How long does it take to read The Years?
The Years by Virginia Woolf takes about 7 hours 50 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 7 hours 50 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1937. 427 pages, about 117,425 words.
16 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 13 hours 3 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 50 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 54 minutes |
The page count is the median across 131 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
A stirring, straightforward work written near the end of her luminous career, Virginia Woolf's The Years is a portrait of the Pargiters, a staid London family presided over by Colonel Abel Pargiter. In some ways, "portrait" is not an entirely appropriate word, because Woolf's subject in this novel (and an abiding concern in all of her works) is fluidity and flux: the movement of the seasons and years, the experience of maturing and growing old, and the pain of change, passing, and loss. Although it spans a fifty year period, it is not an epic novel in the sense that Mann's Buddenbrooks or Tolstoy's War and Peace are epic. The fifty years under consideration in The Years are not continuously narrated; instead, the novel deals with only certain years-1880, 1891, 1908, 1911, 1914, 1917 and "The Present Day" - punctuated with large gaps of time in between. At each new juncture, the reader is left to surmise what has happened in the intervening time with little assistance from a controlling narrative presence. Although The Years is written in the third person, the novel's narrative voice roves among the point of view of different characters fluidly, and recounts the events of the past through memory and dialogue rather than through a third-person summation. Leaping over years and even decades - as the novel does - infuses it with a sense of time's rapid, relentless movement, as the reader watches characters age significantly with the turn of a few pages. The subject matter of The Years is also decidedly not epic, but it is what gives the novel its remarkable power. Although it does discuss what might be termed monumental events in the lives of its characters, such as the death of Mrs. Pargiter in the first chapter, the novel leaves out many events that might seem particularly noteworthy, such as the birth of a child, a courtship, or a wedding. These traditional milestones are often consigned to the blank, unnarrated stretches of time that pass between the chapters…
Subjects: Fiction, Social life and customs, Families, Family, History, London (england), fiction
