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.
