Abstract
This article explores Virginia Woolf's figure of the artist ‘between the trees’ and ‘out of doors’ in two late works, Between the Acts and the late variant manuscript, ‘Anon’. The two works are closely linked in many ways, so much so that a fuller understanding of Between the Acts is enabled by its contemporary unfinished essay. Woolf's suggestion in ‘Anon’ is that writing (Caxton's press) not only instigates individual authorship but also takes the author and the artefact indoors; in Between the Acts, the peripatetic playwright Miss la Trobe with her outdoor pageant is a return, in part. Further, the article explores Woolf's memoir ‘A Sketch of the Past’ and in it, her choice of a plant (unspecified and metonymic) as both co-creator and emblem of ‘the whole’, in ways that anticipate ‘eco’ and ‘biosemiotic’ approaches. At a time of war and crisis and pushing her experimentation further, ‘the perpetual crumbling and renewal of the plant’ has a particular meaning for Woolf and for her poetics, from the ‘androgynous mind’ of her early work to the ‘common voice singing out of doors’ of her last.
Published Version
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