It is 1880: after visiting his mistress in the London suburbs, Colonel Pargiter returns home to his children and his dying wife. In a series of snapshots we meet all the Pargiter siblings: twenty-year-old Eleanor, whose concern is to help the poor; her younger sisters Milly, Delia and Rose; her brothers Morris, Martin and Edward, who is at Oxford and in love with his cousin Kitty. As the years unfold, the various threads of relation, history and personal experience are woven into the tapestries of the characters' lives, forming a larger canvas that covers not only the story of a family, but that of two entire generations.

The most ambitious of Woolf 's novels, and the last one to be published during her lifetime, The Years is a work suff used with a haunting, melancholy sense of time and history, and a stylistic tour de force.