'There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.'
Virginia Woolf's last novel before her death, The Years is a sweeping portrait of one family across generations, and a striking meditation on the passage of time.
Published in 1937 to commercial success, The Years is a powerful narrative that traces the fortunes of the Pargiter family from the 1880s through to the 1930s, capturing the shifting tides of English society as old traditions give way to modernity. Through Woolf's characteristically lyrical prose and sharp psychological insight, the ordinary rhythms of domestic life – births, deaths, reunions, quiet moments of longing – become heavy with meaning. At once intimate and expansive, The Years reveals Woolf's masterful ability to weave together personal histories with broader questions of class, gender and social change. It remains one of her most ambitious works: a novel that both reflects and refracts the world in transition.
Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) was one of the most significant novelists of the twentieth century. A modernist writer and progressive thinker, she is known for her stream of consciousness narrative style and influence on feminist criticism. Her works have been translated into over fifty languages and are widely read and adapted to this day.
