The years

A stirring, straightforward work written near the end of her luminous career, Virginia Woolf's *The Years* is a portrait of the Pargiters, a staid London family presided over by Colonel Abel Pargiter. In some ways, "portrait" is not an entirely appropriate word, because Woolf's subject in this novel (and an abiding concern in all of her works) is fluidity and flux: the movement of the seasons and years, the experience of maturing and growing old, and the pain of change, passing, and loss. Although it spans a fifty year period, it is not an epic novel in the sense that Mann's [*Buddenbrooks*][1] or Tolstoy's [*War and Peace*][2] are epic. The fifty years under consideration in *The Years* are not continuously narrated; instead, the novel deals with only certain years-1880, 1891, 1908, 1911, 1914, 1917 and "The Present Day" - punctuated with large gaps of time in between. At each new juncture, the reader is left to surmise what has happened in the intervening time with little assistance from a controlling narrative presence.

Although *The Years* is written in the third person, the novel's narrative voice roves among the point of view of different characters fluidly, and recounts the events of the past through memory and dialogue rather than through a third-person summation.