INTRODUCTION: THE WEATHER AND VIRGINIA WOOLF

The abounding weather descriptions which distinguish The Years from Virginia Woolf's other works were, according to Grace Radin, added spontaneously as a final touch: “the passages describing the weather and setting the scene that begin each chapter and that separate scenes within chapters were not added to the novel until the final months before publication” (xxii). The reason why the weather was inserted at the book's final stage, I propose, might be that Woolf resorted to the weather as an alternative solution to what she perceived as the novel's main problem: extremely abrupt and incoherent transition between scenes. She articulated what she thought was problematic in her work on Monday 16 March 1936: “I think the change of scene is whats so exhausting: the catching people plumb in the middle: then jerking off. Every beginning seems lifeless— & them I have to retype” (D5: 17).

Descriptions of seasonal cycle can produce paradoxical eff ects. On the one hand, it portrays an ever–changing world and helps us imagine time in terms of space: streets, pathways, and backyard gardens covered with snow in winter and filled with dry leaves in autumn. On the other hand, however, the idea of a constant cycle situates the everchanging world in a fixed temporal pattern. Winter is believed, as a fact, to be followed by spring and summer by autumn. This paradoxical union, of course, does not run smoothly and might be the reason Woolf perceived the book as a “complete failure” (D5: 17), the kind of failure which, she complained in a letter to Elizabeth Bowen on Sunday 23 February 1936, might better be “dropped into the waste paper basket” (L6: 16). Woolf 's sense of failure might be an inevitable result of the weather's “uncertainty” or, in other words, its Janus–faced ambivalence. The weather's insertion in The Years is paradoxical from the start, and so is the impact it produces.

“AGAINST ONE's FORECAST”: THE ELUSIVE WEATHER

The first director of the Meteorological Office was the then Admiral Robert Fitzroy (1805–1865), who in his early career had been the captain of HMS Beagle as well as the second governor of New Zealand.