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The Years

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About this listen

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.

Finalist for the 2007 Audie Award for Classics.

©2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)1965 Leonard Woolf Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Marriage War
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Excellent performance and captures the different moods and characters very well. Four more words required

The Years

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Virginia Woolf and her unique observations, does require a more ‘poetic’ voice, perhaps?
This voice too thin, lost some of the delicious timing, and humour, after all it is for listening,
Nice to have another VW though, more please, Juliet Stevenson ? Alex Jennings?

Perhaps a different reader?

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It is a shame Woolf's magnificent writing should be butchered by appalling narrating. The reading is too fast, as if she is reading a shopping list. Her voice is too harsh. There is no emotion, no understanding of the text or rhythm. I wish Juliet Stevenson would have narrated this one as she so brilliantly did another Woolf's book.

An unfortunate choice of narrator

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While I have finished listening to the main text, I have yet to read Woolf’s essays on the Pargiter essays, written at roughly the same time (1937). I find The Yeats a remarkably complex and compelling novel and look forward to reading it again. I recommend it to anyone in search of another novel by Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf, The Years.

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lovely as usual. such insight into people's thoughts. it doesn't age and gives us a window onto that time.

timeless insight

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