Between the Acts is set on a day in mid-June 1939. An English village readies itself for its annual pageant. War is imminent. As always, Woolf is concerned with the home front; how the threat of war affects the inhabitants of a rural village. Woolf had started working on the novel, initially titled “Pointz Hall”, in 1938, intending to address questions of Englishness, specifically English history and literature. She continued writing through the brief reprieve of the Munich Agreement in September 1938, the declaration of war, and the war itself. When Woolf drowned herself in March 1941, the manuscript of Between the Acts was complete but she had not finished the final revisions for the printer. She may, therefore, have made minor amendments to the text, but when her husband, Leonard Woolf, published the novel...
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Citation: Snaith, Anna. "Between the Acts". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 March 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6375, accessed 09 June 2026.]
