Between the Acts
read book

Between the Acts

3.68 of 5 stars 3.68  ·  rating details  ·  2,244 ratings  ·  115 reviews
In Woolf’s last novel, the action takes place on one summer’s day at a country house in the heart of England, where the villagers are presenting their annual pageant. A lyrical, moving valedictory.
Paperback, 228 pages
Published October 21st 1970 by Mariner Books (first published 1941)
more details... edit details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia WoolfTo the Lighthouse by Virginia WoolfA Room of One's Own by Virginia WoolfOrlando by Virginia WoolfA Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf
From Virginia's Room
8th out of 84 books — 22 voters
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper LeePride and Prejudice by Jane Austen1984 by George OrwellThe Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. TolkienJane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
381st out of 933 books — 2,437 voters


More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 3,000)
filter  |  sort: default (?)  |  rating details
Jamie
2011 Update: This is the third consecutive spring in which I've read BTA. I'll confess my reading this go-round felt less urgent (I...dare I say it?...skimmed parts of the pageant), but nevertheless increased yet again my love for this novel. Deceptively minimalist, austerely affective, Between the Acts feels somehow so apart from and so integral to Woolf's canon. The characters themselves are powerfully immediate; almost allegorical in the way Woolf employs metaphors, images, or emotions as sho...more
Cat
This is beautiful. Her language and imagery are so vibrant and lush. Woolf uses the production of a meager English Village play to mix fantasy with reality.

At times, the reader is backstage at the heart of a theatrical drama where the producer and director, Miss La Trobe, feverishly wills her players to action.

Woolf not only wrote a book when creating Between The Acts, but also, developed a play complete with stage directions. I was often caught up in its plot and found myself wondering what m...more
Michael
Sep 01, 2008 Michael rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: no one
Seriously awful.

I'm not even going to pretend to like it.

I have to discuss this book for my English class tomorrow. What can I honestly say about it? I know the hardcore kids in my class have stacks of notes they took. They will sit on the edge of their seats waiting for the moment to shoot their hand up and draw pointless analogies to other books they've read. They'll have sentences beginning with "It's interesting how..." and "It seems to me that..." I'll sit quietly and mock them in my mind.

W...more
Tony
Woolf, Virginia. BETWEEN THE ACTS. (1941; this ed. 2008). ****. Although I’d have to give the novel itself only three stars, the four star rating applies to this edition which provides an excellent introduction by Melba Cuddy-Keane (University of Toronto) and extensive notes to the text. To give you an idea, the novel itself is only 149 pages long. The introduction is sixty-six pages long, the appended notes take up sixty-two pages. This should give you some idea of the likely obscurity of most...more
Irina
Apr 09, 2012 Irina rated it 3 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Recommended to Irina by: Christian
Intr-un fel, mi-a amintit de ,,Sarpele", de Eliade. Un fel de banal familial combinat cu mister si final enigmatic. In niciuna nu ai certitudinea unui final, sfarsitul nu exista.
Este scrisa destul de posac, cu mici fragmente reverberante in care autoarea parca isi da ultima suflare, in care isi arunca ultima speranta - dar si aceea inconfundabil de trista.
Se prezinta un real bizar, o taina a vietii, care insa nu e prezentata pentru a fi deslusita, ,,e pusa in lumina soarelui" si lasata pentru...more
Laura
I loved it. I knew I would...I've held back from reading it because it's the last Virginia Woolf novel that I had left to read...this made me feel terribly sad...even though I can re-read all of them again, it's the loss of "not knowing" and knowing that this is the last one she wrote that made me not read it for so long. The gorgeous, spare images, yet written with a depth that is by no means simplistic caught my imagination, and the beauty of her rhythm...she always gets me thinking. I was ver...more
Casper
The second novel I've read by Woolf. It's the last one she wrote before committing suicide and one of her shortest. Using a lot of modernist techniques it also illustrates Woolf's feeling for language. With a short and economic style she can create moments of beautiful literature in this novel. The point of Between the Acts is this use of language. Forget the plot, read and reread the lines.
Julie
This book had both good and some not so good qualities to it, but as always, I found myself reading on due to Woolf's writing style and writing style alone.

I loved the writing in the book - although with Virginia Woolf, how can you not love her writing. I always find I can lose myself in her style and narrative no matter what book of hers I pick up, and this one was no exception. This particular story was both good and bad. I like the main idea behind the story, the characters were well done, e...more
Hao Guang
A village gathers to watch a pastiche play of scenes harking back to England's long history, all this in the shadow of WWII. The reader is also the intended audience, and we are also treated to the 'orts, scraps and fragments' of human existence. In one day, the history of the entire (British) world is performed, alluded to. Narrative perspective darts in and out of various characters. And in the midst of all this is Miss LaTrobe, the playwright, who nobody understands and who, it seems, has ult...more
Emily
So this book took me forever to finish it! And not because I did not enjoy it (because I did), but because I was so busy with exams, and college and reading enormous amounts of papers to get through! But anyway, today I had some free time and finished in about an hour the eighty pages I got left.

So, yeah, it was pretty dense, which kind of made it difficult to get into it at first, as often happens with Woolf's works. I felt I didn't know the characters until around page sixty or seventy. I thin...more
Paige
Probably a very often overlooked novel, because it is easy to assume it is about nothing, but there are a lot of interesting things going on here with culture and the state, particularly the role spectators play and are expected to play in cultural events inspiring nationalism or patriotism.
Kristin
An interesting final work for this author. A definite sense that she was trying to sum up her views about writing and art in this book. You sense the author's discord a bit as well, because the writing is just slightly choppy. Though I wonder if a failure to communicate significance was intended. The play was heavy-handed and ambitious, but it seems intended to be. It's harder to get to know the inner lives of the characters in this one, but I do enjoy the moments of satire. Style is radical and...more
Wavegenerator
There are other Virgina Woolf books which may be more representative, but this book disturbed and stirred me more than the others with its circumspect look at the quandary of human existence.
Michelle
Few writers can craft prose like Virginia Woolf. There's a beautiful simplicity in how her sentences flow. I enjoyed this, but it's not my favorite of Woolf's books.

Through the years, through the acts... the players change, but the parts remain the same. Set at the cusp of one of the most horrific wars in history, the next act (WWII) would be just another retelling of the same story.

There was a strong sense of... stagnancy in this book. Everything felt still and futile. Isa's idle wonderings and...more
Christy
Not my favourite novel(la?) by Woolf, but "Between the Acts" had its moments. Perhaps it should be somewhat excused, as it is the last book she wrote before her death in 1941, and therefore is somewhat of a draft (though her husband, Leonard Woolf, wrote she would have kept much the same). "Between the Acts" is the story of one single day ("Mrs. Dalloway" Take 2?) in a rural English village where villagers are putting on a play. All of the characters in the book speak as though they are performi...more
RØB
Jan 30, 2013 RØB rated it 5 of 5 stars
Recommended to RØB by: Meg Sempreora
Chalk another one up for Pancake Master on the "supposed to have read it for school" circuit! I ended up reading this one mostly on a family trip to Banff, Alberta in July. I really enjoyed the flow of it. Woolf doesn't use, or need, chapters! The way this book flows from one conversation, one occurrence, one chance meeting, one snippet of a backwoods pageant, to the next, really brings you into the action. If you can get lost in it, it's very enjoyable. Unfortunately I think it might be just di...more
Jennifer
I love a Penguin Classic, a nice slim well designed volume... but the font in this was just horrible. Coupled with this I condemned the book to my bag which means lots of short reading sessions - not ideal for Woolf's stream of consciousness.

However, I enjoyed the book. It's almost like the posher bits of The Archers set between the wars and made poetic, especially with the pageant. Miss La Trobe is Linda Snell. Woolf's characters are feverish, over-thinking, echolalic, inattentive and deceptive...more
Melissa
Honestly, I only gave this four stars because the annotations in this particular edition were thorough to the point of distracting (if you've got the same kind of OCD about endnotes that I do where you have to keep up as you go). I was flipping back and forth so much that it was easy to lose the thread of the already-incredibly-fragmented plot, so this bears rereading at a later date. If you love Woolf, you'll love her last work, compressing as it does her ellipses, her extreme compression of ex...more
Karl Groll
The following quotes are taken from Between the Acts, by Virginia Woolf. Page numbers are provided from the paperback published by Harcourt in 1941, ISBN: 0-15-611870-X

---

"Next to the kitchen, the library's always the nicest room in the house." Then she added, stepping across the threshold: "Books are the mirrors of the soul." 16

---

She had givin up dealing with her figure and thus gained freedom. 42

---

"That's what makes a view so sad," said Mrs. Swithin, lowering herself into the deck chair whic...more
Jori Richardson
"Between the Acts" covers one day in the lives of a group of people living in a small English countryside town. The setting is just before World War II, and they are preparing to put together their annual play.

I was expecting this book to be another "Mrs. Dalloway," and though there are similarities, this book falls flat in its simplicity, vague plot, and string of characters, while "Mrs. Dalloway" builds off of these same points. This book should not be looked at as a novel, but rather a spare...more
Jocelyn
Read for class.

Between the Acts is about a bunch of people watching a village play being performed in the garden of a wealthy manor. This novel is Woolf's last novel, published posthumously.

The entirety of the book happens in twenty-four hours, and to be honest I was a little unengaged with the material. I don't mean to say that I think Virginia Woolf is a boring author, not at all. I think my disinterest came from the amount of other schoolwork I need to finish; I'm pretty stressed.

I found the...more
Mia -
Ci sono miliardi di cose da dire su questo ultimo romanzo di Virginia Woolf, ma non riesco a fissarne neanche una.

Da leggere, e rileggere, credo, per capirne a fondo ogni immagine, ogni parola.

Parole mai messe, lì dove sono, per caso. La struttura è satura, ogni immagine è data e ripresa.

I personaggi sono presenti altrove, nei loro pensieri, nella loro mente, nei voli pindarici, nei dubbi, nelle domande, nelle frustrazioni.

I passaggi di coralità sono stupefacenti, resi sulla carta con discorsi f...more
Brenden O'Donnell
I think I tried to make this novel conform to the rest of Woolf's work when I first read it. This reading, done in the context of a Modernism seminar after having read "Ulysses" and "Nightwood," has provided a more appropriate frame. Though throughout most of this reading it still felt a little more like Djuna Barnes than Woolf, once I got through to the end I was surprised how much Woolf I recognized in it.

I read it as a prophetic vision of the end of human meaning, though it's really ambiguou...more
Nicole
Lyrical, shattered impressions come together in presenting how "dispersed are we." There is less "knowing" of characters than, say, To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway, but its extraexperimental structure has no room for that. The middle, though establishing a rhythm and language of time, is a bit of a bore... but it all comes together as the curtain reveals our present selves. A great commentary on the space&time between the two World Wars.

Favorite Parts:
He reached it in ten. There, couched...more
Erik
Sep 24, 2008 Erik added it
This novel, the last written by Virginia Woolf before her suicide in 1941, is as Harold Bloom wrote, difficult to describe but beautifully easy to read. He also called it something of a miracle given that it was written under the gathering shadows of madness and self-immolation. I think he calls it that because of the comic touch and delicate control of a very original and experimental book.
Like Mrs. Dalloway (and a number of other modernist novels - just think of Ullyssed for example)it all tak...more
Diana
I took a class on Woolf in the last semester of my third year. This was the last book we read. We had the option of taking an in-class final or writing a paper. As I had not finished much of the assigned reading, I opted for the paper. That quarter, all of my finals were done Monday, and this paper wasn't due until Friday at 5pm. I figured I'd gun this out and turn it in Wednesday at the latest. Ha. No.

Woolf never finished editing this book. It was the middle of WWII and she lost hope. She kill...more
Phil
I wasn't sold on this book in the early going (which may be a result of reading bits and pieces of it in a number of small sittings, rather than one long devoted sitting), but as the book got more into the pageant that makes up the main plot element I began to enjoy this a lot more. Initially I was confused by the tangle of relationships between the characters who dominate the first portion of the novel, since it didn't seem clear to me what the various characters' goals and desires were. But I...more
Blake
Here is Virginia Woolf at her Orlandoesque playfulness.

In a country house, somewhere in England, the residents and others prepare for a pageant, annually performed in the house grounds. It is just weeks out from WW2. The pageant, a celebration of English history, is attended by the entire local community. There, amidst the rush, the leisure and lingering, Woolf has canvas fit to serve her swirling brush.

The writing is filled with hidden meanings, many of them tucked away in seemingly innocuous r...more
Nikki
I really, really don't like Virginia Woolf's fiction. There's a nice flow to the writing, a nice lyrical feeling, but the way she chooses to write about things seems to me pretentious and boring, and sort of... scatterbrained. I'd like to love Woolf's writing, as my favourite writer Ursula Le Guin does, but I just can't seem to connect with or get anything out of her writing. I didn't see the "point" in it, I suppose. There were bits I liked about it -- the play, for example, at the part where t...more
Maíra Carvalho
Between the Acts is not a book for those unaccostumed with Woolf, that is for sure. It oftens seems like an unfinished draft, with its simple plot and short length. One might not understand that the caricatural Miss La Trobe, the writer, is an alegory to Woolf herserlf, and that she is trying to think the act of writing in itself. However, it might be one of her books that brings the most interesting ideas -- too bad the author killed herself before seeing it published.
« previous 1 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 99 100 next »
topics  posts  views  last activity   
Moments of Readin...: * [General] Between the Acts 2 8 Apr 19, 2013 09:43am  
Between the Acts (Annotated)
Between the Acts   (Paperback)
Between the Acts   (Paperback)
Between the Acts   (Paperback)
Between the Acts

6765
(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length es...more
More about Virginia Woolf...
Mrs. Dalloway To the Lighthouse A Room of One's Own Orlando The Waves

Share This Book

Your website
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.” 942 people liked it
“Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.” 174 people liked it
More quotes…