The Years - Softcover

"Inspired throughout--a brilliant fantasia of all Time's problems, age, and youth, change and permanence, truth and illusion."
--The Times Literary Supplement (London)

One of Virginia Woolf's most ambitious and beautifully written novels, The Years offers a glimpse into the lives of one upper-class English family during the turn of the century. The story begins on a day in 1880 in the household of Colonel Abel Pargiter, whose beloved wife lies still, gradually slipping into death in front of their seven worrisome children. Over the years, deaths, births, marriages, and wars shape each family member’s life, but it is through commonplace moments that the essence of each character is revealed. When the Pargiters young and old come together at a 1930s party that ends the novel, they talk, dream, and contemplate the patterns of the past and present?while the reader is left to imagine the future still to come.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, transformed the art of the novel. The author of numerous novels, collections of letters, journals, and short stories, she was an admired literary critic and a master of the essay form.

Mark Hussey, general editor of Harcourt's annotated Woolf series, is professor of English at Pace University in New York City and editor of the Woolf Studies Annual.

Eleanor McNees is associate professor of English and director of graduate studies at the University of Denver.