Although these descriptions move across the whole of England in single paragraphs, Woolf only rarely and briefly broadens her view to the world outside Britain.

[6] Woolf began to collect materials about women's education and lives since the later decades of the 19th century, which she copied into her reading notebooks or pasted into scrapbooks, hoping to incorporate them into the essay portions of The Pargiters (they would ultimately be used for Three Guineas).

In 1977 a transcription of the original draft of six essays and extracts, together with the lecture that first inspired them, was edited by Mitchell Leaska and published under the title The Pargiters.

Woolf's manuscripts of The Years, including the draft from which The Pargiters was prepared, are in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature in the New York Public Library.

Colonel Abel Pargiter visits his mistress Mira in a dingy suburb, then returns home to his children and his invalid wife Rose.

At Oxford it is a rainy night and undergraduate Edward, the last Pargiter sibling, reads Antigone and thinks of his cousin Kitty Malone, with whom he is in love.

Daughter of a Head of House at Oxford, cousin Kitty endures her mother's academic dinner-parties, studies half-heartedly with an impoverished female scholar named Lucy Craddock, and considers various marriage prospects, dismissing Edward.

At Mrs Pargiter's funeral Delia distracts herself with romantic fantasies of Charles Stewart Parnell and struggles to feel any real emotional response to her mother's death.

Back in London, Eleanor, now in her thirties, runs her father's household and does charity work to provide improved housing for the poor.

The chapter begins with a brief glimpse of the south of France, where Maggie has married a Frenchman named René (or Renny) and is already expecting a baby.

Wandering past St Paul's Cathedral, Martin runs into his cousin Sara (or Sally), now in her early thirties.

The party over, Kitty changes for a night train ride to her husband's country estate, then is driven by motorcar to his castle.

"A very cold winter's night, so silent that the air seemed frozen" During the war Eleanor visits Maggie and Renny, who have fled France for London.

"A veil of mist covered the November sky;" The briefest of the sections, at little more than three pages in most editions of the novel, "1918" shows us Crosby, now very old and with pain in her legs.

"It was a summer evening; the sun was setting;" Morris's son North, who is in his thirties, has returned from Africa, where he ran an isolated ranch in the years after the war.

Eleanor is an avid traveller, excited and curious about the modern age, but the bitter, misanthropic Peggy prefers romantic stories of her aunt's Victorian past.

The two pass the memorial to Edith Cavell in Trafalgar Square and Peggy's brother Charles, who died in the war, is mentioned for the first and only time.

However, Woolf made a number of significant alterations and provided a family tree with specific birth dates for the characters, many of whose ages are only implied in the finished novel.

Editor Mitchell Leaska notes that, when figuring out the ages of the characters by sums jotted in the margins of the draft, Woolf makes a number of errors in arithmetic, a problem that also afflicts Eleanor in the novel.