Interlude

Between the Acts is the last novel by the English writer Virginia Woolf. She completed it in February 1941 and drowned herself in March of the same year. The book was published after her death and is regarded as her farewell in fiction. The story takes place on a single day in June 1939, at Pointz Hall, a country house in central England that is several centuries old. The Oliver family, invited guests, and neighbors watch an open-air historical pageant directed by Miss La Trobe. Performed by villagers, the pageant strings together episodes of English history from ancient times to the modern era, but one of the true narrative centers lies in the intervals and offstage: the audience's conversations, distractions, whispers, and inner monologues during breaks, the endurance and longing beneath the trivial routines of country life, and the composure people deliberately maintain as the shadow of war draws near. Woolf uses a polyphonic, multi-threaded method in which drama and reality seep into each other, so that past and present, history and the moment, art and life illuminate one another. The novel retains the delicate touch of stream of consciousness while brimming with witty humor and irony, and its language is rich in poetry and musicality. As the endpoint of her career, it concentrates her final thoughts on Englishness, community, gender relations, and individual solitude. The CITIC edition, translated by Liu Zhongliang, is short, running to just over 90,000 Chinese characters.