Get our Best Book Club Books of 2025 eBook!

Virginia Woolf's The Years, British Empire, and Narrative Form

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reviews |  Beyond the Book |  Read-Alikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser

Theory & Practice

A Novel

by Michelle de Kretser
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (11):
  • First Published:
  • Feb 18, 2025, 192 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Virginia Woolf's The Years, British Empire, and Narrative Form

This article relates to Theory & Practice

Print Review

Book cover of The Years by Virginia WoolfThe Years is the last of Virginia Woolf's novels to be published during her lifetime, in 1937. Beginning in 1880 and following three generations of the Pargiter family across five decades to the "present day," it captures intimate moments between characters and internal monologues against the backdrop of historical events and changes in British society.

As in Woolf's more popular novels To the Lighthouse (1925) and Mrs. Dalloway (1927), the passage of time in The Years is a major theme, but even more so here, with the narrative eschewing close character development and traditional story structure in favor of the bigger picture. A New York Times critic called it "her richest and most beautiful novel, out of many years in the practice of writing." Some modern readers might disagree. The consistent jumping from character to character (often the Pargiter sisters Eleanor, Delia, Milly, and Rose, who age across the course of the book) is a hallmark of Woolf's work in general but requires some added patience in this later work, as plot threads are quickly dropped — the moments offered are absorbing, but become subsumed in the flow of the years.

In Michelle de Kretser's Theory & Practice, the main character is a Sri Lankan Australian grad student writing her thesis on The Years, attempting in the process to resolve her feelings about Woolf upon finding a racist entry in her diary. The Years itself has plenty of racism built in — characters make casual derogatory comments that are antisemitic, Orientalist, and anti-Black. This isn't an inaccurate depiction of upper-middle class British people at the time(s); it isn't an especially critical one, either.

De Kretser's narrator lifts the veil on the underlying structures that support and encourage the viewpoints, language, and general attitudes in the book, focusing on how the Pargiters make their money. That the Pargiter men serve in the military at foreign outposts and secure class and financial status for themselves through complicity in the expansion of British empire could be — and doubtless often has been — read as mere background detail. For the narrator, it's a crucial point that complicates Woolf's picture of women's emancipation and Woolf herself, who is still viewed as a feminist figure.

The Years was initially intended to be a mix of fiction and critical nonfiction, a new narrative form, but ultimately became a novel. De Kretser's character offers the blistering critique that the book's fate parallels Woolf's inability to reach outside of "the powerful fiction that the self-fulfilment of British women transcended the imperialism that enabled it."

Rather than stick to a neat, solid argument as the narrator strives to do (and more or less has to do within the confines of her academic setting), Theory & Practice "write[s] back to Woolf" in the expansive way a friend suggests the narrator should, opening additional pathways for reflection. If British imperialism enabled women's emancipation, did it not also enable the circumstances that made emancipation necessary? Was Woolf aware of her limitations in writing about the times she lived in from a critical point of view? Can new ideas be birthed by new forms?

1969 edition of The Years by Virginia Woolf, courtesy of Mariner Books Classics

Filed under Books and Authors

Article by Elisabeth Cook

This article relates to Theory & Practice. It first ran in the March 12, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $0 for 0 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Based on the author’s family story, comes an extraordinary novel about a mother and her daughters’ escape from Taiwan.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Serial Killer Games
    by Kate Posey

    A morbidly funny and emotionally resonant novel about the ways life—and love—can sneak up on us (no matter how much pepper spray we carry).

  • Book Jacket

    The Original Daughter
    by Jemimah Wei

    A dazzling debut by Jemimah Wei about ambition, sisterhood, and family bonds in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.

  • Book Jacket

    Ginseng Roots
    by Craig Thompson

    A new graphic memoir from the author of Blankets and Habibi about class, childhood labor, and Wisconsin’s ginseng industry.

Who Said...

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

B W M in H M

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.