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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Summary and more..., Jan 10 2000
Virginia Stephen Woolf finished Between the Acts in 1941; however, she never revised the novel because of her suicide during the same year. Between the Acts takes place in a small town in England before she has entered World War II in 1939. The novel, which spans one day, is about the annual village pageant at which villagers present a play to the community and guests about the history of England. The action splits between the acts concerning England in the Elizabethan Age, the Age of Reason, the Victorian Age, the present day, and the intermissions between the acts. In Between the Acts, there are many characters that are involved in the immediate action of the novel. Bartholomew Oliver, a retired Indian Civil Service worker, lives in a medium sized home called Pointz Hall with his widowed sister, Mrs. Swithin, his son Giles Oliver, who is a stock broker, and Giles' wife, Isa Oliver. Isa and Giles have a son named George. Two characters show up at Pointz Hall and attend the pageant with the residents. One of these characters, Mrs. Manresa, who is the only non-British character, is very flirtatious with Giles throughout the book. Her companion, William Dodge, is a very poetic yet nervous character. A final major character who is behind the scenes for the entire novel is Ms. La Trobe, the director of the play. There are also some minor characters that are involved in the action of the novel. Mrs. Haines, the wife of a farmer, appears in the opening scene of the novel. Isa hires Mabel, who plays Reason in the play, to take care of George as his nurse. Lynn Jones, a member of the audience during the play, disagrees with a statement made by Badge, an actor in the play. A final minor character, who is an actor in the play, is Albert the Village Idiot. One theme in this novel is unity. Unity is shown through the acts as the come together to create the play. The group of main characters also expresses unity. Another theme, which is a dominant theme in Woolf's writings, is feminism. There are many feminist images and references in the play. The acts of the play are about the woman rulers of England and love stories. The personality of Virginia Woolf can be seen in Mrs. Swithin, Isa Oliver, and Ms. La Trobe. These two themes are both major themes in Woolf's writings. Between the Acts can be viewed as a conversation that moves from point to point throughout the novel. The novel seems choppy and moves around constantly. The narrator sometimes seems like a character in the novel at points where he or she appears almost involved in the action of the scene. This is a dominant trait in Woolf's literature. The novel is whole with no chapters or significant breaks in the action. Instead, the book seems like a play with many scenes divided by long spaces in between paragraphs. The novel is also a combination of poetry and prose. Many people say that this work is not complete because Woolf never revised the novel.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Save The Best For Last, Sep 3 2001
I just finished the most amazing book I've read this year (After Sputnik Sweetheart though) and its called "Between The Acts" by Virginia Woolf. This was the last work of a gifted genius and the first that I read of this author. Amazing! Simply Superlative to the core!
The story goes like this:
Written in 1939 - the year Woolf Died..."Between the Acts" is a masterpiece in its own genre. Lyrical and highly poetic, this is one of its own.The story goes like this: On a single day of June, 1939--with the war imminent but virtually unperceived--the action takes place at Pointz Hill, an English country house. It revolves about a pageant played upon the lawns by the local villagers. Despite her necessity, the solitary, thick-legged, masculine Miss La Trobe,who knew how "vanity made all human beings malleable," is not one of the principal characters. The chief actors are the members of the Oliver household. The head of the house is old Bartholomew Oliver, who like so many retired English soldiers has only his India to cling to. He marvels at his widowed sister's orthodoxy. ("Deity," as he supposed, "was more of a force or a radiance, controlling the thrush and the worm, the tulip and the hound;
and himself too, an old man with swollen veins.") This aging sister, Mrs.Swithin, who would have become a clever woman is she could ever have fixed her gaze, is the most sympathetic figure in the book. Living with the older Olivers are Isa, the poetry-quoting daughter-in-law, temporarily attracted to a gentleman farmer, and Giles, the stock broker son, handsome, hirsute,
virile and surly. To this special group are added buoyant, big-hearted Mrs. Manresa, "a wild child of nature" for all that her hands are bespattered with emeralds and rubies, dug up by her thin husband himself in his ragamuffin days in Africa. Uninvited she drops in at luncheon, bringing along with the picnic champagne a maladjusted, putty-colored young man named William Dodge, whom Giles contemptuously sizes up as "a toady, a lickspittle, not a downright plain man of his senses, but a teaser and a twitcher, a fingerer of sensations;picking and choosing; dillying and dallying; not a man to have a straightforward love for a woman." William tries dallying with Isa, and Giles, partly to annoy his wife, pays court to the full-blown charms of sparkling Mrs. Manresa, who confesses she loves to take off her stays and roll in the grass. the cream of "Between the Acts" lies between the lines--in the haunting overtones. And the best of the show--the part one
really cares about--happens between the acts and immediately before the pageant begins and just after it is over. So the play is not really the thing at all. It is merely the focal point, the hub of the wheel, the peg on which to hang the bright ribbons and dark cords of the author's supersensitive perceptions and illuminated knowledge. It is in her imagery,
in her "powers of absorption and distillation" that her special genius lies. She culls exotic flowers in the half-light of her private mysticism along with common earthgrown varieties and distills them into new essences. Her most interesting characters move in an ambiente of intuition. With half a glance they regard their fellow-mortals and know their hidden failures. They care less for the tangible, the wrought stone, than for fleeting thought or quick desire. "Between the Acts" has no more ending, no more conclusion than English history. The pageant is played out, the guests depart, night falls. The physical embodiment of Virginia Woolf is no more, but her inimitable voice remains to speak to generations yet unborn. The first line of her last book begins, "It was a Summer's night and they were talking"--The last paragraph ends: "Then the curtain rose. They spoke." A Must Read for Everyone!!
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A work of mature genius by a great writer, Aug 1 2000
By A Customer
This under-appreciated work is slowly gaining the recognition it deserves from Woolf critics... but I would say that, since I wrote my dissertation on it! Woolf's fiction is never light reading, but Woolf lovers will here find a masterful synthesis of descriptive power, her exhaustive knowledge of English history and literature, her feminism, her passionate hatred of war and her conviction that only aesthetic experience can enable humanity to question the status quo and *perhaps* create a better world... interested readers might consider reading it alongside The Years, Three Guineas, Moments of Being, the last volumes of the diary, or such Woolf essays as "Thoughts on Peace During an Air Raid," as well as Shakespeare's Tempest. This slim novel speaks volumes; it is a work of mature genius by one of the 20th century's greatest writers.
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