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, 1...

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, 1...