This Stage of History: Between the Acts and the Destruction of Tradition

Abstract

It has been forcefully asserted that in ‘none of her other novels is Woolf as conscious of and responsive to contemporary events as in Between the Acts’, her last novel.2 The increasing menace of war filled Woolf’s diary with anxious remarks at the time she was writing Between the Acts3 and fostered a sense of danger which underwrites the novel. While looking at the ancient view from his countryside home, which would be nor-mally expected to survive the beholders, Giles Oliver, the young city professional, thinks apprehensively:
Only the ineffective word ‘hedgehog’ illustrated his vision of Europe, bristling with guns, poised with planes. At any moment guns would rake that land into furrows; planes splinter Bolney Minster into smithereens and blast the Folly.4
As we have seen in the previous chapter, the interbellum period marked an increasing interest in political thought and a demand for action on the part of artists and intellectuals.5 However, in contrast to the brisk activism shown by her contemporaries and other members of the Bloomsbury group, for example, her own husband, her friend Forster, as well as the ‘Auden generation’ poets Woolf had mocked in her ‘Letter to a Young Poet’ and ‘The Leaning Tower’, it was her writing that best accommodated her politics. Signing petitions and attending conferences did not, she thought, suffice to prevent fascism and war.6