User:Dybryd/Sandbox/Woolf

in Woolf's Diary

"This fiction is dangerously near propaganda" - 14 April 1935

"The book may be damned with faint praise; but the point is that I myself why its a failure, and that its failure is deliberate." - 7 March 1937

"...when I think of the agony I went through in this room, just over a year ago...when it dawned on me that the whole of 3 years work was a complete failure: & then when I think of the mornings here when I used to stumble out and cut up those proofs & write 3 lines, & then go back & lie on my bed - the worst summer in my life, but at the same time the most illuminating - its no wonder that my hand trembles. What most pleases me tho', is the obvious chance now since de Selincourt sees it, that my intention in The Years may be not so entirely muted and obscured as I feared. The TLS spoke as if it were mere the death song of the middle classes: a series of exquisite impressions; but he sees that it is a creative, a constructive book. [...] & this means that 3 Gs. will strike very sharp and clear on a hot iron: so that my immensely careful planning won't be baulked by time of life & c." - 14 March 1937

"Much of The Years is very feeble - for example the scene in the college still makes me blush." - date? same as above? forgot to note.

Calls The Years and Three Guineas "one book" - June 1938

Development

The novel had its inception in a lecture Woolf made in January 1931 before the National Society for Women's Service. The day before giving the lecture she wrote in her diary, "I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entire new book - a sequel to A Room of One's Own - about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps - Lord how exciting! This sprang out of my paper to be read on Wednesday...."

The book was not mentioned again until July of the following year, when her diary records that she was "sleeping over a promising novel." The entry gives no details of this novel, but discusses Joseph Wright, the subject of

However, soon after beginning the planned essays she had the idea of adding a series of fictional illustrations to them. She conceived the original form of a "novel-essay" in which each essay would be followed by a novelistic passage--presented as extracts from an imaginary longer novel--which would examplify the ideas explored in the essay. She called the book The Pargiters.

Between in October and December of 1932, Woolf wrote six essays and their accompanying fictional "extracts" for The Pargiters. But in February of 1933 Woolf jettisoned the theoretical framework of her "novel-essay" and began to rework the book as pure fiction. Some of the analytic material deleted in transforming the book into The Years eventually made its way into the book of essays Woolf published in 1938, Three Guineas. In 1977 a transcription of the original draft of six essays and extracts--together with the speech that first inspired them--was published under the title The Pargiters, edited by Mitchell Leaska.

Woolf struggled with composition of The Years, taking longer to complete it than any of her previous novels, and unlike most of her work refusing to let her husband and co-publisher Leonard see the manuscript before the book was printed. She also cut a great deal from the novel soon before completion: the galley proofs were about 600 pages, the first published edition only 472.

Reception and criticism

"Throughout the published text of The Years, we come across splinters of memory, fragments of speech, titles of quoted passages left unnamed or forgotten, lines of poetry or nursery rhymes left dangling in mid-air, understanding between characters incomplete, and utterances missing the mark and misunderstood. In one sense, the novel eloquently communicates the failure of communication." -- Mitchell Leaska, intro to The Pargiters

"In The Years as in Night and Day she deserts poetry, and again she fails" -- E.M. Forster

"Mrs. Woolf's work seems to lack the spring and surge of true creation [...] all the characters [...] are muffled and hid from the reader by the author's cultured but petrifying observation." - John Brophy in the Daily Telegraph (VW commented in her diary "The communist press began its little snigger yesterday.")

In the New York Times Peter Monro Jack wrote:

this is a long-drawn-out lyricism in the form of a novel, with flying buttresses to sustain its airy and often absent-minded inspirations. There is the minimum of substructure. But there is everywhere, on one lovely page after another, a kind of writing which reveals a kind of feeling that is more illuminating than a dozen well-made and documented novels. Mrs. Woolf has made, or unmade, her novel in the form of a poem or a piece of music.[1]

Literary Encyclopedia:

Woolf wrote The Years in the face of the escalating political crisis in Europe which would lead to the outbreak of World War II two years later: Hitler was making military advances on the continent, Fascism was on the ascendant in Spain and Germany, and Nazism and anti-semitism were spreading. But, as Woolf shows in The Years, and also in Three Guineas, the feminist, pacifist and anti-Fascist essay she began while finishing the novel in 1936, these ideologies were not confined to continental Europe and the present, but had also operated within the private home for many years.

Writing this novel was a long and difficult process for Woolf: it took five years to complete and the six-year interval since her previous novel, The Waves, was the longest in her career. The strain of writing the novel was such that Woolf suffered a nervous breakdown while completing it. As well as grappling with pressing issues, Woolf also faced difficulties with form and genre. The idea for the novel arose from a talk on “Professions for Women”, and this evolved into an idea of an “Essay-Novel called the Pargiters” which was “to take in everything, sex, education, life &c; & come, with the most powerful & agile leaps, like a chamois across precipices from 1880 to here & now” 1. The first drafts consisted of alternating portions of fiction and essay, but Woolf removed the latter after a few months, believing that they came too close to propaganda. (Some of this material eventually made its way into Three Guineas and the essays themselves have been published in recent years.) During the re-drafting process, Woolf tried out several different titles and wrote a vast amount of material which she had to edit down drastically, including removing “two enormous chunks” of text from the proofs 2. These difficulties notwithstanding, The Years was generally well received and sold well, although the social and political dimensions of the novel have only attracted serious critical attention in recent years, following the publication of the deleted material.

Citation: Jane de Gay, Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds. "The Years." The Literary Encyclopedia. 31 Oct. 2005. The Literary Dictionary Company. 15 October 2006. <http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8243>

the statue of Edith Cavell in Trafalgar Square, and the inscription is "Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone."

Characters

• Colonel Pargiter: 1880, 1891 (but lives through 1910)
• Mrs. Rose Pargiter: 1880
  • Eleanor:
  • Morris:
    • North
    • Peggy
    • Charles, dies in WWI
  • Edward
  • Delia: 1880, Present Day (significant mention in 1891)
  • Milly: 1880, 1891, Present Day
  • Martin
  • Rose

• Sir Digby Pargiter: 1891, 1907
• Lady Eugenie Pargiter: 1891, 1907
  • Sara (Sally) Pargiter: 1891, 1907, 1914, 1917, Present Day
  • Maggie Pargiter

• Kitty Lasswade, nee Malone: 1880, 1891,

• Crosby - Colonel Pargiter's housekeeper