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The sunlight-dappled passages of 'The Years', deciduous and delirious with Woolf's painterly vision hold the key to understanding Woolf's view of the world as an atmosphere of beauty enveloped in a haze of  human melancholy, regret and isolation; although 'The Years' ostensibly follows the Pargiter family, the true star is the city of London. Verdant and vibrant, from the tree-lined streets to  bilious  lamp-light which imbued London with a sickly luminescence, to the maze like streets which have entrapped the characters, few writers had described London with as much verve and originality as Virginia Woolf;
"The moon which was now clear of the clouds lay in a bare space as if the light had consumed the heaviness of the clouds and left a perfectly clear pavement, a dancing ground for revelry. For some time the dappled iridescence of the sky remained unbroken. There was a puff of cloud; and a little cloud crossed the moon" 
London is enveloped in a haze of harlequin colours, of crepuscular dusk and golden rain, Woolf’s poetic descriptions are a testament to her painterly vision, to an eye which was accustomed to catching the small, unnoticed and unappreciated details of life, of gas-lights shaped like peacock feathers, of the fall of moon-light on tables, of night coalescing into day;

“It was a clear night and every tree in the square was visible; some were black, others were sprinkled with strange patches of green artificial light. Above the arc lamps rose shafts of darkness. Although it was close on midnight, it scarcely seemed to be night, but rather some ethereal disembodied day,�

Perhaps the weaker element of ‘The Years� is the characters; although part of this is reflective of the fact that Woolf presents their inner lives via snapshots of different days in various years of their lives and so it can come across as slightly disjointed and so it is difficult to form an emotional connection with the family. However, that does not completely detract from the beauty of the story, from the magical atmosphere which Woolf weaves around London.