How Time Passes

{See front cover) Last year Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, Ga. wrote her first novel. Gone With The Wind. Last week Virginia Woolf of London, England published her seventh. The Years* Margaret Mitchell's book has sold more copies (1,300,000) than all Virginia Woolf's put together. But literary brokers who take a long view of the market are stocking up with Woolfs, unloading Mitchells (TIME, April 5). Their opinion is that Margaret Mitchell was a grand wildcat stock but Virginia Woolf a sound investment.

Virginia Woolf has been called "the best-equipped and the most disappointing woman novelist in the history of English literature." That she can be considered a disappointment indicates that she may be not just a highbrow writer but perhaps a great one. She is certainly the foremost woman author of her day. Her books are addressed not to a literary clique but to the Intelligent Common Reader. And the address is written in such a fine and flowing hand that even when it is illegible the hopeful addressee can find some profitable pleasure in puzzling over it. Even her obscurer books have something about them that attracts popular attention, for more than most stylists, she writes about the common gist of things.

The Book. Nervous readers will find The Years not nearly such heavy going as their knowledge or hearsay of Virginia Woolf might lead them to expect. Unlike some of her other books, The Years is not experimental. It is written ''straight." Superficially, it is the telescoped chronicle of a London family—an upper middle-class family, like all Virginia Woolf's principal characters. But the actors are not the first thing seen. The curtain goes up on a scene that is pointedly empty of human beings. Time is to be the real protagonist of the story: "At length the moon rose and its polished coin, though obscured now and then by wisps of cloud, shone out with serenity, with severity, or perhaps with complete indifference. Slowly wheeling, like the rays of a searchlight, the days, the weeks, the years passed one after another across the sky." On a spring day in 1880 Colonel Pargiter leaves his club to pay a visit to his cockney mistress, then home to his family: his bedridden, dying wife, his children.

Eleanor, the oldest daughter, runs the house, with social service as a sparetime hobby. At Oxford, the eldest son, Edward, spins the beginnings of a sound career, sometimes daydreams about his pretty cousin Kitty, only daughter of the head of his college. At last bedridden Mrs. Pargiter dies. And now it is 1891. Kitty is married, but not to Edward, who has become a don.

All the Pargiter children but Eleanor have left home. One is a full-fledged barrister, one a soldier in India, one of the daughters is leading a questionable life of her own. Age has parted Colonel Pargiter from his cockney mistress.