Between the Acts is Virginia Woolf's last novel, and in her own opinion it was `more quintessential' than any of her others. Set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village pageant at Pointz Hall, the book weaves together the musings of several disparate characters and their reactions to the imminence of a war which is to change the pattern of history. Before the book was published in the spring of 1941, Virginia Woolf had taken her own life.