#1937Club: The Years by Virginia Woolf

I actually had to buy a copy of Virginia Woolf’s The Years to reread it for the #1937Club hosted by Simon and Karen. I’m pretty sure I have a copy of it somewhere at my parents’ house, because Virginia Woolf has been one of my firm favourites since I was about twelve and determined to become a writer, so I bought all of her books that I could find at the English Bookshop in Vienna. But it’s probably a good indicator that it was NOT my favourite by VW, because it was one of the few of her books that didn’t accompany me on my moves abroad (another one was The Voyage Out).

Although it was one of her most popular and well-sold books when it appeared (perhaps because it adheres more closely to a conventional family saga format), it has not fared so well in later years. I suppose I bought into that whole ‘most average of her novels’ post-war assessment by critics (and Leonard himself thought she’d failed to accomplish what she wanted with this book, but kindly did not tell her, for fear it might cause a nervous breakdown). However, I think it also has to do with the fact that as a teenager I did not enjoy reading so much about the passing of time, and seeing characters I’d been introduced to as children suddenly become wrinkled and wizened. Rereading it now at a grand old age, it feels like an even truer and more touching description of the passing of time and the ravages it wreaks upon human bodies and minds than To the Lighthouse or The Waves (although those two remain my top favourites). There is a resilience and yet a wistfulness to many of the characters as they age which really spoke to me this time around.

The book presents snapshots of certain days in the life of various members of the Pargiter family (and their acquaintances) from 1880 to the present-day (i.e. 1936). Those were years of extraordinary historical changes: loss of empires, revolutions, several wars – including a world war, the introduction of the automobile and airplanes as normal means of transport, the massive changes in women’s clothing and appearance, the coal strikes, the Spanish Flu and so much more. Yet we don’t get to see any historical figures or dramatic scenes from battlefields, and there is only one scene where a house party gets interrupted by a bombing raid. Instead, this is all filtered through genteel (albeit occasionally heated) conversations in drawing-rooms – where Parnell and the Irish home rule question are the main topics, while the farms in Africa where some of the protagonists spent several years seem delightfully remote, maybe even quaint. I couldn’t help wondering if this reflected the type of conversations that Virginia’s own circles might have engaged in, but then I remember that Leonard was quite a politically engaged writer so they would have been at the very least more aware of all the social changes than most of the Pargiter family seems to be.

There are, of course, exceptions: Rose, the rebellious younger daughter, turned suffragette and imprisoned for her activities, Eleanor who is a tireless worker for charity and later travels the world, and North, who experiences both the front line during WW1 and a failed attempt to run a farm in Africa. But overall, the focus is on the domestic rather than the epic: how those great social and political movements shape individuals and families – or not. From her diaries and letters, it emerges that Virginia intended to write a ‘state of the nation’ novel, taking in all those significant changes, especially about expectations for women, but this book doesn’t quite work in that respect. Instead, it is in the small, intimate moments, in the beautifully written insights into individual minds, and in the gorgeous descriptions of the countryside and the city, a real love letter to London as the time of day, the seasons, the years pass.

I will finish with this very appropriate quote for this time of year, the opening passage to the book, which demonstrates why even a less than perfect book by VW is still superior to many other writers’ offerings. Just listen to the melody and elegance of these carefully-wrought sentences, how she appeals to all the senses, such vivid recreations of time and place, yet instantly recognisable even today.

It was an uncertain spring. The weather, perpetually changing, sent clouds of blue and purple flying over the land. In the country farmers, looking at the fields, were apprehensive; in London umbrellas were opened and then shut by people looking up at the sky. But in April such weather was to be expected. Thousands of shop assistants made that remark as they handed neat parcels to ladies in flounced dresses standing on the other side of the counter and Whiteley’s and the Army and Navy Stores. Interminable processions of shoppers in the West end, of business men in the East, paraded the pavements, like caravans perpetually marching, so it seemed to those who had any reason to pause, say to post a latter, or at a club window in Piccadilly. The stream of landaus, victorias and hansom cabs was incessant; for the season was beginning. In the quieter streets musicians doled out their frail and for the most part melancholy pipe of sound, which was echoed, or parodied, here in the trees of Hyde Park, here in St. James’s by the twitter of sparrows and the sudden outbursts of the amorous but intermittent thrush.