The most popular of Virginia Woolf&#39;s novels during her lifetime, first published in 1937, &quot;The Years&quot; is a savage indictment of British society at the turn of the century.<br /><br />&quot;The Years&quot; is the story of three generations of the Pargiter family - their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs - mapped out against the bustling rhythms of London&#39;s streets during the first decades of the twentieth century. Growing up in a typically Victorian household, the Pargiter children must learn to find their footing in an alternative world, where the rules of etiquette have shifted from the drawing-room to the air-raid shelter. A work of fluid and dazzling lucidity, &quot;The Years&quot; eschews a simple line of development in favour of a varied and constantly changing style, emphasises the radical discontinuity of personal experiences and historical events. Virginia Woolf&#39;s penultimate novel celebrates the resilience of the individual self and, in her dazzlingly fluid and distinctive voice, she confidently paints a broad canvas across time, generation and class.<br /><br />Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist, and the centre of &#39;The Bloomsbury Group&#39;. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from &quot;Mrs Dalloway&quot; (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel &quot;The Waves&quot; (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive &quot;Orlando&quot; (1928) and &quot;A Room of One&#39;s Own&quot; (1929) a passionate feminist essay.