As the Pargiters, a middle-class English family, move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the \047present day\047 of the 1930s, they are weighed down by the pressures of war, the social strictures of patriarchy, capitalism and Empire, and the rise of Fascism. Engaging with a painful struggle between utopian hopefulness and crippled with despair, the novel is a savage indictment of Virginia Woolf\047s society, but its bitter sadness is relieved by the longing for some better way of life, where \047freedom and justice\047 might really be possible. This is Virginia Woolf\047s longest novel, and the one she found the most difficult to write. The most popular of all her writings during her lifetime, it can now be re-read as the most challengingly political, even revolutionary, of all her books.