would be followed by a novelistic passage presented as extracts from an imaginary longer novel, which would exemplify the ideas explored in the essay. 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). Between October and December 1932 Woolf wrote six essays and their accompanying fictional "extracts" for The Pargiters. By February 1933, however, she jettisoned the theoretical framework of her "novel-essay" and began to rework the book solely as a fictional narrative, although Anna Snaith argued in her introduction to the Cambridge edition of the novel that "Her decision to cut the essays was not a rejection of the project's basis in non-fiction, but affirmation of its centrality to the project, and to her writing in general." Some of the conceptual material presented in The Pargiters eventually made its way into her non-fiction essay-letter, Three Guineas (1938). 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 the New York Public Library. Plot summary 1880 "It was an uncertain Spring." Colonel Abel Pargiter visits his mistress Mira in a dingy suburb, then returns home to his children and his invalid wife Rose. His eldest daughter Eleanor is a do-gooder in her early twenties, and Milly and Delia are in their teens. Morris, the eldest brother, is already a practising barrister. Delia feels trapped by her mother's illness and looks forward to her death. Ten-year-old Rose quarrels with twelve-year-old Martin and sneaks off by herself to a nearby toyshop. On the way back she is frightened by a man exposing himself. As the family prepares for bed, Mrs Pargiter seems at last to have died, but she recovers. 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. He is distracted by two friends, the athletic Gibbs and the bookish Ashley. Daughter of a