The Years
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| The Years, Harvest/HBJ trade paperback edition | |
| Author | Virginia Woolf |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Hogarth Press |
| Released | 1937 |
| Media Type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 444 |
| ISBN | 0156997010 |
The Years is a 1937 novel by Virginia Woolf, the last she published in her lifetime. It traces the history of the genteel Pargiter family from the 1880s to the "Present Day" of the mid-1930s.
Although spanning fifty years, the novel is not epic in scope, focusing instead on the small private details of the characters' lives. Except for the first, each section takes place on a single day of its titular year, and each year is defined by a particular moment in the cycle of seasons. At the beginning of each section, and sometimes as a transition within sections, Woolf describes the changing weather all over Britain, taking in both London and countryside as if in a bird's-eye-view before focusing in on her characters. Although these descriptions move across the whole of England in a paragraph, Woolf only rarely and briefly broadens her view to the world outside Britain.
[edit] Development
The novel had its inception in a 1931 lecture Woolf made before the National Society for Women's Service. Having recently published A Room of One's Own, Woolf thought of making this speech the basis of a second book of essays on women, this time taking a broader view of their economic and social life, rather than focusing on women as artists as the first book had.
However, soon after beginning the planned essays she had the idea of adding a series of fictional illustrations to them. She conceived the original form of a "novel-essay" in which each essay would be followed by a novelistic passage--presented as extracts from an imaginary longer novel--which would examplify the ideas explored in the essay. She called the book The Pargiters.
Between in October and December of 1932, Woolf wrote six essays and their accompanying fictional "extracts" for The Pargiters. But by February of 1933 Woolf had jettisoned the theoretical framework of her "novel-essay" and began to rework the book as pure fiction. Some of the analytic material deleted in transforming the book into The Years eventually made its way into the book of essays Woolf published in 1938, Three Guineas. In 1977 a transcription of the original draft of six essays and extracts--together with the speech that first inspired them--was published under the title The Pargiters, edited by Mitchell Leaska.
[edit] Further reading
Virginia Woolf's the Years: The Evolution of a Novel, Grace Radin, University of Tennessee Press, 1982
[edit] External links
Novels: The Voyage Out · Night and Day · Jacob's Room · Mrs Dalloway · To the Lighthouse · The Waves · The Years · Between the Acts
Short stories: A Haunted House · A Society · Monday or Tuesday · An Unwritten Novel · The String Quartet · Blue & Green · Kew Gardens · The Mark on the Wall · The New Dress
Biographies: Orlando: A Biography · Flush: A Biography · Roger Fry: A Biography
Non-fiction: Modern Fiction · The Common Reader · A Room of One's Own · On Being Ill · The London Scene · The Second Common Reader · Three Guineas · The Death of the Moth and Other Essays · The Moment and Other Essays
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