The notes, the markings: along the margins of the years

ABSTRACT The focus is the historiography of Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937) and her intention to produce a ‘history-novel’ that contained ‘everything’. Modern English-language novelists (popular and literary) also invent characters that embody a preoccupation with the philosophy of history, with the idea of time and duration; sometimes these characters are historians, who are used to inscribe method in social history. The ideas of the marginal note, of marginalia in general, and the footnote provide new ways of understanding history-writing in the modern era.