The Years, the writing of which Woolf was later to describe as ‘like a long childbirth’ (D. v. 31), was ‘conceived’ in 1931:

The history of The Years is a complex one. In brief, Woolf's original plan was for a ‘Novel-Essay’, a ‘novel of fact’, in which essays would be interspersed with extracts from ‘a [non-existent] novel that will run into many volumes’: ‘Its to be an Essay-Novel, called the Pargiters – & its to take in everything, sex, education, life &c; & come, with the most powerful and agile leaps, like a chamois across precipices from 1880 to here & now’ (D. iv. 129). ‘We must become the people that we were two or three generations ago. Let us be our great grandmothers,’ she wrote in the first essay of The Pargiters, explaining that her use of the fictional extracts was to be an aid to this process for those unused to ‘being somebody else’. The past provides ‘that perspective which is so important for the understanding of the present’ (P. 9).

In early 1933 Woolf decided not to have separate ‘interchapters’ (the essays), instead ‘compacting them in the text’ (D. iv. 146). Other elements were later used in Three Guineas, her polemical ‘anti-fascist’ essay on women's resistance to war. Woolf wrote the novel at speed and with relative ease, but its revising caused her years of difficulty and almost stopped her writing completely. The Years was finally published in 1937: Three Guineas appeared in 1938.

The earliest version of The Years was published as The Pargiters in 1977, revealing a great deal not only about its genesis but about Woolf's conceptions of the relationship between fiction, history, and politics in the 1930s.