![]() ![]() The family’s servants, their visitors, Mrs Manresa, her friend William Dodge as well as numerous characters who live in the village all appear in the narrative. The novel has no main character instead interest is diffused among generations of that family: Old Bartholomew, his sister Mrs Swithin, his son Giles, Giles’s wife Isabella and their small son George. Woolf called Between the Acts ‘Pointz Hall’ while she was writing it, the name of the ‘middle-sized’ (p.6) country house where the Oliver family live. The novel focuses on a particular day, and also on a particular location: a small English village community. Through ideas about time and memory, what is ‘now’ is seen to rest on all that has gone before. The date is important, just weeks before the start of the Second World War, while the focus on a single day allows her to explore how the whole weight of the past relates to the immediacy of the present moment. An earlier novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925), has a time span of 18 hours and in Between the Acts Woolf set herself a similar framework, ‘a June day in 1939’ ( Between the Acts, p.69). ![]() She wrote reviews, letters, diaries and she published nine novels, of which Between the Acts (1941) was the last. Virginia Woolf was an essayist, a critic, and biographer. Figure 1 Virginia Woolf, 1939, colour dye transfer print, 30 × 20 cm. ![]() Portait photograph of Virginia Woolf, with her looking into the camera. ![]()
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