Kathleen Jowitt's Reviews > The Years

Virginia Woolf is always good at showing a particular moment, through the patchy impressions it makes inside a character's head. In The Years she shows how the steady accretion of particular moments adds up to make history - personal history, family history - and how the history of the wider world influences that and is, in very small, barely noticeable ways, influenced by individuals. It follows members of the Pargiter family from 1880 through to the early 1930s, with the attitudes one might expect. It's a complicated, layered, book, and I'm sure I missed loads of references, both internal and external. Particularly good if you know London well, I think.