Between The Acts (Aziloth Books) 12+

📙 Virginia Woolf was a leading member of the 'Bloomsbury Group' of avant-garde writers. In March 1941, aged 59 and at the height of her fame, she drowned herself in the River Ouse. She left behind a new work, 'Between the Acts', which was published that same year. On the face of it, 'Between the Acts' is a simple story with a seemingly inconsequential plot: the tale of a village pageant, and the thoughts and reactions of those watching the show. But Woolf uses this simple scenario to produce a penetrating dissection of human nature. The lack of plot is deliberate; Woolf has the producer of the pageant say "Did the plot matter? ...The plot was only there to beget emotion. Don't bother about the plot: the plot's nothing". And so it proves. The story plays through on three levels, the animal, human and the spiritual, each acting as counterpoint to the rest, and all nested within the greater pageant of existence. With 'Between the Acts' Woolf created, just prior to her own death, a timeless masterpiece, a perfect epitaph to her own genius. In the work, one of her characters says of the landscape "... so beautiful. It will be there when we are not" - an apt and flawless appraisal of the book itself.