The most popular of Virginia Woolf's novels during her lifetime, The Years
is a savage indictment of British society at the turn of the century,
edited with an introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson. The Years is the
story of three generations of the Pargiter family - their intimacies and
estrangements, anxieties and triumphs - mapped out against the bustling
rhythms of London's streets during the first decades of the twentieth
century. Growing up in a typically Victorian household, the Pargiter
children must learn to find their footing in an alternative world, where
the rules of etiquette have shifted from the drawing-room to the air-raid
shelter. A work of fluid and dazzling lucidity, The Years eschews a simple
line of development in favour of a varied and constantly changing style,
emphasises the radical discontinuity of personal experiences and historical
events. Virginia Woolf's penultimate novel celebrates the resilience of the
individual self and, in her dazzlingly fluid and distinctive voice, she
confidently paints a broad canvas across time, generation and class.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and
essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist, and
the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists
and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a
powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. Between
1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest
masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly
experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing
output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography,
including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own
(1929) a passionate feminist essay.