Yale Modernism Lab
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Featured Article
Featured Article: Virginia Woolf's The Years
Published in 1937, The Years was the last of Virginia Woolf’s novels to appear in print during her lifetime. Over the previous six years, Woolf had undertaken a massive project combining fiction and social critique that eventually produced both The Years and the polemical essays of Three Guineas. (While not the single volume tour de force that Woolf first envisioned, she would later write that the two works really constituted “one book.”) The Years consists of two long sections entitled “1880” and “Present Day” (approx. 80 and 120 pages, respectively) that bookend nine shorter sections, each headed only by a year: 1891, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, and 1918. Sections open and are occasionally interrupted by passages of what could be termed panoramic narration that describes seasons, weather, celestial bodies, and the day to day movements of people and things before the its scope tightens to inhabit the consciousness of particular characters. Each section covers a single day with the exception of the first, which includes events on at least three days.
The Years defies plot summary and includes nothing that could be termed a continuous storyline or a central protagonist. Nor is there much of the charged, poetic language that works in many of Woolf’s novels to evoke memory and the processes of perception--indeed, among the novel’s distinguishing features is its curious flatness of affect or tone. Woolf presents a large cast of characters whose ordinary activities and thoughts we follow on seemingly random days over a span of fifty-odd years. (more...).
