The Years | Thornfield Hall

It began with To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway – rapture! – and A Room of One’s Own. And then I read Virginia Woolf’s other novels and essays, the diaries (still in progress), and Leonard Woolf’s six-volume autobiography.

But why had I not heard of The Years? The critics apparently hated it. Susan Hill attacks the critics in her introduction to the Vintage edition of The Years: “Open any of their books to see it dismissed in a few lines, accounted patchy at best, a poor thing, disappointing – though patronizingly, they often imply that it needn’t matter – even the greatest writers have off-days.”

I was very lucky a few years ago to come across this Vintage edition in a bookstore, because, as I said, I had never heard of it. Oddly, it has become my favorite of Woolf’s novels. And the Vintage has not one but two introductions, one by Susan Hill and the other by Steven Connor.

Published in 1937, The Years is more fluid and insightful even than her masterpieces of the 1920s. It is an ambitious family saga, as absorbing as The Forsyte Saga, only written in Woolf’s running style, poetic, flowing, fragmented, whimsical, describing brass tea kettles and Picadilly with equal verve. Told from multiple points-of-view, it charts the lives of three generations of the Pargiter family, from 1880 to the late 1930s.

The ideal introduction to The Years would be nonverbal: a family tree. Dozens of characters appear, disappear, and reappear at different stages, most coming together in the end at a family party.

But I am fondest of the Abercorn Terrace Pargiters, the bristly Colonel Pargiter and his wary family. At the center is his daughter Eleanor, a kind, distracted young woman who manages the household while her mother is dying. She also does charity work and more or less keeps track of her siblings, the youngest of whom, Rose, is seven or eight. There are many comic scenes where Eleanor does the accounts. She wonders aloud: what is eight times eight?

Like Eleanor’s multiplication, the offspring of the branches of the family are multitudinous. There are cousins, aunts, uncles, parents, widows, spinsters, housewives, Victorians, Edwardians, and more. Eleanor is our rock: she stays with her father at Abercorn Terrace until he dies. And then she is free. In her seventies, she joyfully travels to India.

A profession cannot define Virginia Woolf’s characters, but it may give you an idea of the broad spectrum of their interests: Eleanor’s brother Edward teaches at Oxford, their sister Rose becomes a suffragette (and goes to jail), kind cousin Kitty from Oxford becomes Lady Lassdale, and Sara, a whimsical single woman, lives in a flat in a slum and spends most of her time with her best friend, a gay man (whom many think she should marry, despite his sexuality, because of their close friendship).

At the party at the end of the novel, we can see that the third generation is different, though. Why are they so wretched? What does this represent? Peggy, a bitter doctor, hates the uselessness of the human race, the constant marriages and reproduction, even the repetitive conversation. The women of the earlier generations lacked her educational opportunities, but that does not matter: she dislikes them and is, strangely, the unhappiest person in the room. Her brother, North, a war veteran and poet-farmer, just home from Africa, is also estranged because London does not embrace him, and his family is kind but vague. At the end of the party, he meets a girl, and that changes things. He will marry and reproduce… Peggy pulls herself together.

A significant number of women in the book are single, and they flourish, like Eleanor, who in her seventies is the life of the party. And Sara, a radical in her rather strange solitude, chooses to defy her class and llive in a noisy, poor neighborhood that is unacceptable to anyone except her bohemian sister, Maggie, who lived with her until she married.

The sentence below will show you what it is like to read The Years.

.. “The swarm of sound, the rush of traffic, the shouts of the hawkers, the single cries and the general cries, came into the upper room of the house in Hyams Place where Sara sat at the piano.”

EDITIONS: The Vintage edition with its beautiful cover and two introductions is excellent, but I also recommend the Wordsworth, which has an introduction and footnotes!!! The cover is not ideal, but it’s the content that matters.

Annie Ernaux’s exquisite book, The Years, translated from French by Alison L. Strayer, is a hybrid of memoir, autofiction, and history. I learned about The Years when it was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. There was a controversy about its eligibility: it had been classified as a personal narrative. But Bettany Hughes, chairperson of the judges, told the Guardian it was a “much-needed riposte to the ever-narrowing trajectory of auto-fiction.”

Memoir or fiction, Ernaux’s book is breathtakingly elegiac. She begins with the sentence, “All the images will disappear,” followed by a list of abbreviated descriptions: public lavatories built on a river, Scarlett O’Hara killing a soldier in Atlanta, photographs of people being deported to the camps, and “a house with an arbor of Virginia creeper, which was a hotel in the sixties, no. 90A, on the Zaterre in Venice.” But never fear, if lists are not your thing, she soon segues into a chronological narrative, the story of her life from 1940 to age 66.

This short personal narrative (240 pages) is intertwined with history, politics, and social history. Much of the book is set at holiday dinners, as Annie navigates the years of childhood, adolescence, motherhood, middle age, and old age. At the dinners, the relatives look at photos and tell stories. Ernaux describes the shortages of commodities after World War II, the national fascination with the Tour de France and the race to the moon, the rise of Elvis Presley and rock and roll, the migrations of refugees from Algeria , and the materialism that coincides with the availability of appliances and other commodities.

We get to know Annie very well over the years. She reads Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Gone with the Wind, hopes to become a writer, but becomes a teacher. She sympathizes with student protests and takes to the streets with them when she is a teacher in the late ’60s. She is too busy with work and raising children to write her book, but she thinks about how she will write it.

This is a bookish book, bearing the influence of many books: Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Gone with the Wind (Annie wants to be Scarlett O’Hara, as did my own mother), and probably many other French memoirs and novels. I also thought of Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence series, particularly the last book, The Four-Gated City, which follows Martha Quest from age 30 in post-war London, through the upheavals of the ’60s and on to a dystopian future.

The Years won the 2018 French-American Foundation Translation Prize and the 2016 Strega European Prize. I do think it should have won the Booker. I look forward to reading her other books–and if you have suggestions let me know.