The Years

"In some ways it is, and it had a kind of success that suggests that people were reading it as if it were, say, like Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga . It was a big commercial success in her time. Now it’s the least favoured of all her books, which is partly why I chose it: because I wanted to give it an airing. That and Night and Day , I would think, are the two least read. It’s not a transfixingly experimental book in the way that Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse are. She called it her ‘failure’. She had a terrible time writing it, and kept changing her mind about what she wanted to do with it. But the reason why I think it’s interesting and important is that it’s an extremely political book. In The Years , the Victorian family that is growing into the modern world—the novel goes from the 1880s until the present day, which is 1936—is dealing with issues of feminism, of attitudes to women and the abuse of women, issues of abortion and child abuse, and women’s rights, racism and class war. These things are implicit in novels like Jacob’s Room or Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse —novels of the 1920s—but in the 1930s, when all around her Woolf sees the rise of fascism, she feels, like other writers of the time, the need to speak about politics. She is extremely engaged with the public world. The Years is a deeply flawed book, but it’s brave about political issues. In her mind, the late nineteenth-century world in which she grew up had all kinds of conventions and hypocrisies and rather stultifying ways of treating family life—in which girls, for instance, didn’t go to school if they were from an upper-middle class family, and sex was never spoken about, and young women had chaperones. The people of her generation get out of that. They go and live in Bloomsbury, they become artists, they are outspoken about sex. But they’ve lost something as well. They’ve lost a sense of solidity and gravitas and rootedness, and she struggles with that. She feels that the quality of modern life is thinner, somehow, than the quality of the life of her parents. The Years is partly about that, but it is also about individual struggles to make a meaningful life, at a time which seemed to her not helpful to individual fruition or fulfillment. She felt that the times were dark. And they were. It does. One of the reasons the novel was so difficult for her to write, and one of the reasons The Years doesn’t quite work, is that it is not what she meant it to be. She started a book called The Pargiters in the early ’30s. It’s a really interesting idea. She was going to have alternating chapters of political analysis of the situation for women and the middle classes, and what individuals did in a free country at the time of the rise of fascism. She had the polemical chapters interspersed with the life of her case-history family. Then she realized it wasn’t working, so she split the political stuff off, and turned it into a long essay called Three Guineas , which came out almost at the same time as The Years . She suppressed a lot of the polemics in the novel. She didn’t want it to be too loud-speakery, too like someone shouting at you at Speakers’ Corner. She was trying to be outspoken about the politics of her lifetime, and yet she thought that that was somehow against the grain of her aesthetic. It’s a quandary for her, and I’m interested in that tension."