Night and Day
1920
Virginia Woolf's second novel is often overshadowed by the experimental masterpieces that followed, but this Edwardian social comedy has a sharpness and wit all its own. Set in a London of tea parties, literary salons, and suffragette marches, it follows Katharine Hilbery, a beautiful heiress trapped in the peculiar prison of having everything and wanting nothing. Her mother is composing a biography of a famous grandfather while Katharine drifts toward an engagement with William Rodney, a dependable but dreary poet. Then Ralph Denham arrives, awkward and critical, and everything shifts. This is a novel about the terror of choosing a life, about the gap between what society demands and what the self requires. Mary Datchet, a suffragist, offers one possible answer work and activism but even she finds that love complicates everything. Woolf savors her characters even as she skewers their world, and the result is a book that asks whether happiness and freedom can coexist, and answers with a complicated yes.
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“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.””
— Virginia Woolf
“What if I told you I’m incapable of tolerating my own heart?””
— Virginia Woolf
“Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.””
— Virginia Woolf
“If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?””
— Virginia Woolf
“There are some books that LIVE," she mused. "They are young with us, and they grow old with us.””
— Virginia Woolf
“She seemed a compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine ...””
— Virginia Woolf
“She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one.””
— Virginia Woolf
“Well, I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married.””
— Virginia Woolf
“His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they held dreams or realities...and in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life... ””
— Virginia Woolf
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Woolf, Virginia. Night and Day. Lex, lex-books.com/book/night-and-day-d516fe59-289d-4707-b887-174c07547051.Woolf, V. (1920). Night and Day. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/night-and-day-d516fe59-289d-4707-b887-174c07547051Woolf, Virginia. Night and Day. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/night-and-day-d516fe59-289d-4707-b887-174c07547051.
