Word: woolf
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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BETWEEN THE ACTS-Virginia Woolf-Harcourt, Brace...
...late, great Virginia Woolf's last book is not one of her major works; it is almost a "light" novel. But it compares with the run of light novels as a Mozart opera compares with one by Sig Romberg. It is also the most nearly public of her exquisitely private books. Its subject is no individual, but the whole of England...
...lawn of a country house, on a summer afternoon in 1939, a group of upper-class English people watch a village pageant and retire with its ambiguous messages fading on "the sky of the mind." By this time the afternoon is over, Mrs. Woolf has conjured up a heroic image of the whole splendor of English literature and history, from the age when rhododendrons crowded Piccadilly to the moment when, puzzled, uneasy, a little offended, the audience beholds itself torn to pieces among the flashing mirrors of the village players in their finale, called England: Ourselves...
...youth in India; his delicate old aunt, cherishing a crucifix between her bony hands; an assortment of eligible neighbors. The pageant they have come to see is a half-talented, half-parodied hodgepodge which in actual performance would have been sad, silly, and typically British, but which, in Mrs. Woolf's hairline contexts, is moving...
...trees, unable to make themselves heard through the wind as they chant: "Digging and delving, hedging and ditching, we pass. . . . Summer and winter, autumn and spring return. . . . All passes but we, all changes . . . but we remain forever the same. . . ." They remind you of Evelyn Waugh; yet in Mrs. Woolf's many-planed perspective they are also in truth the nameless human swarm...