This study investigates Virginia Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts (1941), through the theoretical intersection of affect, materiality, and anticipatory trauma. Drawing on non-representational theory of affect and trauma scholarship, this article argues that the affective materials of the novel such as the gramophone, mirrors, the barn, and the pageant itself function at once as figures of impending catastrophe and as active producers of anticipatory trauma materially: the felt weight of a war not yet fully arrived. Set on a single June day, Between the Acts incorporates its objects and landscapes with a pre-traumatic affect that circulates through bodies, surfaces, and sounds before it can be articulated in language. Within this frame, the study reveals how Woolf’s materiality of language, manifested through syntactic fragmentation and deliberate silences, performs the collapse of meaning at the limits of representation. By positioning the text at the junction of the material turn, affective turn and trauma studies, this analysis provides a new theoretical perspective for Woolf studies as well as modernist affect scholarship.