An edition of The years (1937)

The years

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Last edited by MARC Bot
March 8, 2023 | History
An edition of The years (1937)

The years

  • 0 Ratings
  • 26 Want to read
  • 0 Currently reading
  • 0 Have read

A stirring, straightforward work written near the end of her luminous career, Virginia Woolf's The Years is a portrait of the Pargiters, a staid London family presided over by Colonel Abel Pargiter. In some ways, "portrait" is not an entirely appropriate word, because Woolf's subject in this novel (and an abiding concern in all of her works) is fluidity and flux: the movement of the seasons and years, the experience of maturing and growing old, and the pain of change, passing, and loss. Although it spans a fifty year period, it is not an epic novel in the sense that Mann's Buddenbrooks or Tolstoy's War and Peace are epic. The fifty years under consideration in The Years are not continuously narrated; instead, the novel deals with only certain years-1880, 1891, 1908, 1911, 1914, 1917 and "The Present Day" - punctuated with large gaps of time in between. At each new juncture, the reader is left to surmise what has happened in the intervening time with little assistance from a controlling narrative presence.

Although The Years is written in the third person, the novel's narrative voice roves among the point of view of different characters fluidly, and recounts the events of the past through memory and dialogue rather than through a third-person summation. Leaping over years and even decades - as the novel does - infuses it with a sense of time's rapid, relentless movement, as the reader watches characters age significantly with the turn of a few pages. The subject matter of The Years is also decidedly not epic, but it is what gives the novel its remarkable power. Although it does discuss what might be termed monumental events in the lives of its characters, such as the death of Mrs. Pargiter in the first chapter, the novel leaves out many events that might seem particularly noteworthy, such as the birth of a child, a courtship, or a wedding. These traditional milestones are often consigned to the blank, unnarrated stretches of time that pass between the chapters. Woolf instead focuses our attention on smaller, less self-evidently significant moments of experience: a girl writing a letter to her brother, a college student sipping a glass of port and studying ancient Greek, the goodnights exchanged after a dinner party. These tiny moments exist in a tension against the sweep of seasons, years, and lives passing in the background, and this ever-present tension is what makes the novel ultimately so disquieting and so moving. Not only does the book's structure keep us constantly aware of the time's march, but also many of the smaller details - the sound of cars moving in the streets, the sight of a hearth fire dying, a gust of wind and rain - subtly keep an atmosphere of change, flow, and passing defining the experience of the characters. The things that lend a sense of fixity to life, such as rank, employment, or marriage, or those things that pass for it, such as a painting, a text, or a sentimentalized object, are touchstones for Woolf as well. The discord between the desire for stasis and the inevitability of change in many ways defines the novel, and is everywhere evidenced in the very environment in which the characters live and breathe.

Publish Date
Language
English
Pages
435

Buy this book

Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: Years
Years
2016, Penguin Random House
in English
Cover of: The Years
The Years
2002, RosettaBooks
E-book in English
Cover of: The Years
The Years
1999, Oxford University Press
Cover of: The years
The years
1973, Penguin books
Texte imprime / in English
Cover of: The years
The years
1965, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
in English
Cover of: The years.
The years.
1937, Harcourt, Brace & Company
in English

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Book Details


Published in

New York

Edition Notes

"A Harvest/HBJ book."

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
813.54 W66y 1965
Library of Congress
PR6019.O9

The Physical Object

Pagination
435 p. ;
Number of pages
435

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL18406874M
Internet Archive
years00virg
ISBN 10
0156997010
ISBN 13
9780156997010
OCLC/WorldCat
7778524
Library Thing
25994
Goodreads
828446

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History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON / OPDS | Wikipedia citation
March 8, 2023 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
December 5, 2022 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
September 29, 2021 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
August 27, 2020 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
October 16, 2008 Created by ImportBot Imported from Oregon Libraries MARC record.