The Years

It is 1880: after
visiting his mistress in the suburbs, Colonel Pargiter returns home to his
children and his dying wife. In a series of snapshots we meet all the
Pargiter siblings: twenty-year-old Eleanor, whose concern is to help the
poor; her younger sisters Milly, Delia and Rose; her brothers Morris, Martin
and Edward, who is at Oxford and in love with his cousin Kitty. As the years
unfold, the various threads of relation, history and personal experience get
woven into the tapestries of the characters’ lives, forming a larger canvas
that covers not only the story of a family, but that of two entire
generations.

The most ambitious of Woolf’s novels, and the last one to be published
during her lifetime, The Years is a work suffused with a haunting, melancholy
sense of time and history, and a stylistic tour de force.