Conclusion

Abstract

It is so tempting, even to those with no aesthetic axe to grind, to see in an artist’s oeuvre the beauty and completion which were perhaps denied to their individual productions. Between the Acts can be seen as Woolf’s swansong, her farewell to an art form which failed her just as the villagers, cows, gramophone and audience failed Miss La Trobe. It is difficult to imagine a successor to that novel; but then, it is just as difficult to imagine successors to Woolf’s previous novels. Forster’s A Passage to India is perhaps more understandably a final novel, not simply from the evidence of the author’s subsequent silence.

The best critics … wrote of literature with music and painting in their minds. ¹