Edward Albee once famously asked, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", and while her most famous novels can certainly intimidate even the most hardened reader, Between the Acts can provoke fear with its stunning mediocrity. A novel that seems poised from the start to follow in the tradition of Mrs Dalloway, it instead feels as if it is talking about not much--unless, which is entirely possible, I just missed it.

The novel concerns an annual pageant in a small English country village in which the residents put on a play--the topic of which, this year, is the (condensed) history of England. The various townspeople, however, are the real story: each person has something hidden beneath the surface and, as the play struggles to fight the impending storm and complete itself before mother nature interferes, those true qualities begin to bubble up and distribute tension amongst the otherwise quiet masses.

The most fascinating characters in the novel are Giles and Isa Oliver, a married couple with children whose mutual disinterest in each other begins to boil over as the pageant wears on. Rather than give us intense insight into these two characters, however, Woolf gives their plight to us through the lens of the flirtatious Mrs. Manresa, whose shameless attempts to hit on Giles come off as more irritating than suggestive. It makes the reader wonder what Giles could possibly see in her, which derails us from the true nature of what's in Giles mind.

Equally compelling but unexplored is the fate of Miss La Trobe, who staged and wrote the pageant. We get the sense, based on her particularities and obsessive running of the play, that she has a great stake in its outcome, though the rest of the audience is either hypercritical or otherwise disinterested. It would be nice to know more about why she is so invested in the play, and what makes her the way she is, but with so many other people in the cast with issues to be explored, the truly fascinating like Miss La Trobe are left criminally underserved.

The problem ultimately is that, while Woolf has bravely attempted to expand her vision and cover a wide variety of people and backstories, the characters in Between the Acts lack the depth and interest to truly make her plan work. The result is a work that feels like it's missing something, that doesn't necessarily exude the kind of authority that Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse effortlessly do. The sense of Woolf trying too hard comes through far too much here, making this a book that is not nearly as memorable as her better-known works.

Ambitious, but fragmented. Depending on your perception of this novel and its intentions, I'd feel safe saying that it's either far too short or far too long. For me, it was simply tiresome. While I see the intentions coming through, and find those interesting, in the end I just didn't see this coming close to living up to its potential. ( )

Virginia Woolf's last novel was published soon after her suicide and it's a book that I find elusive although I enjoy her peerless imaginative writing. I suspect if I re-read in a few years it might yield hidden treasures. ( )

The second novel I've read by Woolf. It's the last one she wrote before committing suicide and one of her shortest. Using a lot of modernist techniques it also illustrates Woolf's feeling for language. With a short and economic style she can create moments of beautiful literature in this novel. The point of Between the Acts is this use of language. Forget the plot, read and reread the lines. ( )

Read this for a literary theory class. Love it because it's Virginia, sense of Theatre, between world wars, Rusty Brown, must reread ( )