The Years

As the Pargiters, a middle-class London family, move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the 'present day' of the 1930s, they are weighed down by the pressures of war, the social strictures of patriarchy, capitalism and Empire, and the rise of Fascism. Engaging with a painful struggle between utopian hopefulness and crippled with despair, the novel is a powerful indictment of 'Victorianism' and its values. "The Years", written in 1937, was the most popular of Virginia Woolf's novels during her lifetime.