The Years

By Virginia Woolf

A novel that is both epic in scope and quiet in nature; it captures the breadth of Virginia Woolf’s talents.

Woolf exquisitely captures the life of an English family, their drifting apart and coming together, over more than 50 years, choosing to focus on the intimate details of individual days.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781551998411

Virginia Woolf

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando.

Reviews for The Years

[patsymurray · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a book about identity and the passage of time, about being an individual and being a part of the universal.

[bettyandboo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"Tell me about William Whatney," she said. "When I last saw him he was a slim young man in a boat."
Peggy burst out laughing.
"That must have been ages ago!" she said.
"Not so very long," said Eleanor. She felt rather nettled. "Well -" she reflected, "twenty years - twenty-five years perhaps."
It seemed a very short time to her; but then, she thought, it was before Peggy was born. She could only be sixteen or seventeen." (pg. 205)

We've all experienced this, haven't we? This somewhat unsettling realization when something that we perceive in our minds to have occurred "not so very long" ago really happened more like two decades (and then some) in the past.

Nice to see that Virginia Woolf understood that even in 1937 when she wrote this novel.

I mean, I fall into this mind trap ALL THE TIME. I still, on more occasions than I care to admit, think 1990 was ten years ago rather than (gulp) 22 years long gone. I chalk this up to approaching my mid-40s, but after reading Virginia Woolf's novel The Years, now I'd like to look at this differently.

"They talked as if they were speaking of people who were real, but not real in the way in which she felt herself to be real. It puzzled her; it made her feel that she was two different people at the same time; that she was living at two different times in the same moment." (pg. 167)

Yep. That's it exactly. We are two different people at the same time, living at two different times in the same moment. We're a combination of our present and our past. ("What is the use, she thought, of trying to tell people about one's past? What is one's past?" (pg. 167)

Virginia Woolf's second-to-last novel The Years is a commentary about the passage of time, which she brings forth for the reader by showing her characters - members of the large, well-to-do Pargiter family and their extended family - through 1880-1918. (The last chapter is titled "Present Day," which I suppose is 1939, when the novel was published.) The Pargiters live in London, and at the beginning of the book, are in that sort of odd stage when you're just watching and waiting for a loved one to pass away. (In this case, their mother.)

Not too much happens in The Years. People visit each other, talk about their life and their travels. They sometimes die. It's a reflective, thoughtful sort of novel, and truthfully, this takes a little while to get used to - especially if you, like me, are not generally a classics reader or one who doesn't normally read novels set in this time period. (Woolf's passion for the semicolon is also more than a bit distracting.) It isn't until almost halfway through the story that you begin to see the connections among the characters, the passing of time as evidenced by the changing seasons and the weather.

Honestly, up to that point, I kind of considered abandoning this, but then I started gaining an appreciation for what Woolf was trying to say. With the exception of Mrs. Dalloway, which I absolutely loved right off the bat (kudos to one of the most awesome college English professors ever), I'm finding that this is my typical reaction to Virginia Woolf. I start off a little perplexed, a little lost and confused, and then I get immersed in the story.

Just like life, no?

"My life, she said to herself. That was odd, it was the second time that evening that somebody had talked abut her life. And I haven't got one, she thought. Oughtn't a life to be something you could handle and produce? - a life of seventy odd years. But I've only the present moment, she thought. Here she was alive, now, listening to the fox-trot. Then she looked round. There was Morris; Rose; Edward with his head thrown back talking to a man she did not know. I'm the only person here, she thought, who remembers how he sat on the edge of my bed that night, crying - the night Kitty's engagement was announced. Yes, things came back to her. A long strip of life lay behind her. Edward crying. Mrs. Levy talking; snow falling; a sunflower with a crack in it; the yellow omnibus trotting along the Bayswater Road. And I thought to myself, I'm the youngest person in this omnibus; now I'm the oldest ... Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?" (pg. 366-367)

[thebooknerd · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Among Woolf's work that I've read, not my favorite. The language, however, is beautifully crafted.

[pieterpad_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A glorious opening paragraph sets the tone for Woolf's descriptions in this long survey of London society 1887-1937, but the narrative flags in the middle years. The close, though, set in an all-night party in the miasma of the late 1930s, is absolutely brilliant, a return to the impressionist modernism of Jacob's Room with the added insight of a great novelist's insights.

[chris_v_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was the first Virginia Woolf novel I ever read and I suspect it would rate a little higher with a re-read as I struggle to remember most of it. Her wonderful eye for London life is as vivid as ever.

[myhi_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

First Virginia's book I've read. Liked it.... but nothing like the others. She was a phenomenon, a very unique happening in 2000 years of literature.Nothing extraordinary in this book - still the first book I ever read containing mostly women characters !Time. All her books are about time going by... past and present happening apparently in the same time (the action time); many writers at the beginning of the XXth century brought new, different visions on time (Proust, Mann, Joyce) in the modern literature, trying to align it with the latest scientific discoveries (Bergson) - but VW used her very particular technique to express her vision on time & life.All the (strong) characters are actually allowed to introduce themselves - through their deep thinking and sometimes even acts; great art of imagining every single person's thoughts.... and keeping it believable.VW's writer's journal says it all about her masterpieces; worth reading before any of her novels.A lot to discover about her among Aldous Huxley's pages (one of her best friends).

[william345 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I will not call the early going a slog, but the novel did fail to engage me until page 140 or so. After that, all was well. The novel took off as a proper Virginia Woolf novel should. By the end of the long party scene which closes the book I was familiarly dazzled. I have to admit that I find the content almost unsummarizable. There's no plot to speak of. It's the technique that astonishes. Woolf's concern is not the quotidian, and often not the particular, but the structural. There are any number of exchanges between characters, sometimes arguments, in which the reader has no idea of the issues involved. Woolf deliberately takes the emphasis off the particular here and this somehow pulls the characterizations into the foreground more strongly. I'm not sure how she does it. It's impressive. She uses the technique throughout. As for the timeline, it seems almost capricious. Here are the years which form the chapter heads: 1880, 1891, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, 1918 and Present Day. As with a bildungsroman, Woolf's interest is in the developmental arc over time. The overwhelming feature of the novel is the sense of the result of experience. But unlike the bildungsroman there is no movement toward a set goal, life being thinly plotted. Neither is there a single central character but rather an ensemble effect. Much takes place offstage: births and deaths and weddings and childbirth. Woolf's concern is with the interstitial moments, when the effect of time, certainly Proustian time though without the flashbacks, has its collective impact. This novel is certainly a candidate for rereading, so enigmatic are its means of advancing the narrative. Highly recommended.

[amerynth · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Of the three novels I've read by Virginia Woolf ("The Years," "Jacob's Room" and "The Waves") this is the one I liked best. Perhaps because it has a more traditional narrative structure than the other two or because the overall theme was more obvious, I didn't feel as though I was missing some great point as I did with the other two. "The Years" is very much about the passage of time, shown through some vignettes looking into the experiences of the Pargiter family (and their near relations.) The novel stretches from the 1880's to the 1930's, as the family ages, looks back and tries to make sense of their lives.The characters are really interesting and the relationships between them often complex (and often only hinted at) which makes this book a fun and entertaining read.

[stillatim · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My first time reading this Woolf, and I can see why it would have been a shock when it first came out. on the other hand, it's just as experimental as her previous handful of novels, but the experiment is different. And it's quite enjoyable, though I confess it was a bit too long. The last quarter was comparatively tedious.

[ghost_boy-691444 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Forgot to write little review when I read this a while back. Out of all the Woolf novels, I think this one might be the worst. It's not a bad novel, but this didn't read like Woolf. In her diary she said she didn't like this book either because she wrote this when she was sick. She says it's never a good thing when writers write when they are sick. It shows too.