What matters, in the 1891 section, for instance, is not so much the death of Parnell in itself, so much as the convergences which it allows in the lives of those upon whom that death impinges. Even though The Years is the most historical and outward-facing of Woolf’s later writings, which plants its foot firmly in datable public events like the deaths of the Irish political leader Charles Stuart Parnell and of Edward VII and the First World War, the calendar in use is still clearly that of the heart rather than the calendar of public history. The Waves represents the summit of this achievement. In this fiction, history is filtered through the inner lives of characters, the First World War being famously reduced to a parenthesis in To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf pledged herself early in her writing career to a kind of fiction that would measure the movements and responses of minds, rather than bodies, of subjective rather than objective truth. This essay first appeared as an introduction to Virginia Woolf’s The Years (London: Vintage, 1992). Virginia Woolf, the Baby and the Bathwater Virginia Woolf, the Baby and the Bathwater Steven Connor
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