Virginia Woolf and Ireland: The Significance of Patrick in The Years

Abstract

The complex modification of Virginia Woolf’s draft novel-essay ‘The Pargiters’ into what was to become the 1937 novel The Years has been well documented, and it is evident that the final edited form avoided much of the overt politics and polemic that characterized its earlier version.¹ Instead, the politics is discernible on a more implicit level in The Years as the portrait of the everyday lives of the Pargiter family is structured loosely around key social and political events of the years in question. Alongside allusions to social changes such as the women’s suffrage movement, the First World War, and Britain’s shifting class divides, the contemporary political situation in Ireland is mentioned repeatedly in the novel. The question this essay seeks to address is why, when the overt politics and polemic of ‘The Pargiters’ had been significantly compressed, the Irish question remained such a strong presence in The Years? This leads to the further question of why Woolf fails to take this opportunity, through the character of Patrick, to denounce the British imperial system she was to condemn so vehemently in Three Guineas. The reason, I will argue, can be traced to the Woolfs’ only trip to Ireland in April 1934, where one can find a source for the most overt engagement with the Irish question in Woolf’s writing.