Though it is impossible to know with certainty how revisions on Between the Acts might have proceeded, what we can say without a doubt is that the novel is neither silly nor trivial. Despite the inherent comedy that its setting and action allows – the book describes a pageant staged in the grounds of a country house – it evokes and encompasses, as Woolf herself hoped it would, “all life, all art, all waifs, all strays”. Its ambition and execution – complete with moments of fragmentation, passages of prose poetry and darting movements from one character’s consciousness to another – are strikingly original, daring and yet assured. No wonder that the writer Alexandra Harris, in her wonderful book Romantic Moderns, describes Between the Acts as “the richest and most self-aware expression of this turn towards an impure, inclusive and very English eye”.

War on women

Critics have noted Woolf’s tendency to incorporate discussions of social conditions and the possibility of change in her later work, particularly in relation to women. In 1937, she had published her bestselling novel The Years, which tracked the life of the Pargiter family over five decades and examined the prospects and constraints of its female characters.

A year later came a polemical work of non-fiction that she had conceived in tandem with The Years. Three Guineas, written in the form of a letter to a male correspondent, probed the various different ways in which war might be prevented – and how the social position of women prevented them from playing a full role: “The question which concerns us is what possible help we can give you in protecting culture and intellectual liberty – we, who have been shut out from the universities so repeatedly, and are only now admitted so restrictedly; we who have received no paid-for education whatsoever, or so little that we can only read our own tongue and write our own language, we who are, in fact, members not of the intelligentsia but of the ignorantsia?”