The Years

The Years published in 1937 was Virginia Woolf's most popular novel during her lifetime. It examines a wide range of issues in English society from 1800 to the 1930s including sex feminism family life education and politics as they influence one large upper-class London family. The central theme of this complex work which spans three generations of the Pargiter family is time. Colonel Abel Pargiter his dying wife and their seven children begin the storey on a day in 1880 and it closes in the 1930s with a magnificently described celebration at which the Pargiters young and elderly pass in review. The pressures of war business empire and the development of Fascism weigh down the Pargiters as they travel from the harsh confines of their Victorian home in the 1880s to the 1930s.