It was raining. A fine rain, a gentle shower, was peppering the pavements and making them greasy. Was it worth while opening an umbrella, was it necessary to hail a hansom, people coming out from the theatres asked themselves, looking up at the mild, milky sky in which the stars were blunted. Where it fell on earth, on fields and gardens, it drew up the smell of earth. Here a drop poised on a grass-blade; there filled the cup of a wild flower, till the breeze stirred and the rain was spilt. Was it worth while to shelter under the hawthorn, under the hedge, the sheep seemed to question; and the cows, already turned out in the grassy fields, under the dim hedges, munched on, sleepily chewing with raindrops on their hides. Down on the roofs it fell-here in Westminster, there in the Ladbroke Grove; on the wide sea a million points pricked the blue monster like an innumerable shower bath. Over the vast domes, the soaring spires of slumbering University cities, over the leaded libraries, and the museums, now shrouded in brown Holland, the gentle rain slid down, till, reaching the mouths of those fantastic laughers, the many-clawed gargoyles, it splayed out in a thousand odd indentations. A drunken man slipping in a narrow passage outside the public house, cursed it. Women in childbirth heard the doctor say to the midwife, "It´s raining." And the walloping Oxford bells, turning over and over like slow porpoises in a sea of oil, contemplatively intoned their musical incantations. The fine rain, the gentle rain, poured equally over the mitred and the bareheaded with an impartiality which suggested that the god of rain, if there were a god, was thinking Let it not be restricted to the very wise, the very great, but let all breathing kind, the munchers and the chewers, the ignorant, the unhappy, those who toil in the furnace making innumerable copies of the same pot, those who bore red hot minds through contorted letters, and also Mrs. Jones in the alley, share my bounty. About the Book
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 or Tolstoy´s War and Peace 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, 1911, 1914, 1917 and "The Present Day"-punctuated with large gaps of time in between. At each new juncture, the reader is left to surmise what has happened in the intervening time with little assistance from a controlling narrative presence. Although The Years is written in the third person, the novel´s narratorial "eye" roves among the point of view of different characters fluidly, and recounts the events of the past through memory and dialogue rather than through a third-person summation. Leaping over years and even decades-as the novel does-infuses it with a sense of time´s rapid, relentless movement, as the reader watches characters age significantly with the turn of a few pages.
The subject matter of The Years is also decidedly not epic, but it is what gives the novel its remarkable power. Although it does discuss what might be termed monumental events in the lives of its characters, such as the death of Mrs. Pargiter in the first chapter, the novel leaves out many events that might seem particularly noteworthy, such as the birth of a child, a courtship, or a wedding. These traditional milestones are often consigned to the blank, unnarrated stretches of time that pass between the chapters. Woolf instead focuses our attention on smaller, less self-evidently significant moments of experience: a girl writing a letter to her brother, a college student sipping a glass of port and studying ancient Greek, the goodnights exchanged after a dinner party. These tiny moments exist in a tension against the sweep of seasons, years, and lives passing in the background, and this ever-present tension is what makes the novel ultimately so disquieting and so moving. Not only does the book´s structure keep us constantly aware of the time´s march, but also many of the smaller details-the sound of cars moving in the streets, the sight of a hearth fire dying, a gust of wind and rain-subtly keep an atmosphere of change, flow, and passing defining the experience of the characters. The things that lend a sense of fixity to life, such as rank, employment, or marriage, or those things that pass for it, such as a painting, a text, or a sentimentalized object, are touchstones for Woolf as well. The discord between the desire for stasis and the inevitability of change in many ways defines the novel, and is everywhere evidenced in the very environment in which the characters live and breathe.
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