Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts – four day study in St Ives
Event Details
It has become a Salon tradition to spend some time each year in St Ives reading Virginia Woolf’s work and enjoying a place she loved and in which she spent significant parts of her childhood. In 2023 we will offer two Woolf studies in St Ives: Between the Acts (30 September to 3 October) and To the Lighthouse (5 to 8 October).
The Cornish coastal town of St Ives serves as a prism through which we will explore Woolf’s work. During our visit you will have the opportunity to visit the iconic Tate St Ives gallery overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, built between 1988 and 1993 on the site of an old gasworks. If weather allows, there will be an optional boat trip to Godrevy Lighthouse and we also hope to look at Talland House, Woolf’s childhood summer home (now privately owned). For several months of the year the elegant house overlooking St Ives Bay would be the Stephens’ family home until 1895 when Virginia’s mother, Julia Stephen, died. Although the complete family never returned to St Ives following their mother’s death, her children travelled back in 1905 following the death of their father in 1904.
In this book Virginia Woolf’s lyric prose and gorgeous vision combine to consider the sense of exhaustion that punctuated the Modernist period leading up to the Second World War. According to Edward Mendelson: “Everything comes to an end in Between the Acts, and then, as the book itself comes to an end, something unknowable begins.” The book includes a pageant composed of imaginary episodes from 1,000 years of English history, and a close examination of the intricacies of village life in England in the days leading up to World War II. As always, it is Woolf’s penetrating consideration of intimate relationships and the places where language fails — but something else transcends — that lift this work from “the doom of sudden death hanging over us” as one of her characters describes.
“Here came the sun—an illimitable rapture of joy, embracing every flower, every leaf. Then in compassion it withdrew, covering its face, as if it forbore to look on human suffering. There was a fecklessness, a lack of symmetry and order in the clouds, as they thinned and thickened. Was it their own law, or no law they obeyed?”
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts
Part of the challenge when reading Woolf is to understand it is not the action that matters but the impression of thoughts; it is by attending to the pattern and signification of thoughts and impressions that we will uncover meaning, innovation. While Woolf was writing this novel, she had written in a letter to Stephen Spender: “I think action generally unreal. It’s the thing we do in the dark that is more real; the thing we do because people’s eyes are on us seems to me histrionic, small boyish” (Letters Volume 6, April 1937).
Although Woolf was to invoke the power of light, it is the darkness in the human mind that she was becoming increasingly fascinated with while she witnessed Europe spinning towards war as she wrote this, her last book. As Julia Briggs observes:
“Oh beautiful and bounteous light on the table; oil lamp; ancient and out-of-date lamp… are the first words that Woolf typed out in April 1938 (as she began Between the Acts) . . .
The lamp traditionally stands for illumination . . . yet this novel seeks for the darkness that lies beyond and beneath light and reason: lust, jealousy, contempt, the eruptions of anger and desire that are part of the night world . . .
Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life
Feedback from participants in 2022 St Ives studies:
“The studio where the discussion took place is a beautiful, extraordinary place, the participants were imbued with the light and landscape, creating a friendly and committed atmosphere. The two facilitators were wonderful . . .”
“The collaboration between participants and facilitators was rich indeed, and I wonder how it was accomplished that everyone in the group was so insightful and intelligent and I might even say soul-searching . . . I also think it was just a superb group of people.”
Read Salonista Leah Jewett’s account of a 2022 Salon Study in St Ives
on our blog here.
SALON DETAILS
- Facilitated by Toby Brothers and Sarah Snoxall
- Our meetings will take place in the fabulous Porthmeor Studios
- 30 September to 3 October 2023, 12+ hours of study and additional activities over four days in St Ives
- Recommended edition: Between the Acts, by Virginia Woolf, Oxford World Classics (June 2008) ISBN-13: 978-0199536573
- Cost £520, includes notes and critical resources (N.B. travel, food and accommodation are NOT included and participants are responsible for arranging their own travel and accommodation).
- Recommended places to stay include No 4 St Ives, 3 Porthminster Terrace, Blue Sky, The Olive Branch, Rivendell and the Harbour View Hotel, but PLEASE check web details and review sites before booking to make sure they meet your needs.
More on the study:
As one of the primary modernist writers, Woolf plays with language; testing its ability to truly reflect human experience by recording the life of the mind not just action. Her narrative form reflects one of the characteristics of Modernist writing in its shifting centre of narrative perspective, presenting a questioning of ultimate and moral authority that characterised a time at which the dissolution of Imperialism and absolute values began.
Writing from the edge of the violent shift from Victorian to Modernist era, the loss of an old world in the violent destruction of war and massive social change, Woolf’s ambivalence is demonstrated in her work. She struggles against the boundaries and structures of the Victorian age while holding a great longing and nostalgia for the noble traditions of the time. Between The Acts reflects this ambivalence in its nostalgia for a lost English idyll, celebrated in the world of Pointz Hall as well as by the pageant itself.
To understand this book, you will want to read with a wide-awake mind and then re-read once you have played on the surface of plot and character. Notice how the descriptions along the edges—the fragments, the other stories invoked, the pastiche of the pageant—all comment on and expand the central narrative.
