The Years

Written in 1937, this was the most popular of Virginia Woolf's novels during her lifetime. It explores a rich variety of themes such as sex, feminism, family life, education and politics in English society from 1800 to the 1930s, as they affect one large middle-class London family.

As the Pargiters, a middle-class English family, move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the `present day' of the 1930s, they are weighed down by the pressures of war, the social strictures of patriarchy, capitalism and Empire, and the rise of Fascism. Engaging with a painful struggle between utopian hopefulness and crippled with despair, the novel is a savage indictment of Virginia Woolf's society, but its bitter sadness is relieved by the longing for some better way of life, where `freedom and justice' might really be possible.

This is Virginia Woolf's longest novel, and the one she found the most difficult to write. The most popular of all her writings during her lifetime, it can now be re-read as the most challengingly political, even revolutionary, of all her books. This text refers to the Paperback edition.

The story of the Pargiter family - their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs - mapped out amongst the bustling rhythms of London's streets during the first decade of the 20th century. The Pargiter children must learn to find their footing in a world of rapidly changing rules.

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