The years

"The Years is perhaps Virginia Woolf's most politically and historically embedded novel. It covers a period of intense social change from the 1880s to the 1930s, making direct reference to suffrage, Irish Home Rule, the First World War and anti-semitism. The novel's composition history is unusually complex; the text changed radically from its inception in 1931 to its publication in 1937. This edition provides readers with a fully collated and annotated text. It includes a substantial introduction that charts the composition process, a detailed chronology and full annotation of all historical, cultural and topographical references. All variants from extant galley and page proofs, as well as editions of the novel produced in Woolf's lifetime, are included, and reveal the significant and crucial changes Woolf made even in the months before publication"-- "How should we read the writings of Virginia Woolf? This is not so much a question of interpretation as of practice. How are we to read this writer for whom reading is an activity that requires almost the same talents and energies as the activity of writing itself ? For Woolf responds to the question, 'How should one read a book?', as a person of immense, virtuosic skill and experience in both activities. She understands the reader to be the 'fellow-worker and accomplice' (E5 573) of the writer. The 'quickest way to understand [. . .] what a novelist is doing is not to read', she suggests, 'but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words' (E5 574); and 'the time to read poetry', she recognises, is 'when we are almost able to write it' (E5 577). Not only has Woolf left a richly rewarding oeuvre, but she has also left ample documentation of her meticulous processes of composition and of her detailed involvement in the production and publishing of many of her works, all of which her active and conscientious reader will wish to negotiate. If we are going to read Woolf creatively and cr