The Years

Spanning an uncertain London spring in 1880 and the dawn of a new decade, Virginia Woolf charts the fleeting moments of a family across fifty years.

The Years is a sweeping tale of three generations of the Pargiter family, from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, in the thick of life's cycles of birth, death, and the search for a pattern in all the chaos.

The narrative moves from the dim tea-tables of Abercorn Terrace into the twentieth century, tracking the brothers and sisters through bereavement, courtroom careers, and wartime air raids.

Woolf records these shifting decades through the quiet textures of daily habit, gathering the scattered cousins and elders at last into a London dawn. Annotated and with an introduction by Eleanor McNees.

• Multiple POV: Across eleven distinct temporal chapters, the narrative shifts between siblings and cousins, from Eleanor managing dilapidated tenements in Peter Street to Sara debating philosophy above a noisy South London street.


• British Literature: Woolf captures the texture of fifty turbulent years through specific domestic rituals, from Rose confronting a terrifying stranger near a gas-lit pillar-box to her militant defiance at political meetings.


• Period Piece: Intimate household shifts reveal the passing of Victorian certainties, following the faithful parlourmaid Crosby as she leaves Abercorn Terrace for a solitary room in Richmond with the family dog Rover.


• Also by This Author: Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, A Biography and The Waves.

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.