The Years – Virginia Woolf (1937)

I have reviewed books by Virginia Woolf before on this blog, but it’s never an easy task – how to talk about a writer like Virginia Woolf? Is it the mark of a genius that we mere mortals struggle to find the right words – perhaps.

“Slowly wheeling, like the rays of a searchlight, the days, the weeks, the years passed one after another across the sky.”

The Years was Virginia Woolf’s penultimate novel – the final one though to be published in her lifetime. It was also the one which was the most popular and sold most widely during her lifetime – and along with Night and Day one of her more conventional novels. It was also the last of her novels I had to read. I still have many of her essays and some short stories to read. Conventional is probably what I am most comfortable with, and despite my great love for To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway – Night and Day is probably my favourite of her novels. So, despite the fact that I have had The Years on my tbr bookcase for about five years – I knew I would love it, and I did.

The Years is the story of the Pargiter family, from 1880 to the ‘present day’ (early 1930s) it represents the span of Woolf’s own life to this point (she was born in 1882). Each chapter – some longer than others – depicts one day in a particular year within that fifty year period. Each of these chapters begins with a slightly broader view acting as a transition from one year to another – taking in the weather across Britain and delivering a birds eye view of the countryside or London. Woolf does this sort of thing so well – creating that wonderful sense of connectedness and time passing that we have seen her use before.

“The fine rain, the gentle rain, poured equally over the mitred and the bareheaded with an impartiality which suggested that the god of rain, if there were a god, was thinking Let it not be restricted to the very wise, the very great, but let all breathing kind, the munchers and chewers, the ignorant, the unhappy, those who toil in the furnace making innumerable copies of the same pot, those who bore red hot minds through contorted letters, and also Mrs Jones in the alley, share my bounty.”

Despite this span of fifty years – the novel itself is not epic in scope, there’s no feeling of a large family saga, because Woolf’s concerns are smaller and more everyday than that. In this novel Woolf is focussing on the small details of the everyday life of a family.

In many ways there is very little plot – but that certainly doesn’t make this novel inaccessible or hard to read, there’s no build up to a big climax – but you probably wouldn’t expect that from Virginia Woolf – would you? Characters are glimpsed in part – we don’t see everyone wholly or in any exacting detail – it’s as if we meet them fleetingly and having had a brief conversation, they leave us with an impression of who they are as they move on. Later we hear something more about them and we think – ah so that’s what happened to them.

Opening in 1880 – we meet the large Pargiter family. Colonel Abel Pargiter visits his mistress Mira – before retuning home to his family. At home Col Pargiter’s wife is dying – his eldest daughter Eleanor is in her early twenties, she is clearly the most adult person in the family – something of a do-gooder, involved with charitable works and such like. Her brother Morris is already a barrister, while Edward is at Oxford – (we meet him there later) Delia and Milly are in their teens while Rose and Martin still very much in the school room at just ten and twelve years old. Delia is struggling to cope with the fact her mother is dying – and rather wishes she would just get on with it – each crisis which comes along and is then got through almost a disappointment.

The scene shifts to a rainy night in Oxford, Edward Pargiter is thinking a great deal about his cousin Kitty Malone and reads Antigone. Kitty meanwhile is enduring another of her mother’s dinner parties, she is the daughter of an Oxford head of house. She has been taking lessons from a poor female scholar, though she doesn’t seem to have completed the tasks previously set for her. Kitty’s mother predicts that Kitty will marry Lord Lasswade. Kitty, though clearly not as enamoured of Edward as he is of her, seems to be weighing up several possibilities. Kitty is sat with her mother when the news is brought to them that Mrs Pargiter has finally died.

The novel then moves forward to 1891 – life has moved on, more so for some than others. Eleanor is running her father’s house and heavily involved in charity work providing homes for the poor. Other characters have married or gone abroad. In this section we meet Col Pargiter’s younger brother and his family. Time moves on with each chapter, characters age, marry or have children, some may not marry.

“The wind ceased; the country spread wide all round her. Her body seemed to shrink; her eyes to widen. She threw herself on the ground, and looked over the billowing land that went rising and falling, away and away, until somewhere far off it reached the sea. Uncultivated, uninhabited, existing by itself, for itself, without towns or houses it looked from this height. Dark wedges of shadow, bright breadths of light lay side by side. Then, as she watched, light moved and dark moved; light and shadow went travelling over the hills and over the valleys. A deep murmur sang in her ears—the land itself, singing to itself, a chorus, alone. She lay there listening. She was happy, completely. Time had ceased.”

 Friendships develop that will last years. People who went abroad return home – family reunions are brought about.

This was such a lovely novel to read, Woolf’s prose is simply gorgeous and her portrait of London and Oxford are especially lovely I thought.