Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf (Book Analysis) E-Book

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• Kategorie: Bildung
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• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 29

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Unlock the more straightforward side of Between the Acts with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!

This engaging summary presents an analysis of Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf, which is set at the country house of Pointz Hall on the day of the annual village pageant, and shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. The pageant precipitates manifold dramas of passion among the audience and the play’s director herself, and encourages reflections on the continuity between the primeval and the present, the range of parts people play, and the violent impulses behind British imperialism. Woolf is widely considered to be one of the most significant English-language writers of the 20th century; her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway, The Waves and Orlando, and the essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.

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Leseprobe

VIRGINIA WOOLF

ENGLISH WRITER

Born in London in 1882.Died in Rodmell (Lewes, East Sussex) in 1941.Notable works:Mrs Dalloway (1925), novelTo the Lighthouse (1927), novelThe Waves (1931), novel

Virginia Woolf was a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and publisher. She is a key figure in 20th-century literature and is particularly recognised as a modernist and feminist author. A daughter of a prominent man of letters, Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), she was always a voracious reader. After the deaths of her mother and step-sister, soon followed by her father and brother, her adolescent traumas left her prone to mental breakdowns and hearing voices. With her sister Vanessa Bell (painter, 1879-1961), she gathered bohemian intellectuals to form the Bloomsbury Group. The Hogarth Press, which she and her husband Leonard Woolf (1880-1969) founded in 1917, published emerging, innovative writers. Her own writing – especially from her third novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), onwards – is noted for its lyrical, impressionistic, and experimental style, departing from objective realism and continuously exploring fresh ways of expressing the inner lives of individuals. She also wrote the influential feminist treatises A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Fearing another onset of mental illness, she drowned herself in the River Ouse near her home in 1941.

BETWEEN THE ACTS

A NOVEL THAT UNFOLDS WITH THE PERFORMANCE OF A PAGEANT

Genre: novel (also described as a drama-novel)Reference edition: Woolf, V. (2000) Between the Acts. London: Penguin Books.1stedition: 1941Themes: history, violence, human nature, love and hate, illusion and belief, war and imperialism, Englishness

Between the Acts is Virginia Woolf’s last novel, published by her husband Leonard after her suicide on 28 March 1941. First conceived in April 1938, the novel is set on one afternoon in mid-June 1939, only six weeks before the start of the Second World War. Ostensibly, it depicts the staging of a pageant at the Olivers’ country house, which precipitates manifold dramas of passion among the audience and the play’s director herself. The ominous shadow of war and death haunts the work, but it is a novel that disperses its attention on many themes, while preserving the intensity of its revelations. It dwells on the continuity between the primeval and the present, the savage and the human; the violence and universal impulse of lust; the communal experiences of ritual and suffering; the parts people play and their “unacted part”; and the blurred distinction between reality and fiction. Between the comical, even absurd satire of British imperialism and the class-ridden society of the English village, the novel explores questions at the heart of human consciousness.

SUMMARY

BEFORE THE ACTS: THE CHARACTERS MEET

One evening in June, at Pointz Hall, Mr. Oliver (Bart) is talking to his guests, Mr. and Mrs. Haines, about the county council’s plans to build a cesspool. Isa, Bart’s daughter-in-law, enters in a dressing gown. There is a moment of intimacy between Mr. Haines and Isa, even though they do not exchange any words, and he had only handed her a racquet at a tennis party.