THE YEARS & BETWEEN THE ACTS

Edited and introduced by Linden Peach, Professor and Dean of Arts and Humanities, University of Wales, Cardiff. This volume brings together Virginia Woolf's last two novels, The Years (1937) which traces the lives of members of a dispersed middle-class family between 1880 and 1937, and Between the Acts (1941), an account of a village pageant in the summer preceding the Second World War which successfully interweaves comedy, satire and disturbing observation. Rewriting the traditional family saga and the pageant, these unsettling novels provide extraordinary critiques of Englishness and English identity while pursuing themes such as the nature of time, memory, personal relationships and sexual desire. Their tightly constructed narratives enable the reader to experience the fragmented lives of their characters and the difficulties that they have in communicating with each other and even understanding themselves. Complete and unabridged, these novels of 1937 and 1941 have not received the same degree of critical attention as her Orlando or The Waves. Between the Acts reflects the shifting mood of the late 1930s and early 40s and the nature of Englishness and British identity given mass unemployment and the rise of Fascism and prospect of war. New Wordsworth paperback, 413pp.