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The Years
- Author
- Virginia Woolf
- Narrator
- Finty Williams
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date
- 6 February 2018
- Run Time
- 13 hours 32 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
Written in 1937, The Years was the most popular of Virginia Woolf's novels during her lifetime. It explores a rich variety of themes such as sex, feminism, family life, education, and politics in English society from 1800 to the 1930s, as they affect one large upper-class London family.
The principal theme of this ambitious book is time, threading together three generations of the Pargiter family. The story begins on a day in 1880 in the household of Colonel Abel Pargiter, his dying wife, and their seven children, and it ends in the 1930s with a brilliantly depicted party at which the Pargiters, young and old, pass in review. Important events—births, deaths, marriages, wars—occur in the wings; it is the commonplace moments that are captured here in a sequence of perfectly drawn scenes. As the Pargiters move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the 1930s, they are weighed down by the pressures of war, capitalism, empire, and the rise of Fascism.
Critics Review
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“Lovely though The Waves was, The Years goes far beyond and beyond it—expressing Woolf’s purpose in the novel more richly than it has ever been done before.”
New York Times
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“Inspired throughout—a brilliant fantasia of all time’s problems, age and youth, change and permanence, truth and illusion.”
Times (London)
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“It would be impossible to overpraise the beauty of Mrs. Woolf’s prose in The Years. There is, to my mind, an immense advance from the wild, disjoined poetry of Orlando or Flush, a greater gravity, a ripeness and richness and warmth in the descriptive passages which she has achieved nowhere else…The Years is the finest novel she has ever written.”
New Statesman
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“An astonishing editorial achievement.”
Times Literary Supplement (London)
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“Finty Williams’s bright, lively voice immediately engages listeners in Virginia Woolf’s 1937 novel. Beginning in 1880, the story chronicles fifty years in the life of the Pargiter family yet doesn’t actually sustain a narrative line. It is more a series of lively vignettes, significant events, memories, and sensations. Of course, Woolf’s feminism and social consciousness are ever present, but even more prevalent in this work is her awareness of the remorseless passage of time. While the novel is fascinating as much for its omissions as for its artful prose and character sketches, it is Finty Williams’s performance, her intensity and believable characterizations, that will keep listeners glued to their headsets.”
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Details
- Author
- Virginia Woolf
- Narrator
- Finty Williams
- Duration
- 13 hours 32 minutes
- Release Date
- 6 February 2018
- ISBN
- 9781538483725
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Genre
- Fiction: general and literary, Classic fiction, Family life fiction, Generational sagas
Synopsis
Written in 1937, The Years was the most popular of Virginia Woolf's novels during her lifetime. It explores a rich variety of themes such as sex, feminism, family life, education, and politics in English society from 1800 to the 1930s, as they affect one large upper-class London family.The principal theme of this ambitious book is time, threading together three generations of the Pargiter family. The story begins on a day in 1880 in the household of Colonel Abel Pargiter, his dying wife, and their seven children, and it ends in the 1930s with a brilliantly depicted party at which the Pargiters, young and old, pass in review. Important events—births, deaths, marriages, wars—occur in the wings; it is the commonplace moments that are captured here in a sequence of perfectly drawn scenes. As the Pargiters move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the 1930s, they are weighed down by the pressures of war, capitalism, empire, and the rise of Fascism.
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