The Years

First US edition. Large crown 8vo. Pp. [iv], 436. Publisher's cerulean blue buckram, stamped in gilt on a brown panel to spine. Top edge stained chocolate-brown; fore-edge untrimmed. The first American edition was published on 8 April 1937, in an edition of 10,000 copies, priced at $2.50. It proved to be an enormous success and Harcourt, Brace had to print a further 37,900 copies, in 12 impressions, between April and October 1937, with Time Magazine following suit by putting Woolf on the cover.

Sans dustwrapper. Slight fading to spine, tanning to endpapers, else Near Fine.

Author's penultimate novel and the last Woolf published in her lifetime. Tracing the history of a genteel family from the 1880s to the 'present day' mid-1930s, it uncannily resembles Woolf's own extended literary-familial circle. Seemingly epic in scope, homing in on the trials and tribulations of this extended clan, the book maintains a personal focus, concentrating on the evolution of characters and relationships on a single day per chosen year, with its principal theme being the passage of Time.

The work had its inception in a lecture she gave to the National Society for Women's Service on January 21, 1931, an edited version of which would subsequently be published as "Professions for Women". Woolf originally envisaged it as a 'novel-essay' in alternate chapters, but ultimately decided to separate the two, collecting the essays as Three Guineas in 1938. Its lengthy gestation led her to compare it to 'a long childbirth,' yet she was rewarded by overwhelmingly positive critical reviews and vast sales upon publication. A Connolly 100 title. "A brilliant fantasia of all Time's problems, age and youth, change and permanence, truth and illusion." –The Times Literary Supplement

[Kirkpatrick and Clarke A22b]