Virginia Woolf’s The Years sparks some surprising associations… Downton Abbey?

“She wanted to see the owl before it got too dark. She was becoming more and more interested in birds. It was a sign of old age, she supposed.” –––– Virginia Woolf, The Years* (186)

Finally, I finish my other 1937 Club read hosted by Kaggsy and Simon that took place in April, two months late, and that’s Virginia Woolf’s The Years, published in 1937. It sure feels like years for me to finish this book. Better late than never, for I have full intention to see what Woolf had to say in her last novel published during her lifetime (Between the Acts was published shortly after her death in 1941), specifically, what was in her mind just a few years before she took her own life.

The book follows the children of Colonel Abel Pargiter’s family as they go through the years crossing the 19th century into the 20th. It’s a family saga through chapters titled for a specific year, beginning with 1880, 1891, then into the new century 1907, 1908 and to the First World War, and finally the “Present Day” which is the 1930’s. Within each chapter the narratives are episodic, characters appear without introductions; readers would have to piece together who’s who and how they relate to each other.

A few unexpected mental associations came to me during my reading. The quote above at the beginning of this post is one of those surprises. A loud Whoa! when I read it: Interest in birds as a sign of ageing. It’s a thought in the mind of Eleanor, the eldest of the Partiger children, when she is fifty-five. She goes on to live past seventy when the book ends, and I’m sure has seen many more owls.

Another surprise for me in my reading experience of The Years is how it’s like watching an arthouse film, or any good movie for that matter. My first impression of that beginning chapter 1880 is that it reads like a script where the expressions and actions of the characters are highly nuanced and the subtext in their conversations speak volumes. Nothing much is happening but the seemingly uneventful narrative carries unsettling undercurrents.

Here’s an example. The Colonel, with his wife Rose on her death bed, is a troubled and temperamental man whom his seven children fear more than respect or love. He comes back home unexpectedly during supper time in the opening chapter and the way he drinks his tea while trying to strike up conversations in a surly manner with his children reflects his changing mood. A ready movie scene here. I’ve taken out the dialogues, but just the description of his tea-drinking actions reveal a lot about his character:

He stirred his sugar round and round in the cup as if to demolish it… ground the grains of sugar against the walls of his cup. [After some tense conversations with his children] Then he seemed to repent of his gruffness… He drank up his tea. Some drops fell on his little pointed beard. He took out his large silk handkerchief and wipe it impatiently… [Later] the Colonel took up his cup, saw there was nothing in it, and put it down firmly with a little chink. The ceremony of tea-drinking was over. (13-14)

Another surprise is that reading The Years makes me think of Downton Abbey, how a family goes through changes both in the larger socio milieu and in their personal lives through the years. The time-lapse is about the same as the six seasons of Downton, from horses to cars, from candles to electric lights, WWI and the changes it brings. The following line in Woolf’s novel makes me think of the Dowager Violet Crawley:

Then he looked at a car. It was odd how soon one got used to cars without horses, he thought. They used to look ridiculous. (215)

BTW, Edith Crawley, who breaks the mould and ventures out to live in London on her own and heads up a magazine she inherits from Michael Gregson and a London flat, has mentioned that she had met Virginia Woolf there, one of Michael’s Bloomsbury acquaintances. One can imagine the author just might have certain influence on her.

The Years is about lives lived, actions or non-actions, the regrets and the resignation of what had happened, the unchangeability of the past. Check out these lines, the introspection of Eleanor’s, just reminds me of Mary Crawley, who had uttered similar words thinking of her own past errors in judgment:

But once it’s done, there it is… How irrecoverable things are, she thought. We make our experiments, then they make theirs. (185)

Above all else, The Years is about the past and memories, and the meaning of it all. Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past comes to mind, no surprise. Both authors value the writing down of lives lived. But Woolf goes into a more depressed mode of seeing even the futility of it. As the chapters, ie, the years, move on, Woolf is more explicit about her view on life––I suppose that’s her perspective––through Eleanor’s point-of-view. Considering Woolf taking her own life just four years after this book was published, I paid attention to the reflections and internal search for existential meaning, or the failing of which, and find these passages particularly poignant. Short sentences like this: “Scenes passed over scenes; one obliterated another,” to reflection like the following, again, quite a cinematic moment:

Things can’t go on for ever, she thought. Things pass, things change, she thought, looking up at the ceiling. And where are we going? Where? Where?… The moths were dashing round the ceiling; the book slipped on to the floor. .. made an effort; turned round, and blew out the candle. Darkness reigned. (195)

to what seems like ultimate despair, take note that Woolf wrote this in the 1930’s:

But how can one be ‘happy’? she asked herself, in a world bursting with misery. On every placard at every street corner was Death; or worse––tyranny; brutality; torture; the fall of civilization; the end of freedom. (358)

I gave the book 3.5 out of 5 stars in my Goodreads review, an evaluation that’s based on my first reading, having had to figure out who’s who –– considering the Pargiters have seven children and some of them have their own children. And then there are extended family members, cousin, niece and nephew, and servants. I’m sure upon second reading, I’d be able to get a clearer picture of all the characters and would enjoy it more, for it really deserves more than one reading.

__________

* The edition that I used (photo above) is Vintage Classics, Penguin Random House UK, London. 401 pages. Introduction by Susan Hill. With this inscription before the Introduction:
“The text of this edition of The Years is based on that of the original Hogarth Press Edition, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf on 15th March 1937.”

***

Related Post on Ripple Effects:

In Praise of Austen: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust: A Movie Reviewer’s Long Take

My other 1937 Club Posts:

Out of Africa by Karen Blixen from Book to Movie

Somerset Maugham’s Theatre and Screen Adaptation