Between the Acts

Between the Acts
Front cover of the first edition
AuthorVirginia Woolf
Cover artistVanessa Bell
LanguageEnglish
GenreTheatre-fiction
Set inEngland
PublisherHogarth Press
Publication date
17 July 1941
Publication placeEngland
Media typePrint

Between the Acts is the final novel by Virginia Woolf. It was published shortly after her death in 1941. Although the manuscript had been completed, Woolf had yet to make final revisions.

The book describes the mounting, performance, and audience of a play at a festival in a small English village, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Since the play is inside the story, much of the novel is written in verse, and it is thus one of Woolf's most lyrical works. Because of its focus on theatrical performance, it has been discussed as theatre-fiction, which Graham Wolfe explains as "referring to novels and stories that engage in concrete and sustained ways with theatre as artistic practice and industry".[1]

  1. ^ Wolfe 2020, p. 2.