44 pages • 1 hour read
Between The Acts
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Authorial Context: Virginia Woolf
Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to death by suicide.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English writer who is well known for her modernist and feminist writings. She grew up in a well-to-do, intellectually inclined family in Kensington, London. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a prominent literary critic. Woolf was homeschooled as a child, and from an early age, she read voraciously. She studied classics and history at King’s College, London, and in 1904, she helped form the Bloomsbury Group, which was a group of English intellectuals, artists, and writers who met to discuss philosophy and art. Woolf also became involved in the women’s rights movement while at college.
In 1912, she married her husband Leonard Woolf, who was a writer and publisher. Together, they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which provided a publication platform for modernist writers including T.S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield in addition to Woolf herself. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931), along with the feminist nonfiction essay collection A Room of One’s Own (1929). Woolf’s novels focused on the interiority of her characters, and Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse were narrated with close attention to the characters’ thoughts in a style known as stream of consciousness. A Room of One’s Own argued that women must have financial and social freedom in order to be creative.
Woolf battled mental health conditions for much of her life. Her anxiety and depression worsened with the start of World War II. On March 28, 1941, she died by suicide at the age of 59. Between the Acts was the last work she wrote before her death, and it was published posthumously.
Sociohistorical Context: English History and the Impending War
The action in Between the Acts takes place on a day in June 1939, just before England declared war on Nazi Germany and World War II began. In 1939, many English citizens tried to carry on with their lives as usual but felt uneasy and worried because they knew war was coming. In the novel, the villagers try to prepare for and enjoy the play, but the tension of the coming war looms over them. Giles Oliver, who works as a stockbroker in London, hears news in the city about violence on the continent, and this makes him resent having to sit passively and watch the village pageant. Toward the conclusion of the novel, 12 planes fly over the village, and the villagers become uneasy and suspect that war is around the corner.
The pageant’s director, Miss La Trobe, intends to cover English history, tracing its origins as a country and ending in contemporary times. The beginning of the pageant presents England as a child separated from France and Germany by the sea. This is meant to symbolize England’s formation into an island following continental drift and the formation of England as a country. Eventually, England grows into a young woman with flowers in her hair, representing the time of Chaucer. The Elizabethan, Restoration, and Victorian periods are represented by the figures of Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Anne, and a Victorian police officer, respectively. They provide facts about the eras in costume and then each scene has a play with tropes, archetypes, and dialogue that is characteristic of each period. To show the novel’s present, the pageant’s actors hold up mirrors to the audience themselves. By showing snippets of various time periods in English history, the play highlights The Inevitability of Change by showing how traditions and ideas have changed over time, setting the stage for the huge changes coming with World War II. At the pageant’s conclusion, most audience members struggle to understand the message behind the pageant since it was fragmented and vague, which mirrors the uncertainty and confusion of this pre-war period.
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