Product Description

As the Pargiters, a middle-class English family, move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the `present day' of the 1930s, they are weighed down by the pressures of war, the social strictures of patriarchy, capitalism and Empire, and the rise of Fascism. Engaging with a painful struggle between utopian hopefulness and crippled with despair, the novel is a savage indictment of Virginia Woolf's society, but its bitter sadness is relieved by the longing for some better way of life, where `freedom and justice' might really be possible. This is Virginia Woolf's longest novel, and the one she found the most difficult to write. The most popular of all her writings during her lifetime, it can now be re-read as the most challengingly political, even revolutionary, of all her books.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #291004 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 524 pages

Synopsis
The most popular of Woolf's novels during the author's lifetime, this book tells the story of a family, the Pargiters, and is a savage indictment of British society at the beginning of the 20th century.

From the Publisher
With introductions by Susan Hill and Steven Connor

About the Author
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf's distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917, hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. This intense creative productivity was often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had suffered since her mother's death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.

Customer Reviews

Interesting, but went on for too long
I was prepared not to enjoy this, as I had read a certain amount of negative criticism. However, I really enjoyed the first three-quarters of this sprawling family saga, a saga which addresses directly both political and social issues in Britain and Europe, from the late C19th to the years immediately before the Second World War. It isn't quite in the same league as 'Mrs Dalloway', but it still has that Virginia Woolf way of pulling you in by such precise and well-observed description of character and place .

But at some point near the end, I found I was getting a bit bored. I wasn't interested any more. Eleanor's internal maunderings were slightly tedious; I was forgetting who was related to who; and I had to make an effort to finish the book.

For me, it was a sprawl too many. But it's still worth a read - it's Woolf, after all.