The Years

Reviews

“Lovely though The Waves was, The Years goes far beyond and beyond it—expressing Woolf’s purpose in the novel more richly than it has ever been done before.”

“Inspired throughout—a brilliant fantasia of all time’s problems, age and youth, change and permanence, truth and illusion.”

“It would be impossible to overpraise the beauty of Mrs. Woolf’s prose in The Years. There is, to my mind, an immense advance from the wild, disjoined poetry of Orlando or Flush, a greater gravity, a ripeness and richness and warmth in the descriptive passages which she has achieved nowhere else…The Years is the finest novel she has ever written.”

“An astonishing editorial achievement.”

“Finty Williams’s bright, lively voice immediately engages listeners in Virginia Woolf’s 1937 novel. Beginning in 1880, the story chronicles fifty years in the life of the Pargiter family yet doesn’t actually sustain a narrative line. It is more a series of lively vignettes, significant events, memories, and sensations. Of course, Woolf’s feminism and social consciousness are ever present, but even more prevalent in this work is her awareness of the remorseless passage of time. While the novel is fascinating as much for its omissions as for its artful prose and character sketches, it is Finty Williams’s performance, her intensity and believable characterizations, that will keep listeners glued to their headsets.”

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