The Years Summary
Virginia Woolf

The Years Overview

The Years, published in 1937, was the last novel published in Virginia Woolf’s lifetime. It is a realist depiction of the lives and loves of a single family, the Partigers, between 1880 and the early 1930s. As the older generation of the Partiger family fades away, and as the younger generation grows up and lives through the first World War, Woolf's book provides a portrait in miniature of the slow end of the Victorian era in Britain, and of the birth of the new modern world: of women's rights, a relaxing of attitudes towards sex, and a society piecing itself together after one great conflict whilst looking ahead to another. It is told mainly through multiple first-person perspectives, though each chapter begins with a long, poetic meditation on the current weather in Britain.