and unspoken grievances of the Oliver family and their guests. Over it all hangs the growing anxiety of a country waiting for a war it can feel approaching.

Key Concepts

The novel explores the fragile line between unity and fragmentation, both within a community and within the individual mind, and questions what role art and shared performance can play in holding people together. Woolf contrasts the pageant's collective retelling of the past with the isolated, often dissonant inner lives of those watching it, all set against the unspoken dread of an approaching war.

About the Author

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English writer and a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of writers, artists, and thinkers in early twentieth-century London. She is regarded as one of the leading innovators of modernist literature. She lived with recurring mental illness throughout her life and died in 1941.