The Years

Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw, Ian Blyth, David Bradshaw, Ian Blyth

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118234297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This edition takes the first British edition of The Years as its copy-text, and includes a comprehensive introduction, extensive explanatory notes, and a full list of textual variants and editorial emendations.

• Features a comprehensive introduction, detailing the lengthy process of the composition and revision of the novel, and its subsequent publication history
• Includes extensive explanatory notes, highlighting the political, historical, social and literary contexts of the novel
• Provides a full account of the variants between the first British and American editions, supplemented by a list of editorial emendations made in this present edition

PRESENT DAY

IT was a summer evening; the sun was setting; the sky was blue still, but tinged with gold, as if a thin veil of gauze hung over it, and here and there in the gold-blue amplitude an island of cloud lay suspended. In the fields the trees stood majestically caparisoned, with their innumerable leaves gilt. Sheep and cows, pearl white and parti-coloured, lay recumbent or munched their way through the half transparent grass. An edge of light surrounded everything. A red-gold fume rose from the dust on the roads. Even the little red brick villas on the high roads had become porous, incandescent with light, and the flowers in cottage gardens, lilac and pink like cotton dresses, shone veined as if lit from within. Faces of people standing at cottage doors or padding along pavements showed the same red glow as they fronted the slowly sinking sun.

Eleanor came out of her flat and shut the door. Her face was lit up by the glow of the sun as it sank over London, and for a moment she was dazzled and looked out over the roofs and spires that lay beneath. There were people talking inside her room, and she wanted to have a word with her nephew alone. North, her brother Morris’s son, had just come back from Africa, and she had scarcely seen him alone. So many people had dropped in that evening—Miriam Parrish; Ralph Pickersgill; Antony Wedd; her niece Peggy, and on top of them all, that very talkative man, her friend Nicholas Pomjalovsky, whom they called Brown for short. She had scarcely had a word with North alone. For a moment they stood in the bright square of sunshine that fell on the stone floor of the passage. Voices were still talking within. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“It’s so nice to see you,” she said. “And you haven’t changed …” She looked at him. She still saw traces of the brown-eyed cricketing boy in the massive man, who was so burnt, and a little grey too over the ears. “We sha’n’t let you go back,” she continued, beginning to walk downstairs with him, “to that horrid farm.”

He smiled. “And you haven’t changed either,” he said.

She looked very vigorous. She had been in India. Her face was tanned with the sun. With her white hair and her brown cheeks she scarcely looked her age, but she must be well over seventy, he was thinking. They walked downstairs arm-in-arm. There were six flights of stone steps to descend, but she insisted upon coming all the way down with him, to see him off.

“And North,” she said, when they reached the hall, “you will be careful. …” She stopped on the doorstep. “Driving in London,” she said, “isn’t the same as driving in Africa.”

There was his little sports car outside; a man was going past the door in the evening sunlight crying “Old chairs and baskets to mend.”

He shook his head; his voice was drowned by the voice of the man crying. He glanced at a board that hung in the hall with names on it. Who was in and who was out was signified with a care that amused him slightly, after Africa. The voice of the man crying “Old chairs and baskets to mend,” slowly died away.

“Well, good-bye, Eleanor,” he said turning. “We shall meet later.” He got into his car.

“Oh, but North——” she cried, suddenly remembering something she wanted to say to him. But he had turned on the engine; he did not hear her voice. He waved his hand to her—there she stood at the top of the steps with her hair blowing in the wind. The car started off with a jerk. She gave another wave of her hand to him as he turned the corner.

Eleanor is just the same, he thought: more erratic perhaps. With a room full of people—her little room had been crowded—she had insisted upon showing him her new shower-bath. “You press that knob,” she had said, “and look—” Innumerable needles of water shot down. He laughed aloud. They had sat on the edge of the bath together.

But the cars behind him hooted persistently; they hooted and hooted. What at? he asked. Suddenly he realised that they were hooting at him. The light had changed; it was green now, he had been blocking the way. He started off with a violent jerk. He had not mastered the art of driving in London.

The noise of London still seemed to him deafening, and the speed at which people drove was terrifying; but it was exciting after Africa. The shops even, he thought, as he shot past rows of plate-glass windows, were marvellous. Along the kerb, too, there were barrows of fruit and flowers. Everywhere there was profusion; plenty. … Again the red light shone out; he pulled up.

He looked about him. He was somewhere in Oxford Street; the pavement was crowded with people; jostling each other; swarming round the plate-glass windows which were still lit up. The gaiety, the colour, the variety, were amazing after Africa. All these years, he thought to himself, looking at a floating banner of transparent silk, he had been used to raw goods; hides and fleeces; here was the finished article. A dressing-case, of yellow leather fitted with silver bottles, caught his eye. But the light was green again. On he jerked.

He had only been back ten days, and his mind was a jumble of odds and ends. It seemed to him that he had never stopped talking: shaking hands; saying How-d’you-do? People sprang up everywhere; his father; his sister; old men got up from armchairs and said, You don’t remember me? Children he had left in the nursery were grown-up men at college; girls with pigtails were now married women. He was still confused by it all; they talked so fast; they must think him very slow, he thought. He had to withdraw into the window and say, “What, what, what do they mean by it?”

For instance, this evening at Eleanor’s there was a man there with a foreign accent who squeezed lemon into his tea. Who might he be, he wondered? “One of Nell’s dentists,” said his sister Peggy, wrinkling her lip. For they all had lines cut; phrases ready-made. But that was the silent man on the sofa. It was the other one he meant—squeezing lemon in his tea. “We call him Brown,” she murmured. Why Brown if he’s a foreigner, he wondered. Anyhow they all romanticized solitude and savagery—“I wish I’d done what you did,” said a little man called Pickersgill—except this man Brown, who had said something that interested him. “If we do not know ourselves, how can we know other people?” he had said. They had been discussing dictators; Napoleon; the psychology of great men. But there was the green light—“GO.” He shot on again. And then the lady with the ear-rings gushed about the beauties of Nature. He glanced at the name of the street on the left. He was going to dine with Sara but he had not much notion how to get there. He had only heard her voice on the telephone saying, “Come and dine with me—Milton Street, fifty-two, my name’s on the door.” It was near the Prison Tower. But this man Brown—it was difficult to place him at once. He talked, spreading his fingers out with the volubility of a man who will in the end become a bore. And Eleanor wandered about, holding a cup, telling people about her shower-bath. He wished they would stick to the point. Talk interested him. Serious talk on abstract subjects. “Was solitude good; was society bad?” That was interesting; but they hopped from thing to thing. When the large man said, “Solitary confinement is the greatest torture we inflict,” the meagre old woman with the wispy hair at once piped up, laying her hand on her heart, “It ought to be abolished!” She visited prisons, it seemed.

“Where the dickens am I now?” he asked, peering at the name on the street corner. Somebody had chalked a circle on the wall with a jagged line in it. He looked down the long vista. Door after door, window after window, repeated the same pattern. There was a red-yellow glow over it all, for the sun was sinking through the London dust. Everything was tinged with a warm yellow haze. Barrows full of fruit and flowers were drawn up at the kerb. The sun gilded the fruit; the flowers had a blurred brilliance; there were roses, carnations and lilies too. He had half a mind to stop and buy a bunch to take to Sally. But the cars were hooting behind him. He went on. A bunch of flowers, he thought, held in the hand would soften the awkwardness of meeting and the usual things that had to be said. “How nice to see you—you’ve filled out,” and so on. He had only heard her voice on the telephone, and people changed after all these years. Whether this was the right street or not, he could not be sure; he filtered slowly round the corner. Then stopped; then went on again. This was Milton Street, a dusky street, with old houses, now let out as lodgings; but they had seen better days.

“The odds on that side; the evens on this,” he said. The street was blocked with vans. He hooted. He stopped. He hooted again. A man went to the horse’s head, for it was a coal-cart, and the horse slowly plodded on. Fifty-two was just along the row. He dribbled up to the door. He stopped.

A voice pealed out across the street, the voice of a woman singing scales.

“What a dirty,” he said, as he sat still in the car for a moment—here a woman crossed the street with a jug under her arm—“sordid,” he added, “low-down street to live in.” He cut off his engine; got out, and examined the names on the door. Names mounted one above another; here on a visiting-card, here engraved on brass—Foster; Abrahamson; Roberts; S. Pargiter was near the top, punched on a strip of aluminium. He rang one of the many bells. No one came. The woman went on singing scales, mounting slowly. The mood comes, the mood goes, he thought. He used to write poetry; now the mood had come again as he stood there waiting. He pressed the bell two or three times sharply. But no one answered. Then he gave the door a push; it was open. There was a curious smell in the hall; of vegetables cooking; and the oily brown paper made it dark. He went up the stairs of what had once been a gentleman’s residence. The banisters were carved; but they had been daubed over with some cheap yellow varnish. He mounted slowly and stood on the landing, uncertain which door to knock at. He was always finding himself now outside the doors of strange houses. He had a feeling that he was no one and nowhere in particular. From across the road came the voice of the singer deliberately a...