Revising the family novel: A cross-reading of Rebecca West’s Aubrey trilogy and Virginia Woolf’s The Years

Claudia Cao

2021-01-01

---

Abstract

This contribution examines Rebecca West’s trilogy, “The Saga of the Century” (1956-1985), in a double dialogue with Virginia Woolf's novel, “The Years” (1937), and with the English archetype of the family novel, “The Forsyte Saga” by John Galsworthy (1906-1921). The investigation starts from the definition of the family novel as a metonymy of the political and social dynamics of the Edwardian age and illustrates the points of intersection on the form and content levels between Rebecca West's trilogy and Virginia Woolf's novel, in order to highlight their convergence on similar aims. Both, in fact, revise the structural and thematic elements of the traditional family novel in order to question the bourgeois and patriarchal values of the society of the time. Finally, through the examination of three aspects of West's trilogy (the narrative structure, the role of the characters, and the motif of family rituals), this essay highlights the valorisation of the maternal sphere – in contrast to the emphasis placed on the male axis in the traditional family novel – and the revision of the concept of family.