The Years

The Years is a 1937 novel by Virginia Woolf, the last she published in her lifetime. It traces the history of the Pargiter family from the 1880s to the "present day" of the mid-1930s. Although spanning fifty years, the novel is not epic in scope, focusing instead on the small private details of the characters' lives. At the beginning of each section, and sometimes as a transition within sections, Woolf describes the changing weather all over Britain, taking in both London and countryside as if in a bird's-eye view before focusing in on her characters. Although these descriptions move across the whole of England in single paragraphs, Woolf only rarely and briefly broadens her view to the world outside Britain.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a Modernist writer, widely considered to be one of the most important of the twentieth century. She and her husband Leonard bought a hand-printing press in 1917, and they set up Hogarth Press in their house in Richmond, which published much of Virginia's work, as well as those of friends and fellow luminaries. She was a member of the Bloomsbury Set - an artistic, philosophic and literary group which included John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. Today she is best remembered for her novels - in particular To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway - and her essay A Room of One's Own.