During her lifetime THE YEARS was one of Virginia Woolf's most popular books, and is considered to be one of the most powerful indictments of 'Victorianism' ever written. At first, THE YEARS appears to be a historical novel, tracing the lives of three generations of the Pargiters, a middle class family living in London from 1880 to the 1930s. Yet there is no simple line of development in the novel. Instead, Woolf observes what history might mean to the individuals caught up in it. A work of fluid and dazzling lucidity, THE YEARS traces the shifts of time through the dialogues, thoughts and feelings of individual members of the family, at the same time interweaving themes of change and continuity.