The Pargiter family home in Abercorn Terrace is a replica of 22 Hyde Park Gate where Woolf grew up with her father, the Victorian biographer Leslie Stephen, her mother Julia, a former Pre-Raphaelite model, her siblings Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian and step-siblings Stella, Gerald and George Duckworth. In The Years, these silent spirits have taken flight and landed, seemingly, in Woolf’s childhood home. In the story, a ghostly couple walk hand in hand through their former home, floating from room to room and reminiscing about the past while the new owners are sleeping. In 1921, Virginia Woolf published a short story called A Haunted House, which appeared in a collection entitled Monday or Tuesday. The novel was published in 1937 and was the last to be published in Woolf’s lifetime and though, ostensibly, it concerns itself with the fortunes of the Pargiters, The Years is, at its heart, very much a ghost story. This is Woolf’s, possibly subconscious, swansong, where she bids farewell to the present through a dreamlike journey through her past. Over the course of the next few chapters we meet his children: selfless Eleanor, barrister Maurice, homely Milly, romantic Delia, academic Edward, feminist Rose and free-spirited Martin.Īt first glance, The Years appears to be a family saga worthy of Galsworthy, a radical departure from Woolf’s modernist masterpieces such as Mrs Dalloway and The Waves but as you read on it becomes apparent that the author is doing something very interesting and very different here. At the beginning we are introduced to Colonel Pargiter, his dying wife and the mistress he keeps in a dingy part of town. The Years, a novel by Virginia Woolf follows the fortunes of the Pargiters, an upper-middle class London family, from 1880 to 1937.

The pargiters