Water and the desire to be covered by it is another recurring theme, and there is even a passing mention of a local myth that made me stop in my tracks-a legend of a woman who drowned herself in a lily pond. It’s awash with symbolism representing a threat from above the weather which will decide whether the pageant will be held on the terrace or in the barn flocks of birds pelting a tree like winged stones planes in perfect formation zooming overhead.
She strongly felt that everything she had ever known would be destroyed, and even made a suicide pact with her husband Leonard, a Jewish socialist who would undoubtedly be packed off to a concentration camp in the event of a Nazi invasion.īetween the Acts is permeated by a sense of premonition-even if most of the characters act as if nothing were the matter, there is the feeling of being on the brink of something huge, something that will change the world forever. In no other book was she as conscious of contemporary events as in Between the Acts, so it’s hard to write about this last novel without considering the period that brought it forth: Virginia began writing it before the official start of WWII, and wrote the bulk of it during the Blitz. (…) Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing.”Īll characters save one seem either unaware or unconcerned by the impending war unlike the author, who increasingly worried about the threat of war towards the end of her life, with her writing changing as a result.
There was no need to puzzle out the plot. There were only two emotions: love, and hate. The plot was only there to beget emotion. “Did the plot matter? She shifted and looked over her right shoulder. But what happens during the three main acts of the play isn’t where the substance of the novel lies, but rather, as the title suggests, it’s through the scattered inner voices and changing relationship dynamics of the attendees we fleetingly get to know before and between the acts that the English experience of the Interbellum period is evoked.
The outward plot is easily summed up: We follow different characters who go about their day at a country house in a small English village just before the outbreak of WWII, while a play celebrating English history is prepared and then performed at the annual pageant that the entire local community attends. My most recent Woolf had been her first novel, so I thought I’d continue from the other side of her creative life’s time line, and picked her final novel, which was published posthumously.
Rating: ★★★ “Books are the mirrors of the soul”
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