Exploring Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts

Introduction

This free course, Exploring Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, is designed to explore the historical context of the final work of Virginia Woolf, one of the most significant modernist writers of the twentieth century. You’ll read about the historical context that led to the writing of this novel, which was written during the late 1930s, and published during the Second World War. You’ll explore Woolf’s views on the role of this novel, and the wider significance of literature and language. As well as reading about the novel, you will read several extracts from it, which will have audio readings accompanying them, and you’ll be asked to analyse these extracts, and determine how Woolf achieved her aims by depicting images, memories, and language.

It would be helpful, but not essential, to read Between the Acts for this course. Where passages from the novel are used in the course, the page numbers cited correspond to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the text.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course A335 Literature in transition: from 1800 to the present [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , and was written by Sue Asbee.

Before you start. if you’d like an introduction to the style of Virginia Woolf’s work first, watch this short video from a four part series produced by The Open University, examining the lives, work and influence of women writers: