Abstract
While writing Between the Acts, her last novel, Virginia Woolf also wrote the essay ‘Anon’, which has never been published and which has received little critical attention.1 Essay and novel, I hope to show, are companion pieces, sharing a single hero and theme. In both, Woolf, with the aid of her hero (La Trobe of the novel, Anon of the essay), imagines an old world in which a communal life flourished free from conventional language, which she thought a male dominion, ruling and often ruining her world.
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Notes
For a discussion of fertility ritual in Between the Acts see Jane Marcus’s ‘Some Sources for Between the Acts’, Virginia Woolf Miscellany Winter 1977;
and Judy Little, ‘Festive Comedy in Woolf’s Between the Acts’, Women and Literature, Spring 1977, pp. 26–37.
The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf vol. t: 1882 –1912 ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975) p. 144.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Notes on an Elizabethan Play’, Collected Essays 4 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1966–7) vol. 1, p. 59.
Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: New American Library, 1953) p. 96.
See Charlotte Walker Mondez, ‘I Need a Little Language’, Virginia Woolf Quarterly Fall 1972, pp. 87–105.
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room’ and The Waves’: Two Complete Novels (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1959) p. 381.
Virginia Woolf, The Years (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1937) p. 405. Further references are to this edition, cited as Y.
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1941) p. 16. Further references are to this edition, cited as BA.
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© 1981 Jane Marcus
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Eisenberg, N. (1981). Virginia Woolf’s Last Words on Words: Between the Acts and ‘Anon’. In: Marcus, J. (eds) New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05486-2_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05486-2_12
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