10 Greatest Unfinished Novels
9. Between The Acts By Virginia Woolf
In her last novel, Virginia Woolf wrote a piece that exemplifies the modernist spirit in Literature: experimental, engaged, and balanced between symbolic playfulness and sharp social critique.
Between the Acts is an intricately written story about a pageant being performed in an English country house just before the Second World War, with the play itself charting different periods of English history. The play and the audience itself serve as objects for the prose to examine and absorb in an experimental piece indicative of some of Woolf's other modernist masterpieces, particularly To the Lighthouse.
Woolf had written and submitted the manuscript but did not live to correct and make the final revisions to the novel prior to her death by her own hand. Due to this, numerous critics consider this to be an unfinished work, and it is certainly one of the finest examples as such. As the culmination of one of literature's most well-regarded careers, what we are left with is an exquisite swan song - as moving and as stylistically daring as her best works.