Marginalized in the corpus of Woolf's work due to its lack of a wholesome textual body, The Years falls short of a textual 'ablebodiedness.' Although the textual able-bodiedness I refer to here is not equivalent to the physical kind of ableism that disability scholars have discussed, the enforcement of textual able-bodiedness in Woolf criticism often transliterates into her narrative representation of physical deafness, muteness, and other disabilities. As Vera Chouinard explains, ableism is defined by 'ideas, practices, institutions, and social relations that presume able bodiedness, and by so doing, construct persons with disabilities as marginalized … and largely invisible 'others'' (380). Compensating for its lack of aesthetic wholeness, this critical tradition in reading The Years metaphorizes an ableism that disability scholars have been striving to undo. Chan have examined the novel's political consciousness, including Woolf's antisemitism and her feminism. 1īoth Grace Radin and Susan Squier have discussed Woolf's revision process in their seminal works Anna Snaith, Maren Linett, and Evelyn T. As The Pargiters foreshadows, criticism on The Years is 'pargeted' with commentaries on its periphery works that chronicle the rise of Woolf's political consciousness. In particular, criticism tends to pair The Years with its sister works Three Guineas and The Pargiters (an earlier draft of The Years). This aesthetic incompleteness has engendered a plethora of textual prosthetics that purport to salvage a more holistic reading.

Today, the novel is rarely read as a stand-alone or aesthetically complete work. Swayed by Woolf's dejection, critics similarly believed that The Years had fallen short of its ambition. 'he certainty of failure,' in Virginia Woolf's own words, hovered over the composition of The Years (1936) ( A Writer's Dairy 263).

The pargiters