Virginia Woolf, The Years (1937)

Virginia Woolf Season
Anna Snaith, Lecture on The Years (1937), 2 May 2021

Blog by Lisa Hutchins

The Years (1937) may be more than 70 years old and one of Virginia Woolf's lesser-known works, but its relevance to today's circumstances is so great that it retains the power to shock the reader. This argument was made by Professor Anna Snaith in her lecture on The Years in Literature Cambridge's first Woolf season.

Anna, Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at King’s College London and editor of the Cambridge University Press scholarly edition of The Years, identified several concerns that resonate with a 21st-century audience. Woolf was a survivor of the 1919 flu pandemic, a writer powerfully concerned with violence against women, colonial and imperialist narratives, and a critic of the patriarchal family. After exploring the novel's complex and extended composition and editing process, Anna discussed scenes with particularly strong resonances.

She described The Years as the novel by Woolf that is most embedded in the history and politics of its time, as well as one of her most commercially successful. It is sometimes viewed as a return to realism, a genre Woolf had not particularly embraced since writing Night and Day in 1919. However, The Years is highly experimental in form, inviting parallels with other works: Orlando depicts how we understand the passage of time, The Waves examines consciousness across time, through weather and the cycle of the seasons, and Mrs Dalloway expresses anti-colonialist sentiments. A theme of this season has been how intensely concerned Woolf was with the discipline of writing lives, and Anna suggested that The Years can be understood as the biography of a family, an unusual literary construction.

Anna examined two scenes in detail. Delia, a daughter of the Pargiter family, sits at the bedside of her dying mother:

She longed for her to die. There she was – soft, decayed but everlasting, lying in the cleft of the pillows, an obstacle, a prevention, an impediment to all life […] There was the other scene of course – the man in the frock coat with the flower in his button hole. But she had sworn not to think of that till bedtime […] "Wearing a white flower in his button-hole," she began. It required a few minutes' preparation. There must be a hall; banks of palms; a floor beneath them crowded with people's heads. The charm was beginning to work. She became permeated with delicious starts of flattering and exciting emotion. She was on the platform; there was a huge audience; everybody was shouting, waving handkerchiefs, hissing and whistling. Then she stood up. She rose all in white in the middle of the platform; Mr Parnell was by her side.

(The Years, 1880 section)

The passage refers to Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the movement for Irish Home Rule. Anna highlighted how Woolf intertwines feminism and anti-colonialism, drawing parallels between unruly daughters determined to lead their own independent lives and unruly states. Delia has no personal connection with Ireland or its struggle for national self-determination, yet she identifies passionately (almost erotically) with the cause, as it speaks to her own sense of oppression as a woman facing barriers to determining her own fate.

The second features Delia's youngest sister, Rose, who is still a child. She wishes to make a late visit to a shop and is told her brother Martin must accompany her. However, they quarrel and she goes alone:

She was riding by night on a desperate mission to a besieged garrison, she told herself. She had a secret message – she clenched her fist on her purse – to deliver to the General in person. All their lives depended on it. The British flag was flying in the central tower […] As she ran past the pillar-box the figure of a man suddenly emerged under the gas lamp.

‘The enemy!’ Rose cried to herself. ‘The enemy! Bang!’ she cried, pulling the trigger of her pistol and looking him full in the face as she passed him. It was a horrid face: white, peeled, pockmarked; he leered at her. He put out his arm as if to stop her. He almost caught her […] He was leaning with his back against the lamp-post, and the light from the gas lamp flickered over his face. As she passed he sucked his lips in and out. He made a mewing noise. But he did not stretch his hands out at her; they were unbuttoning his clothes.

(The Years, 1880 section)

Rose is on her way out; she must return, must push past the perpetrator of this indecent act to get safely home. She is scarred by the encounter, suffering from nightmares and the inability to tell an older sister, who intuits that she is suffering, what is wrong. Later she will harm herself by cutting her wrist to incur a physical scar. Woolf was the recipient of unwanted sexual advances at a young age and she noted in her diary that she had taken a few hours away from the text after completing this scene. Hyde Park Gate, where her parents lived, was the known haunt of a real-life individual who behaved similarly.

In the novel, Rose will go on to be a suffragette and be force-fed, further demonstrating how political and personal freedoms are intertwined. As well as examining the constellation of uncomfortable emotions that surround this event, Anna discussed the language that Rose uses with its echoes of colonial adventure tales and its positioning of this young girl in an active, heroic role that would not be envisaged for her according to Victorian social conventions.

The depictions of the predatory exploitation of a young girl alone outdoors, and the traumatic outcome when she speaks up for her rights, have a powerful contemporary resonance. In this, as in so many other ways, this remarkable novel speaks to us across the gulf of years.

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Anna Snaith edited The Years for the Cambridge University Press Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf (2012). She has also written Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London 1890-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize.

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Claire Davison will lecture on music in Three Guineas on Saturday 8 May, and Claudia Tobin will repeat her lecture on art in To The Lighthouse on Sunday 16 May 16. Additionally, Ildiko Csengei will lecture on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein on Saturday 22 May 2021.