The book describes the mounting, performance, and audience of a play at a festival in a small English village, just before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Because of its focus on theatrical performance, it has been discussed as theatre-fiction, which Graham Wolfe explains as "referring to novels and stories that engage in concrete and sustained ways with theatre as artistic practice and industry".

Isa is attracted to a local gentleman farmer, Rupert Haines, although the relationship goes no further than eye contact.

The final scene is entitled "Ourselves", at which point Miss La Trobe shocks the audience by having the cast turn mirrors on them.

As darkness descends, cloaking the country house, Giles and Isa are left alone, presumably resulting in conflict and reconciliation.

The novel "sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation—all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history.

[3] While Woolf's work can be understood as consistently in dialogue with the Bloomsbury Group, particularly due to its tendency (informed by G.E.