As the Pargiters, a middle-class English family, move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the `present day` 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`s society, but its bitter sadness is relieved by the longing for some better way of life, where `freedom and justice` might really be possible.

This is Virginia Woolf`s 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.