5/13/2023 0 Comments Woolf between the acts![]() ![]() There are few things more prosaic than a discussion of a cesspool, which is how Between the Acts begins. ![]() Those last sentences give you some idea of Woolf’s preoccupations. The title of Woolf’s essay ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, published in the New York Herald Tribune in 1927, demonstrates her intense and continuing interest in change and innovation in writing: ‘It may be possible’ she says: ![]() How realistic is the idea of a plot, where complex lives and events result in tidy and neat endings? Is life really like that? Such questions provide ways of thinking about Woolf’s own dissatisfactions with fiction, and help to explain why she constantly sought new ways to express what life is.īetween the Acts has so far been referred to as a ‘novel’, but the term is a convenience, used for want of a better word. Such a position seemed too authoritative. As a result, Woolf and other writers like her rejected the kind of third-person narrator who is often also referred to as ‘omniscient’: god-like and all-knowing. ![]() In her family that was the norm, but elsewhere too there was a general sense of loss of faith, especially after the First World War. What did Woolf believe? She was brought up to have no conventional religious conviction. ![]()
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