The Years

The Years was Virginia Woolf′s most commercially successful novel, topping the American best–seller list for weeks. It takes the form of a seemingly conventional family saga, but it is in fact a tightly organized meditation on the class system, feminism, politics, imperialism, and war.

This important new edition adopts the text of the first British edition of the novel, published in London on March 15, 1937. A comprehensive introduction details the lengthy process of the composition and revision of the novel (it was envisaged at the outset as an essay on the professional lives of women, revised into an "Essay–Novel called the Pargiters," and underwent many further significant changes – some at the very last moment), and its subsequent publication history. The extensive explanatory notes highlight the political, historical, social, and literary contexts of the novel, while the variants between the first British and American editions, as well as the editorial emendations made in this present edition, are listed in an appendix.

Abbreviations.

Introduction.

TEXT.

Explanatory Notes.

Appendix: Textual Variants and Emendations.

David Bradshaw is Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and Hawthornden Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Worcester College, Oxford. Among other volumes, he has edited Woolf′s The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf, The Concise Companion to Modernism (Wiley–Blackwell, 2003), and A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (with Kevin J. H. Dettmar; Wiley–Blackwell, 2006). His Shakespeare Head Press edition of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (co edited with Stuart N. Clarke) is forthcoming.

Ian Blyth is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of English, University of St Andrews. He is the co–editor of a forthcoming edition of Woolf’s Orlando and the author of various articles on Woolf and other subjects.

"Scholars such as David Bradshaw and Ian Blyth remind us that The Years is so much more than just a family saga, and to them we must be grateful for their shared insights."
Virginia Woolf Bulletin (May 2013)