This essay focuses on questions of class, politics and narrative form in Virginia Woolf’s late writing, in particular her posthumously published novel, Between the Acts. The novel is frequently discussed by critics in relation to the Second World War; this essay pushes an overlapping but critically overlooked context into view. It reads the text in the light of late 1930s leftist cultural production, particularly those discourses about national history and cultural traditions that loomed large during the popular front period. The essay argues that Woolf’s last novel is the conflicted location of a search for a more inclusive narrative form