The Historical Novel at History’s End: Virginia Woolf’s The Years

Abstract

It seems as if there were no progress in human race, but only repetition. --Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) The recent surge of interest in late modernism has expanded purview of modernist studies in at least two directions: on one hand, study of late modernism addresses lesser known literary and cultural activity may not adhere to stylistic or periodizing norms of modernism or postmodernism; on other hand, it draws late works of household names such asT. S. Eliot, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf from shadows of their more lauded counterparts from teens and twenties. (1) Woolf's late fiction has been prime focus of this latter direction. In Jed Esty and Marina MacKay's foundational studies, Between Acts exemplifies formal and historical distinctiveness of late modernism. (2) But where does The fit within this broadening, vibrant field? How might this often overlooked novel also be historically and aesthetically exemplary? The has not figured heavily in history of Woolf criticism. To be sure, this hefty chronicle of Pargiter family scarcely resembles svelte, introverted novels preceded it. It lacks rapturous of To Lighthouse and hypnotic lines of The Waves; it displays little of daring characterization of Jacob's Room or Mrs. Dalloway. By comparison, The falls shy of achieving what Woolf called merger of the granite and rainbow (New 235), concrete and poetic. Indeed, Woolf herself declared it a and curiously characterized failure as deliberate (Writer 277). after its publication she would remember novel only as that misery The Years (Diary 340). (3) The remained stray, ugly duckling, an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise handsome career. (4) More recent critical assessments of The seem less beholden either to Woolf's judgments or to near reflexive equation of high modernist with literary value. Karen Levenback, Judy Suh, Anna Snaith, and Maren Linett have all recast The as central to Woolf's political thinking on war, fascism, and, perhaps more complexly, anti-semitism. (5) In these readings, The exemplifies Woolf's imaginative confrontations with mounting crises of 1930s. John Whittier-Ferguson ties social and political turmoil of decade to local details of her style and what he memorably dubs her inventively exhausted prose (231). My reassessment of The joins this renewed attention to tangled aesthetic and political problems of Woolf's novel. I treat The as late modernist version of historical novel, one seems primarily concerned with establishing correspondence between minutiae of everyday lives of Pargiter family and world-historical processes underwrite novel's near fifty-year timespan. Of course, Woolf s concern with everyday life did not begin with this novel, but The marks an astonishing departure from signature interiorized, phenomenological explorations of her earlier fictions. (6) The treatment of everyday life in The bears stronger resemblances to historical novels and family chronicles like Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Thomas Mann's Buddenhrooks, and John Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga than anything one might find in her earlier novels or even in her modernist fellow travelers like Joyce, Proust, or Conrad. (7) By attending to Woolf's reworking of formal features of historical novel--plot, event, characterization--we can see The registering protracted decline of British centered world-system as crisis of historical consciousness. (8) In this late novel, Woolf figures everyday as scene where historical crises of 1930s attain legibility. In what follows, I first examine Woolf's use and reconfiguration of historical novel, genre long thought to belong to great realists. …