Between the Acts: Virginia Woolf (Penguin classics) - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 024137250X ISBN 13: 9780241372500

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2019

Synopsis

'One of the great writers of the twentieth century' Guardian

It is June in 1939, and the inhabitants of a country house prepare to host the annual village pageant in its grounds. It will tell the stories of English history, as it does every year. Yet the coming of war broods over the whole community, changing the meaning of past and present, and heralding a new act. Through her characters' passionate musings and private dramas, and through the enigmatic figure of the pageant's author, Miss La Trobe, Virginia Woolf's playful final novel both celebrates and mocks Englishness, and re-creates the elusive role of the artist.

Edited by Stella McNichol with an Introduction and Notes by Gillian Beer

About this title

About the Author

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.

From the Back Cover

Outwardly a novel about life in a country-house in whose grounds there is to be a pageant, Between the Acts is also a striking evocation of English experience in the months leading up to the Second World War. Through dialogue, humour and the passionate musings of the characters, Virginia Woolf explores how a community is formed (and scattered) over time. The pageant, a series of scenes from English history, and the private dramas that go on between the acts, are closely interlinked. Through the figure of Miss La Trobe, and author of the pageant, Virginia Woolf questions imperialist assumptions and, at the same time, re-creates the elusive role of the artist.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 024137250X
• ISBN 13: 9780241372500
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192
• Editor: McNichol Stella, Beer Gillian