‘What could be more ordinary?’ she said. ‘A large family, living in a large house…’
(Rose Pargiter, thinking back on her childhood, page 161)

He looked clean, he looked starched and ironed like his robes. But what did he mean by what he was saying? She gave it up. Either one understood or one did not understand, she thought. Her mind wandered.
(Typical behaviour from one of Woolf’s female protagonists [in this case, Delia], detached from male discourse and dreamily drifting into her own world)

Her mind was a perfect blank for a moment. Where am I? she wondered. What am I doing? Where am I going? Her eyes fixed themselves on the dressing-table; vaguely she remembered some other room, and some other time when she was a girl…
(Kitty Malone expressing the dissociation and bewilderment typical of so many Woolf women)

The Years is Woolf’s longest novel. The strange thing is how this big and traditional novel punctuated her run of much shorter, much more experimental works, coming after the run of Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927) and before her last, normal-length work, Between The Acts (1941).

It’s a sad and mournful book, lyrical and nostalgic. I like the suggestion by Nuala Casey (see below) that it’s a sort of ghost story, the ghosts being Woolf’s own family who the Pargiter family are clearly based on.

‘The Years’ and ‘Three Guineas’

‘The Years’ had a long, complicated and painful gestation. It was intimately tied up with the long feminist essays which became Three Guineas. According to Wikipedia:

Although Three Guineas is a work of non-fiction, it was initially conceived as a ‘novel–essay’ which would tie up the loose ends left in her earlier work, A Room of One’s Own (1929). The book was to alternate between fictive narrative chapters and non-fiction essay chapters, demonstrating Woolf’s views on war and women in both types of writing at once. This unfinished manuscript was published in 1977 as The Pargiters. When Woolf realised the idea of a ‘novel–essay’ wasn’t working, she separated the two parts. The non-fiction portion became Three Guineas. The fiction portion became Woolf’s most popular novel during her lifetime, The Years, which charts social change from 1880 to the time of publication through the lives of the Pargiter family. It was so popular, in fact, that pocket-sized editions of the novel were published for soldiers as leisure reading during World War Two.

The soldiers’ version

Regarding its popularity and the publication of a pocket edition for soldiers, as I read through The Years I came to understand why. It is gentle and beautiful, sad and nostalgic. Each of the book’s 11 sections opens with a description of the English countryside or the busy London streets, in winter and in summer, in rain and shine, and these slowly build up into a composite portrait of the country those soldiers were fighting for.

And you can put The Years down and pick it up at any point, on any page, without worrying about forgetting the plot, because there is no plot. The characters waft around London in the same lyrical, detached, dreamlike state for hundreds of pages.

Similarly, although we know Woolf was incensed by the oppression of women by the patriarchy of her day, and although her fury is hinted at at various points in the narrative, ironically it is the very exclusion of women from education, the professions and public life, from activities of most kinds, which permits the novel’s lazy, hazy, dreamy tone.

The person who emerges as the central protagonist, Eleanor Pargiter, is the one who suffers most from patriarchal exclusion, finding herself obliged to stay at home to look after her widowed father, never benefiting from a proper school let alone university education, excluded from all the professions and any kind of paid employment. No wonder she grows up into the detached, dreamy, forgetful woman she’s depicted as – what alternative was there for women of her era and class?

There is also a pleasing irony that the great pamphlet The Years grew out of, Three Guineas, is furiously against war and against the entire patriarchal, masculinist system of hierarchy, competition and militarism which encourages it, and yet the fiction which evolved alongside it was mass published to help and succour… soldiers, becoming, in its particular way, part of the vast machinery of war which Woolf claimed to hate so much.

‘Three Guineas’ feminism

As explained, The Years was originally conceived to be interspersed with factual chapters detailing the oppression of women in England during the period covered (1880 to 1937). Eventually Woolf realised the two books had to be separated out and from her factual material created the great pamphlet, Three Guineas.

Three Guineas is a powerful feminist polemic. Reading it changed my opinions, shifting me to a markedly more feminist point of view of English social history and in particular the literature of this period, the late Victorian and Edwardian era. It is more difficult to read but, in the end, much more powerful than the shorter, more popular A Room of One’s Own.

Three Guineas is a searing indictment of all aspects of the patriarchal system developed during the Victorian era, which Woolf felt still strangled women’s aspirations in the 1930s. One aspect of this is her compelling portrait of the classic Victorian family home as a prison for daughters. Middle-class daughters were deprived of the private education given to their brothers, prevented from going to university, prevented by law from entering any of the professions, prevented from earning money and having any kind of financial or personal independence. Instead they were trapped in the prison of the Victorian family home ‘like slaves in a harem’, subject to the tyrannical whims of an all-powerful paterfamilias and, more often than not, confined to tending family members, especially if they were sick. Millions of women were forced to squander their talents, living lives blighted by endless legal, financial and cultural restrictions. This boredom crops up throughout the opening chapters.

‘I’ve nothing whatever to do,’ [Delia] said briefly. ‘I’ll go.’

This, then, is why the young women of Woolf’s day obsess about marriage and spend so much time fantasising about the young men they meet at this or that party or reception. Because marriage represents the only means of escape from the stifling family home. Deprived by law and tradition from all other channels of expression and achievement, pursuit of the perfect marriage is the only ‘profession’ allowed them.

She [Eleanor] wished Milly did not always bring the conversation back to marriage. And what do they know about marriage? she asked herself. They stay at home too much, she thought; they never see anyone outside their own set. Here they are cooped up, day after day… (p.31)

My reading of Three Guineas heavily influenced my reading of The Years, the weight of Woolf’s angry critique of Victorian oppression of women hanging very heavily over the text of the novel.

The character of the damaged, angry, unpredictable Colonel Pargiter is straight out of the essay, as is the permanent gloom caused by their mother’s long illness, the heavy curtains, the sense of trapment and stasis. Then, after the mother dies, Eleanor finds herself even more trapped in the role of her father’s carer and household manager, while all the time she watches the boys of the family go off to their private schools, then to Oxbridge colleges, and then on to professions in the army, academia or the law. All forbidden to the daughters of the family.

Presumably the dominance of this factual or even political agenda is one reason why the novel is so unlike her experimental ones, so much more conventional, much closer to the big novels about family dynasties which were so popular in the Edwardian era (for example, the series of novels by John Galsworthy making up The Forsyte Saga published 1906 to 1921).

Structure

How do you ‘chart social change? Well, Woolf picked a series of specific years, like snapshots in a family scrapbook. Hence the structure, the chapter titles and title of the novel as a whole.

1. 1880 (82 pages)
2. 1891 (37 pages)
3. 1907 (15 pages)
4. 1908 (12 pages)
5. 1910 (29 pages)
6. 1911 (20 pages)
7. 1913 (8 pages)
8. 1914 (52 pages)
9. 1917 (20 pages)
10. 1918 (3 pages)
11. Present Day (123 pages)

Curious to see if the section lengths indicated any sort of pattern, I turned them into a graph. No particular pattern emerges except the obvious fact that the first and last chapters are the longest, with the final chapter as long as all the short ones put together. The book is heavily weighted towards the ‘Present Day’

The Waves and The Years

Each of the 11 sections starts with a paragraph or so describing the time of the year and the weather, giving lyrical natural descriptions before the text zooms in onto the human characters. This tactic of natural setting followed by human interaction is very similar to the structure of The Waves, in which each of the sections is preceded by a description of the passage of the sun through the sky and the effect of the changing light, wind and weather on the sea beneath it – before moving on to focus on the lives of the characters. Not quite identical but a very similar idea.

And it’s not just using an introductory section about the weather that both novels have in common. The idea of following half a dozen or so characters, from childhood through to adulthood by giving snapshots of particular moments or events scattered over a period of 40 or more years, this is exactly the method of The Waves.

The similarity extends to the tactic of giving the children a couple of childhood events or moments, and then having these same events be remembered in each successive section, so that they slowly build up significance and resonance. Thus it was with the childish incident of Jinny kissing Louis in The Waves which gains significance as the various characters remember it throughout their lives. Here it is incidents like defiant little Rose sneaking out of the house to run along to Lamley’s shop or Maggie’s memory of the cheap necklace Eleanor bought for the Colonel to give her (Maggie) on her birthday.

1880. The Pargiter family at Abercorn Terrace wait for their mother to die (82 pages)

It was an uncertain spring. The weather, perpetually changing, sent clouds of blue and of purple flying over the land…

Colonel Abel Pargiter is in his 50s. He served in India where he lost two fingers during the Mutiny of 1857. He lives in a comfortable family home in Abercorn Terrace, off the Bayswater Road, north of Hyde Park.

An online article by Nuala Casey tells me that:

The Pargiter family home in Abercorn Terrace is a replica of 22 Hyde Park Gate where Woolf grew up with her father, the Victorian biographer Leslie Stephen, her mother Julia, a former Pre-Raphaelite model, her siblings Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian and step-siblings Stella, Gerald and George Duckworth.

The colonel’s wife is dying of some slow wasting illness, so he has taken a mistress, Mira, who lives in a dingy house near Westminster Abbey. Mira herself is no longer young, being about 40 and with a daughter at school.

Back at the family home wait the Colonel’s children – Milly, Delia (‘his favourite daughter’), Rose, Eleanor and Martin. They are all terrified of his bad moods. Eleanor, in her early twenties, is already the household manager and accounts keeper. Martin is 12, Rose is 10.

There are several servants. The main housekeeper is named Crosby, silent and efficient. The butler is named Hiscock, rarely talks, always mumbles.

Morris is another son but is old enough (after his private education) (in his early 20s) to have a job, as a junior in a barristers chambers (‘devilling for Sanders Curry’).

Cut to rooms in an Oxford college. Here we meet Edward Pargeter and his two friends, hulking great Gibbs and more effete Ashley. They’re not really friends, they don’t get along. When he’s got rid of them Edward hears laughter from the Lodge of the college and wonders who’s there with young Kitty who, presumably, he has a thing for.

Cut to the Malone household. Father is a don, Dr Malone. The interest is on young Miss Kitty Malone. She’s spent the day showing Mrs Fripp, the wife of American tourists, round Oxford. At the end of the day she undresses to go to bed. She’s a large girl who’s self conscious about her size.

Next morning she gets up and goes to see her tutor, Miss Craddock who’s tutoring her in history. Miss C is very harsh and says a child of ten could have written Kitty’s latest essay. We don’t even find out that the subject of the essay is, before their hour is up and Kitty goes on to visit the Robson family in Prestwich Terrace.

She despises their bad taste, their rooms cluttered with pretentious junk, and they’re all so small, until the son of the house, Jo, comes in from the back garden where he’s been repairing a hen coop. Kitty fancies him; she’d like him to kiss her. Jo thinks she’s a ‘stunner’.

She returns to the Lodge and sits with her mother as the latter reads The Times. Then a note arrives to say that cousin Rose has died. This is obviously Mrs Pargiter. Mrs Malone remembers sitting with Rose out on the moors in Yorkshire when young Abel Pargiter rode up from his barracks to propose to her (Rose).

Cut to the house in London, in Abercorn Terrace. it is dark and full of wreaths. The coffin containing their mother’s body is carried out. Rose’s funeral is seen through the eyes of Delia who loved and hated her. Delia feels excluded by her father and brothers who manage everything.

1891. Eleanor goes to watch brother Morris in the law courts, Colonel Pargiter visits his brother, Sir Digby Pargiter. Death of Parnell (37 pages)

The autumn wind blew over England. It twitched the leaves off the trees, and down they fluttered, spotted red and yellow, or sent them floating, flaunting in wide curves before they settled…

It is October. Kitty has married Lord Lasswade, has a little boy, lives at his grand house in the North of England. Milly has married Edward’s student friend, big Hugh Gibbs. She is pregnant. Edward is an academic at Oxford, in Classics. Morris is a barrister walking through the Inns of Court.

Eleanor, now in her early 30s, still lives at home with her father, still does the household accounts, as well as running round taking part in various committees and managing the family’s other properties, dingy rented houses called Rigby Cottages, dealing with dishonest traders; plus buying a last-minute present for her father to take to Aunt Eugénie for her little girl, Magdalena (Maggie)’s, birthday.

After a morning of chores and lunch with her father, Eleanor hurries off to the Law Courts to watch Morris prosecute a case. On the way she reads a letter from Martin who is 23 and serving in India. She rendezvous with Morris’s small, cat-faced wife in furs, Celia Chinnery.

I read the scene of Morris in court through the prism of Three Guineas. Woolf’s fierce condemnation of the way the patriarchy excluded women from all the professions brings out the outsiderness of Eleanor, excluded from a good education, prevented from attending university, she views proceedings as an outsider. She notes the palliness of all the barristers, their awe of the judge, but without following any of it, her head full of her own impressions and memories. All this makes a lot more sense if you bear in mind Three Guineas explanation of women’s exclusion from every aspect of public life.

Out in the busy Strand she reads a newspaper announcement that Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish independence leader, is dead (6 October 1891). Her sister, Delia, was a supporter of Home Rule so she takes a cab out to the squalid square where Delia lives, but she’s not there.

Cut to Colonel Pargiter visiting Aunt Eugénie in her house in Browne Street. She is married to his younger brother, Sir Digby Pargiter, and her two young daughters, (Sara and Magdalena) are playing in the garden round a bonfire of autumn leaves. Sir Digby arrives, 5 years younger than the Colonel, though the Colonel has more money. After some chat and chaffing the children, the brothers have no more to say to each other, so the Colonel leaves.

En route to their house he’d read a letter to him from his old mistress, Mira, who’s now in her 50s and fat. She had gone off with some other chap who has now, predictably, dumped her and she wants money from him. The Colonel had wanted to tell Eugénie about her, Mira, to unburden himself of his secret life but the moment never occurs, and he leaves, frustrated.

1907. Digby and Eugénie attend a party then come home to their daughter, Sara (15 pages)

It was midsummer; and the nights were hot. The moon, falling on water, made it white, inscrutable, whether deep or shallow…

Each chapter opens with a bird’s eye description of London or the countryside. This one opens with a long description of all the carts of agricultural produce lumbering along roads into London towards Covent Garden (compare and contrast Oscar Wilde’s description of the same thing in Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime and D.H. Lawrence’s description in Aaron’s Rod).

Eugénie and Digby and their older daughter, Magdalena (Maggie) are riding in a coach through Hyde Park towards a party. Back in their house in Browne Street their teenage daughter Sara is too young to attend, so has been left behind. She’s trying to sleep but is kept awake by the waltz music from a nearby party. She opens a present from her cousin Edward, the Oxford Classics scholar, his own translation of Sophocles’ Antigone.

We know from Three Guineas that the Antigone was very, very important to Woolf. Of more than personal importance, it had a polemical, political significance, because Antigone stands for all women everywhere who stand up to dictators and tyrants as Antigone stood up to her tyrannical uncle, Creon. This carried not only an immense significance in the 1930s of the fascist dictators but, in Three Guineas, Woolf makes a direct link between the public tyranny of the dictators and the private tyranny of the Victorian paterfamilias. Even Antigone’s eventual fate was highly symbolic, not just being executed but being buried alive just like the daughters of the upper-middle-class like Woolf and her generation, were buried alive in the dark, curtained mausoleum of the patriarchal home. So this isn’t a casual reference.

Identities and selves

Anyway, the parents return and Maggie visits Sara in her room. Their conversation winds round to the central Woolf theme of identity, not in any profound ore worked-through way, just in a kind of girlish throwaway:

‘Would there be trees if we didn’t see them?’ said Maggie.
What’s ‘I’?…’I’…’ She stopped. She did not know what she meant. She was talking nonsense.
‘Yes,’ said Sara. ‘What’s ‘I’?’ She held her sister tight by the skirt, whether she wanted to prevent her from going, or whether she wanted to argue the question.
‘What’s ‘I’?’ she repeated.

As we know from the last chapter of Orlando, Woolf had evolved to a position where the whole idea of identity was problematical, where she imagines the so-called ‘I’ being made up of scores or even hundreds of ‘selves’. (This theme is picked up in the 1910 chapter, see below.)

Their mother comes into the room and there’s a lovely scene of mother-and-daughters warmth as they chat about the party. The girls (both now in their twenties) persuade their mother to show them how she used to dance, holding her Edwardian skirt out like a partner. Until Sir Digby calls her to come down and lock up, angrily, and when Maggie tiptoes downstairs it’s because there have been burglaries in the street, and Digby told Eugénie to get a new lock fitted and she’s forgotten. The sweet Edwardian mother and the angry Edwardian father.

1908. Martin views the Digby house then visits Eleanor looking after their father (12 pages)

It was March and the wind was blowing. But it was not ‘blowing’. It was scraping, scourging…

It’s March the following year and we learn that Eugénie died a year ago (can that be right? if she was going to parties in October the previous year?) and Digby is dead too. The family house in Browne Street has been put up for sale, and has been sold, as Martin (now in his 40s) discovers when he arrives to view it. The Malone children used to come here all the time. Martin is upset at the loss of this setting of his childhood.

So Martin pops round to the family home. Old Crosby opens the door. The Colonel’s had a stroke and is slow. Eleanor, now in her 50s, is still looking after him. Martin finds a newspaper obituary for Sir Digby among the cuttings that the Colonel nowadays has Eleanor cut for him, which leads to a mild disagreement about whether they preferred him or Eugénie.

(And there’s a joke. Woolf started in the 1930s collecting newspaper cuttings into scrapbooks, many of them to be used in Three Guineas. So it’s a sly joke against herself when Woolf has Eleanor think, about her father: ‘That was a sign that he had grown very old, Eleanor thought—wanting newspaper cuttings kept,’ p.143)

Martin goes to play chess with their father and Eleanor reflects that he, Martin, was right to quit the army.

Martin notes that Eleanor is reading a book by the French historian Ernest Renan. Left by herself Eleanor reflects that she knows so little, is so ignorant of so much. This, of course, is an understated reference to the way she (and so many women her age) were denied any formal education.

There’s a knock at the front door and their sister Rose arrives. She is in her 40s, lives in Northumberland, and is a well-established eccentric, giving to muttering quotes from poems and songs. Eleanor was expecting her to arrive on the 18th but Rose says this is the 18th and both she and Martin laugh at Eleanor for thinking it’s the 11th, for getting her dates mixed up, for being so forgetful and ditzy. (A lot later Woolf tells us ‘She could never do sums in her head at the best of times’ and ‘She never could remember names’.)

This is a trope familiar to Woolf readers, who often goes out of her way to describe the ignorance and lack of education and general ditziness of her central woman protagonists (Mrs Dalloway in the book of the same name, Mrs Ramsay in To The Lighthouse). Woolf describes their practical shortcomings in order to emphasise that it doesn’t matter so long as their heart is in the right place, and because they love life.

All this has much more meaning to me after reading Three Guineas in which Woolf is so angry about the exclusion from all forms of education of women of her class. It made me rethink these women characters as not so much feebly dim but as victims of patriarchal laws and traditions designed to exclude them from education and public life – to be blunt, to keep them ditzy and distracted with trivia.

This adds bite to the way that, as Martin goes to leave, he mentions that he’s dining out that night, again, and Eleanor is jealous that he dines out every night and meets all sorts of people, and here she is trapped at home with a dying old man. Again, reading Three Guineas gives a powerful feminist, political bite to all these simple events and thoughts.

We learn that Rose is very politically engaged and has been making speeches ahead of the 1907 general election. It is nowhere mentioned, but the OUP editors assume she is a suffragette.

1910. Rise visits Sara and Maggy, Kitty goes to the opera, death of Edward VII (29 pages)

In the country it was an ordinary day enough; one of the long reel of days that turned as the years passed from green to orange; from grass to harvest. It was neither hot nor cold, an English spring day…

A lyrical portrait of busy London leads into a description of eccentric Rose catching a bus south of the river to visit her cousins Maggie and Sally at a place called Hyams Place, near Waterloo. After both their parents died and the Browne Street house was sold off, Maggie and Sara had to fend for themselves.

Rose is dismayed by how shabby and poor their house is. When they try to make conversation about the old times she feels like she’s two different people (the Multiple selves theme).

They talked as if they were speaking of people who were real, but not real in the way in which she felt herself to be real. It puzzled her; it made her feel that she was two different people at the same time; that she was living at two different times at the same moment. She was a little girl wearing a pink frock; and here she was in this room, now (p.159)

Rosie persuades Sara to go with her to a meeting. Eleanor is already there taking notes and then Kitty Malone, now Lady Lasswade, arrives, inappropriately dressed in opera wear. We don’t learn what the meeting is about, and since half the people arguing are men I assume it’s not a suffragette meeting. Wikipedia says it’s just ‘one of Eleanor’s philanthropic meetings’.

The meeting breaks up and Kitty, Lady Lasswade offers Eleanor a lift in her magnificent chauffeur-driven car. She drops her where she wants to be dropped then continues on to the Opera. There’s a tasty description of the embarrassment of her and all the other posh types who are wearing evening dress, heels, cloaks and furs in the middle of the day because they are attending a matinee performance, dodging between the Covent Garden workers.

The opera is Siegfried by Wagner and Woolf gives a description. Lady Lasswade/Kitty is in a box with Edward and another young man, very in-the-know. She and they observe that the Royal Box is empty.

Cut back to Sara and Maggie back in their dingy home in the squalid street near Waterloo. There’s a pub just on the corner, children shouting in the street, a geezer yelling for any old iron. A drunk is thrown out of the pub and comes battering on the front door of the neighbouring door. Then along comes a man selling the evening paper and yelling that the king is dead. (King Edward VII was declared dead on 6 May 1010.) So that’s how the characters find out, one set at the Royal Opera, the other in their dingy digs.

1911. Eleanor visits Morris and Celia in Wittering (20 pages)

The sun was rising. Very slowly it came up over the horizon shaking out light. But the sky was so vast, so cloudless, that to fill it with light took time…

August, the holiday season. We learn that every year Eleanor comes to stay at Morris’s house on the south coast, at Wittering. There’s a nice description of the little town in the blistering August sun. We learn that old Colonel Pargiter has died and therefore the London house is locked up.

Morris is the barrister we saw in the courtroom scene where Eleanor soon lost interest in proceedings. Eleanor is greeted by Morris’s wife, Celia, who explains they’re all of a tizzy because other guests have only just left and yesterday they held a bazaar with a little play, a scene from Shakespeare, in support of the local church spire. Characteristically for a Woolf woman, Celia can’t remember which Shakespeare play it was. Because they don’t work – are barred from most work – Woolf’s women are notoriously indifferent about details and precision: everything is a drift and blur.

Eleanor washes herself and changes in the room she’s been given (the blue room). She’s been on a big trip abroad, maybe her first freedom after her father’s death, which included Naples, the Acropolis and, lastly, Spain – Granada and Toledo. Her skin is notably brown (though nobody uses the word ‘tanned’; they say burned; the concept of a suntan must have appeared later in the century. According to the internet the first use of ‘suntan’ as a commercial name for a light-brown skin colour was in 1937. The OED’s earliest evidence for the word ‘suntanning’ is from 1946).

Eleanor is 55. This is the first time the age of any of the Pargiters is mentioned. From it we can deduce that she was already 24 when the novel opened in 1880.

She went on this grand tour with her brother, Edward, the Classics scholar. Another guest is staying for the weekend, a man named Dubbin who they’ve known since they were children. He is now a balding old buffer called Sir William Whatney. He’s been out in India, ruling a province the size of Ireland ‘as they always said’.

Having read Three Guineas I detect the bite behind all this. Whatney and Eleanor’s brothers Edward and Morris have had careers, gone places, had responsibilities, competed over their achievements and status. From this, like all women of her class, Eleanor has been excluded by the entire system of patriarchy which condemned her to live at home with her father managing the household accounts.

She isn’t really jealous, just indifferent, so as Sir William tells another story about India in her booming voice Eleanor, like all the Woolf women, loses interest, drifts away, notices inconsequential details of the room around her, wonders about the passage of time etc.

More bite in the fact that, when Morris and Whatney start talking about politics, Celia takes that as a signal to ‘leave the gentlemen to their politics’, and to take Eleanor and the children out onto the terrace for coffee. Here we learn that 1) Rose is in court, again, for throwing a brick, so presumably she is a suffragette and 2) Maggie has got married to a Frenchman, René.

Morris and Celia have two teenaged children, Peggy and North. The daughter of this house, Peggy, is excited because they see an owl every evening at the same time and her excitement spreads to Eleanor. Celia wants Whatney to come and live somewhere close because he’s so good for Morris.

In the top floor of the house lives old Mrs Chinnery, Celia’s mother, a very ancient 90 years old. Her nurse brings her downstairs in her wheeled chair and Eleanor goes through the rigmarole of politely kissing her and trying to make conversation. As you strongly suspect Woolf did in these situations (because so many of her characters do), Eleanor finds herself going through the motions and acting the part of the dutiful guest.

Eleanor goes to bed and can hear old Whatney huffing and puffing round in the room next door. His life is over (he’s retired) while hers – liberated from caring for her father – is only just beginning. Where should she go? What should she do?

1913. The family home is locked up and Crosby moves to Richmond (8 pages)

It was January. Snow was falling; snow had fallen all day. The sky spread like a grey goose’s wing from which feathers were falling all over England…

It’s a snowy January and Eleanor is escorting an estate agent, Mr Grice, round the now-empty family house at Abercorn Terrace. All the furniture’s been removed, leaving empty spaces, stains on the walls. The point is it’s Crosby’s last day. She’s served the family for 40 years. Showing the estate agent round, Eleanor for the first time realises how low and dingy the cellar was where she spent those 40 years, and feels ashamed. Crosby cries as Eleanor sees her into the carriage which will take her and her dog, Rover off to a one-room apartment in Richmond.

So off Crosby goes to her new home in Richmond, sharing the house with Mr Bishop and Mrs Burt, But Rover doesn’t like the change, sickens and dies.

Crosby catches the Tube to Ebury Street and walks to the bachelor pad of Martin, I wasn’t sure from the text why. The Wikipedia article tells me it’s because she’s still doing his laundry.

Martin is now about 45 and still a bachelor. He is uneasy around servants, tries to sympathise when Crosby tells him about Rover. As he clumsily says his goodbyes to her, he reflects on the tradition of telling lies in their wretched family. After the Colonel died they discovered a batch of letters to him from Mira i.e. that he had a mistress. We’ve seen how the Victorian family house was a prison for girls, but Martin has just as negative a view.

It was an abominable system, he thought; family life; Abercorn Terrace. No wonder the house would not let. It had one bathroom, and a basement; and there all those different people had lived, boxed up together, telling lies. (p.212)

1914. Martin goes to the City, Hyde Park, then to a party (52 pages)

It was a brilliant spring; the day was radiant. Even the air seemed to have a burr in it as it touched the tree tops…

‘Martin, standing at his window, looked down on the narrow street’ (see my section on Windows, below). He heads off towards the City and bumps into Sara/Sally, now in her 40s, outside St Paul’s. He invites her for lunch at a chop house and is angry when the waiter tries to steal some of the change from the bill. They walk back along Fleet Street and catch a bus to Hyde Park. Here the beautiful sunshine gives him a transcendent moment, which revives the ‘multiple selves’ theme.

The sun dappling the leaves gave everything a curious look of insubstantiality as if it were broken into separate points of light. He too, himself, seemed dispersed. His mind for a moment was a blank. (p.230)

He’s accompanying Sara to meet her sister, Maggie – who’s gotten married (to René, a Frenchman) and recently had a baby – at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. I like reading about London because I myself stroll around these places; only a few months ago I went to an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery then strolled along to the Round Pond then down to Kensington High Street where I popped into the Japan House. So all these London placenames aren’t vague abstractions but places where I myself have walked and strolled at different seasons, following in the footsteps of so many of Woolf’s characters.

Sara and the baby fall asleep and Martin finally gets to tell Maggie that his father had a mistress. It seems so silly and petty now, that he bothered to hide it. But this leads him on to ask Maggie if she thinks her mother, Eugénie, was in love with his father, the Colonel, her brother-in-law.

I know there are many readers for whom love – who in a novel is in love with whom, and who having affairs with whom, who is being unfaithful etc etc – is a subject of inexhaustible interest. For me it is a subject of ineffable boredom. But at the same time, I have to accept that this narrow, dull subject – the love lives of the bourgeoisie – is what this art form, the novel, is more often than not about.

Sara wakes up and breaks the odd intimacy he and Maggie had enjoyed. He leaves the sisters. A few hours later he’s wearing evening dress and riding in a carriage to a party in Grosvenor Square. It is hosted by Kitty, Lady Lasswade. It is dazzling how utterly indifferent Woolf is to dialogue. Martin is assigned a young women, Ann Hillier, to escort for the evening (to dinner) and their conversation is quite dazzling in its dullness and banality. One page of dialogue by Oscar Wilde outshines all the conversations in every novel Woolf ever wrote. She has a very poor sense of the difference between people. All her characters have the same dreamy inconsequentiality.

Kitty takes a train to her castle in the north

To our surprise Kitty is impatient for her guests to leave because, as soon they do (soon after 11pm) she rushes upstairs, gets changed into the clothes her maid has laid out, runs downstairs and into the car which the chauffeur drives fast to the station (Euston? King’s Cross?) and she just makes it onto her train, is shown to her sleeper compartment, undresses, lies in the narrow bed and sleeps.

Kitty wakes the next morning, looks out the train window, arrives in a northern station, alights with her bags, is collected by another chauffeur (in the new car) and is driven to the family castle, where she changes for breakfast.

This is an unusual bit of energy and excitement for a Woolf novel, but also serves to highlight the complete absence of plot. She is, after all, just travelling from her London home to the family castle in the North. The entire novel is the record of its half a dozen posh characters coming and going. This sequence is notable because it’s a rare passage set outside London, so Woolf shows off with a description of a train journey and the colder, harder landscape of the North.

1917. Eleanor goes to dinner with Renny and Maggie, there’s an air raid (20 pages)

A very cold winter’s night, so silent that the air seemed frozen, and, since there was no moon, congealed to the stillness of glass spread over England…

Eleanor goes to dinner with Renny and Maggie who have fled France to live in a shabby house in one of the obscure little streets under the shadow of the Abbey. Here she is introduced to a dark foreigner, Nicholas, talkative and philosophical.

Then Maggie’s sister, Sara arrives. Sara has always been portrayed as on the edge of madness, and she infects this dinner party with a kind of delirium. The characters talk and mention things but it’s hard to make sense of the conversation, it seems more a series of random observations. They argue but it’s hard to know what about.

This inconsequential conversation is interrupted by a German air raid. They all go down to the damp cellar while the sound of bombs gets slowly, closer, is overhead, then passes on.

Back in the living room, the meandering conversation turns to Nicholas and Eleanor talking vaguely about the future, about whether there will be a better world.

When, she wanted to ask him, when will this new world come? When shall we be free? When shall we live adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave?

But Sara pours cold water on all this by pointing out the way that people always say the same thing: Nicolas always says ‘Oh, my dear friends, let us improve the soul!’, Eleanor agrees with everything, Maggie says nothing just sits and darns a sock, and Renny angrily says ‘What damned rot!’

Sara surprises the reader by saying Nicholas is gay. To be precise, she jokes that he ought to be in prison:

‘Because he loves,’ Sara explained. She paused. ‘—the other sex, the other sex, you see.’

Eleanor feels a moment of repulsion and then realises it doesn’t matter, at all. She likes him. She reacts like so many Woolf characters do, in so many situations, by going to the window and looking soulfully out.

She got up. She went to the window and parted the curtains and looked out. All the houses were still curtained. (p.284)

1918. Crosby and the armistice (3 pages)

A veil of mist covered the November sky; a many folded veil, so fine-meshed that it made one density. It was not raining, but here and there the mist condensed on the surface into dampness and made pavements greasy…

The last four years have aged old Crosby, the Pargiter family servant. She talks to herself, grumbling and complaining about the other occupants of the house near Richmond Green, especially a Belgian refugee from the war who calls himself a count and spits on the side of the bath, which Crosby has to clean up.

She hears guns bombing and a siren wailing. Woolf in her Woolfian way, tells us what Crosby sees, a man up a ladder painting windows, a woman walking by carrying a loaf of bread wrapped in paper. Someone in a shop queue tells her the war is over.

This is a classic example of Woolf’s technique of indirection and disassociation which can be interpreted in several ways.

1. Modernism: modernism was all about rejecting Victorian pomp and circumstance and addressing a subject in an obvious and relatable way; instead tackling everything obliquely and ironically.
2. Woolfian dissociation: in all her mature novels, characters tend to be dissociated and detached from events, even ones directly affecting them. How much more detached they are from supposedly big public events. Compare and contrast the oblique way King Edward VII’s death, though Kitty’s visit to the opera.
3. Woolfian feminism: the complete indifference of a muttering old lady to the Armistice exemplifies my reading of Three Guineas, which is centrally concerned with the question How to avoid war, and drips with mocking sarcasm about men’s obsession with competition, priority, hierarchy and status which she sees as one of the roots of war. Muttering old Crosby doesn’t give a monkeys about your war or peace or politics or diplomacy and maybe she is right to do so.

Present day (123 pages)

It was a summer evening; the sun was setting; the sky was blue still, but tinged with gold, as if a thin veil of gauze hung over it, and here and there in the gold-blue amplitude an island of cloud lay suspended…

As explained, each section opens with a description of the time of year and weather which largely sets the tone for what follows. As you can see this, the longest, section, opens with an image of mellow contentment, high summer gold, a thin veil, an island of cloud etc. So what’s become of our characters? And when is the present day?

Eleanor back from India, North back from Africa

Eleanor has just returned from a trip to India, brown skinned and white haired. She now in her 70s. She’s just had visitors at her little flat, including her nephew North, son of her brother Morris. North is back from years ‘in Africa’. (Characteristically, the narrative doesn’t tell us what he was doing there. We have to deduce from scattered references that he was a farmer and now he’s sold the farm.)

Eleanor shows North her jazzy new shower. He drives off in his nifty little sports car. He’s going for lunch with Sara, his aunt, now in her 50s i.e. 20 years or so older than him. He parks in a dingy street and has the characteristic Woolf experience of forgetting who he is or what he’s doing:

He mounted slowly and stood on the landing, uncertain which door to knock at. He was always finding himself now outside the doors of strange houses. He had a feeling that he was no one and nowhere in particular…

He knocks and enters Sara’s dingy house:

‘And you—’ she said, looking at him. It was as if she were trying to put two different versions of him together; the one on the telephone perhaps and the one on the chair. Or was there some other? This half knowing people, this half being known, this feeling of the eye on the flesh, like a fly crawling—how uncomfortable it was, he thought…

The uncomfortableness of being observed reminds me of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novels.

She’s on the phone to a man he met at Eleanor’s, the philosophical foreigner we first met in the previous chapter, ‘that very talkative man, her friend Nicholas Pomjalovsky, whom they called Brown for short.’ He is meant to be a great intellectual but the grandest thing he’s said, so momentous it’s repeated several times, is: ‘if we don’t know ourselves how can we know other people,’ which feels mundane and limp.

Come down in the world

A serving girl serves them undercooked mutton which bleeds. A theme in the last few chapters is how all the Pargiter siblings have come down in the world compared to the grand family home they lived in as children, paralleled by the warm Digby household at Browne. The children of both houses find themselves, in the modern world, living in dingy houses and pokey flats. Only their cousin Kitty Malone has done well for herself, marrying Lord Lasswell.

North and Sara have a dingy dinner, but the thing about their encounter is its staginess: he seems to be egging her on to perform her lines rather than have a conversation. Only from the notes did I learn that they were actually reading from a play.

Eleanor rings. She’s having dinner with her niece Peggy. Thus, by phone, two pairs of this extended family communicate. In their part of the narrative, Peggy thinks how old and forgetful Eleanor’s become but then we know she’s always been vague and easily distracted.

Eleanor loves hot water and electric lights but is not so keen on motor cars – one nearly ran her over the other day – and hates the wireless.

Eleanor sees a newspaper with the face of one of the dictators on it, Hitler or Mussolini, and swears and tears it in half, to the shock of her niece. The pair catch a cab to her sister, Delia’s house, who’s having a party. Which is an opportunity for Woolf to slip in a description of travelling into central London, Oxford Street by night etc.

Cut back to North and Sara reading this play, him egging her on to read her lines. I didn’t realise they were reading a play because Sara’s always been a bit cracked, much given to randomly (mis)quoting poems and plays.

Cut back to Eleanor and Peggy arriving at Delia’s party.

Cut back to North with Sara. Again they are creating a kind of joint fantasy, describing living on a desert island, when they’re interrupted by the arrival of Sara’s sister, Maggie, and her husband Renny. They’re all going to Delia’s party.

Cue Maggie, Miss Margaret Pargiter, being announced at the party and going to sit with deaf old Uncle Patrick, Delia’s husband.

The big party scene

I’ve seen commentary to the effect that this big long party scene is a sort of reprise of the big party which ends Mrs Dalloway, and to some extent of the big warm family meal at the end of part 1 of To The Lighthouse, with the implication of themes and variations across her career. What I take from it is how very little Woolf has to offer in terms of incident or plot. Characters wander round London, meeting up for lunch or dinner or attending parties, and that’s more or less it.

One way of reading her novels is as records of almost asphyxiating dullness. There was so little to do. In the real world people spend a lot of time at work, go and watch sports or take part in them, or amateur theatricals, have hobbies, tinker with their cars, go on cycling or walking holidays. Absolutely none of those worlds are in Woolf at all. Instead the trip to the opera house and Kitty’s train journey to the north are the only scenes with any life or colour in them, the only scenes outside the endless rounds of lunch and dinner, walks through the park, cab journeys here or there, the crushing mundaneness of life. I suppose the scene of the family taking shelter in the cellar during a German bombing raid in 1917 ought to be another example but somehow Woolf manages to downplay the danger, focus on the characters’ trivial conversations and make it sound very run-of-the-mill

So the climax of this long novel is this party at which various Pargiter relatives meet up and chat. It’s as excruciatingly boring as the kind of family do’s I had to go to as a boy. I wanted to run a mile from the feelings of claustrophobia, embarrassment and boredom, only leavened by the occasional nice conversation or moment of connection with a random relative. So why would I want to read 130 pages of characters expressing pretty much the same negative feelings? Although it’s the longest, it’s by far the worst chapter in the book and the only one which felt like a chore to read.

Facts: Rose is now ‘stout’ and deaf. Peggy is a doctor which is mentioned everso casually but, from the Three Guineas perspective, is a massive thing, a very big deal that women of her generation were allowed to study medicine at university, qualify and practice as doctors. Yet it is slipped very casually into the narrative. In fact Peggy is her Uncle Martin’s physician. He’s petrified of getting cancer.

Peggy is bored or impatient and, in the archetypal Woolf gesture, looks out the window (see below) and sees Maggie, North, Renny and Sara arriving. Up they come. Points of view alternate between the perceptions of Eleanor, North and Peggy who all experience more or less of the classic Woolf feeling of alienation and unreality.

North is bored he is as he interacts with all the members of his family. Milly is there with his big fat husband, Hugh Gibbs. North is appalled by how married couples learn to walk and talk like each other.

Eleanor falls asleep, then wakes up feeling rejuvenated, feeling that ‘life has been a perpetual discovery, my life, a miracle.’ She doesn’t want North to go back to Africa. He tells them he made four or five thousand from the sale of his farm.

Someone puts a record on the gramophone, they move the carpet out of the way and the young people dance. Peggy, finding herself marooned by the bookshelves, plucks a book at random. Eleanor calls her over and asks her, as a doctor, what dreams mean. Maggie and Renny appear and Eleanor candidly says that if she’d been younger she would have fallen in love with him.

Eleanor insists she is happy but Peggy, characteristically hard and pessimistic, wonders how anyone can be happy in such a world of poverty, depression, mass unemployment and the threat of war. Then again, she wishes she could just stop thinking all the time. Oh for a life of dreams. The conversation stumbles awkwardly and without wishing to, she finds herself being quite critical of her brother, North, critical of him writing book after book instead of ‘living’.

The moment is eclipsed when Aunt Milly appears, telling them everyone’s going downstairs to eat. Kitty, Lady Lasswade appears in the doorway looking majestic. North takes an instant dislike to her. She is widowed now. Everyone heads downstairs. North and Peggy recall childhood exploits but it’s to paper over the fact they now feel very antagonistic to each other.

Delia makes a big deal about getting spoons for everyone to eat the soup. We see inside her head and how she’s always loved bringing people together at parties like this. This is exactly the thinking of Mrs Dalloway, supervising her party.

North finds himself bunched up with Lady Lasswade and Uncle Patrick (husband of Delia who’s hosting the party). They all wonder why he came back from Africa and for the umpteenth time he explains that he’d had enough. The conversation drifts onto the threadbare topic of whether the present is better than the old days. Old Patrick thinks everything’s gone to the dogs, specially in Ireland where he’s from. Kitty on the other hand, welcomes women’s liberation; she remembers the old days when women weren’t allowed to do anything.

Delia lets North escape her pontificating husband but where to? He’s been out the country, he knows nobody. Woolf gives him the latest of several passages where she gently despises the young men of today (the 1930s) obsessed with talking politics but really just saying ‘I, I, I’.

He bumps into Edward, the thin, dried-out scholar of Sophocles. North feels like he’s being interviewed by the headmaster, when Eleanor, that ‘impulsive, foolish old woman’, calls them over. North admires the way the old brother and sister are at ease with each other, and Edward’s grace and precision.

Nicholas thumps a fork on the table to make a speech, which brings Rose to his side to support him but Martin mocks her and Eleanor intervenes, telling them to stop arguing. it takes a while for this family welter to die down and Nicholas to have another go at a drunken speech but they interrupt him again.

‘How can one speak when one is always interrupted?’ (p.404)

That’s what I always dislike about big family do’s, everyone interrupts everyone else so that nothing is ever finished. But this, arguably, is what the book is all about, all of Woolf’s books, maybe: about interruptions and things never completed, about absences and things that might have been, wistful dreamy memories and perceptions of people and events which always escape our understanding.

And so it is here, with the other siblings over-riding Nicholas who abandons his attempt, and the others toast Rose for having the courage of her convictions, smashing a window for the suffragettes and going to prison.

The music starts up in the room above and all the young people head upstairs, leaving the ruck of the Pargiter family to carry on remembering, blundering, talking at cross-purposes. According to the notes, one of the working titles for the novel was ‘Here and Now’, and here on the last few pages Eleanor has thoughts which use that phrase and would, in that case, have been the clear statement of its meaning. Here brother Edward says something to her nephew North but the end of his sentence is masked by someone else laughing and she is a little frustrated. Life is always like that.

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves. We’re only just beginning, she thought, to understand, here and there. She hollowed her hands in her lap, just as Rose had hollowed hers round her ears. She held her hands hollowed; she felt that she wanted to enclose the present moment; to make it stay; to fill it fuller and fuller, with the past, the present and the future, until it shone, whole, bright, deep with understanding. (p.406)

Then something weird happens. It’s very late, in fact the sky is lightening for dawn, when Delia brings two small shy children into the room. She cuts them slices of cake. they are the caretakers’ children. Martin offers them sixpence to sing and if Woolf were fully sentimental, they’d sing some reassuring children’s song to round off this book of creams. But instead they sing in unison incomprehensible words in a tuneless screech. The dysjunction between their sweet innocent appearance and the horrible screech which comes out of their ears appals the middle-class listeners. Martin gives them their sixpences and off they toddle, leaving the Pargiter family, and the reader, perplexed.

Dawn is coming. In Woolf’s characteristic gesture, Delia steps to the window and opens the curtains. The party is over. Nicholas asks Maggie to wake her sister, Sara, and as Sara wakes, she has a monetary vision, of the Pargiter siblings all gathered in the window like a frieze.

‘How strange,’ she murmured, looking round heir, ‘…how strange…’
There were the smeared plates, and the empty wine-glasses; the petals and the bread crumbs. In the mixture of lights they looked prosaic but unreal; cadaverous but brilliant. And there against the window, gathered in a group, were the old brothers and sisters.
‘Look, Maggie,’ she whispered, turning to her sister, ‘Look!’ She pointed at the Pargiters, standing in the window.
The group in the window, the men in their black-and-white evening dress, the women in their crimsons, golds and silvers, wore a statuesque air for a moment, as if they were carved in stone. Their dresses fell in stiff sculptured folds. Then they moved; they changed their attitudes; they began to talk. (p.411)

For the most part Woolf eschews obvious symbolism so this feels like an unusually overt move, it feels fittingly beautiful, consciously beautiful, a very beautiful, understated and realistic climax to this long lovely novel. The siblings offer each other lifts and remember the last time they parties till dawn and so amid friendly chat and memories, the novel sweetly and beautifully ends.

Now it was summer. The sky was a faint blue; the roofs were tinged purple against the blue; the chimneys were a pure brick red. An air of ethereal calm and simplicity lay over everything.

Family members

Pargiter family

Live in Abercorn Terrace.

Colonel Pargiter is married to Rose, Mrs Pargiter, who has a long-term illness then dies.

• Eleanor, remains single
• Morris, becomes a barrister, marries Celia Chinnery, has three children:
  • North
  • Peggy
  • Charles (who we never see, is mentioned once as having died in the war)
• Milly, marries Edward’s university friend Gibbs
• Delia, marries Patrick, hosts the party in the final chapter
• Edward, remains single, turns into a silver-haired, dignified Classics don
• Martin
• Rose, the activist suffragette who goes to prison for her views and ages into a stout spinster

Digby family

Live in Browne Street.

Sir Digby Pargiter is the Colonel’s younger brother. He is married to the beautiful Eugénie — which makes them Uncle Digby and Aunt Eugénie to the Colonel’s children.

• Magdalena (Maggie) marries the Frenchman René
• Sara (Sally) becomes increasingly eccentric

Malone family

They are related because Kitty is a cousin of Edward’s, though I can’t figure out whether on her mother or father’s side. They live at the Lodge of an Oxford college.

• Kitty Malone – marries the wealthy Lord Lasswade, becoming mistress of both his swanky London house, where she hosts a party, and his castle in the north

Seeing life through a window

My only contribution to Virginia Woolf scholarship would be to point out how regularly her characters stare out of windows, day-dreaming, or observing people in the street, avoiding dialogue and interaction with other people in the room, retreating to their own little worlds. I’ll be publishing a blog post on the subject.

Disassociation

Forever seeing life through windows is one example of the way the entire narrative, long though it is, feels beautifully detached from real life. Women in Woolf are not only – as she furiously points out in Three Guineas – legally and financially debarred from the wide world of the professions, of the British Empire, trade, finance, industry, and from the whole world of work – they are temperamentally or psychologically detached too.

At all the dinners and set-piece conversations (posh dinner at Lady Lasswade’s, dinner at Digby and Celia’s in Wittering, the cheap meal at Maggie and Renny’s) the female protagonist starts off by paying attention to the conversation but soon loses interest, loses track, drifts away, focusing on irrelevant details of the cutlery or the furnishings or what people are wearing, drifting off into a world of their own.

He [Morris the lawyer] looked clean, he looked starched and ironed like his robes. But what did he mean by what he was saying? She [Delia] gave it up. Either one understood or one did not understand, she thought. Her mind wandered…

Or, in the final chapter, Peggy the doctor, a bit more aggressively:

Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wished that there were blinds like those in railway carriages that came down over the light and hooded the mind. The blue blind that one pulls down on a night journey, she thought. Thinking was torment; why not give up thinking, and drift and dream?… I will not think, she repeated; she would force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came… She did not want to move, or to speak. She wanted to rest, to lean, to dream.

‘She wanted to dream.’ A Virginia Woolf novel is like a beautiful, lyrical, dreamy painting of the world with almost everything which makes up the real world – all the work and effort, the organisations, the companies, trade and labour, the practicalities and the hard thinking – taken out, excised, surgically removed – to leave a dream world through which her sensitive heroines waft in their long, trailing Victorian dresses.

The effect is very restful. The equanimity of Woolf’s calm, lyrical style, the lack of modernist tricks and tactics, the absence of any events liable to worry or disturb the reader, the absence of any plot and the deep sense of the whole thing being a beautiful dream, makes this by far the most readable and enjoyable of the six Woolf novels I’ve read.

Credit

‘The Years’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1937. Page references are to the 2004 Oxford Classics paperback edition, although the text is easily available online.

Related links

• The Years online
• The Virginia Woolf Society

Related reviews

• Virginia Woolf reviews
• 1930s reviews