It is1880: after visiting his mistress in the London suburbs, Colonel Pargiterreturns home to his children and his dying wife. In a series of snapshots wemeet all the Pargiter siblings: twenty-year-old Eleanor, whose concern is tohelp the poor; her younger sisters Milly, Delia and Rose; her brothersMorris, Martin and Edward, who is at Oxford and in love with his cousinKitty. As the years unfold, the various threads of relation, history andpersonal experience are woven into the tapestries of the characters' lives, forming a larger canvas that covers not only the story of a family, but thatof two entire generations. The most ambitious of Woolf 's novels, and the last one to be publishedduring her lifetime, The Years is a work suff used with a haunting, melancholy sense of time and history, and a stylistic tour de force.