Ralph is a middle class lawyer – obliged to earn his living – he must also support his mother and several younger siblings. “She’ll do …Yes, Katharine Hilbery’ll do… I’ll take Katharine Hilbery.” At the tea party which is in full swing as the novel opens, Ralph Denham is captivated by Katharine of whom he says to himself when alone following their first meeting
William Rodney seems the obvious choice – he is certainly more of Katharine’s class. Mrs Hilbery counts on Katharine’s help, and Katharine quietly submits to helping her mother. Margaret – Katharine’s mother spends much of her time trying to organise documents and her own recollections of her famous unconventional father into a biography. The first William Rodney is a poet and dramatist he is attracted to Katharine fascinated by the stories of her grandfather. Uncertain of her future, frequently restless, Katharine must choose between two men. Katharine Hilbery is beautiful and privileged, her family one of the foremost in the country – her mother the daughter of a famous poet. It has been suggested that Woolf’s fragile mental state during this period can account for her not making any reference to the wider political world, or the war – the reports of which had severely traumatised her.
Set in the very early twentieth century before or around the First World War – this is a society on the brink of change – Victorian attitudes still abound in many quarters – while a younger generation look toward the future. Women’s suffrage and the question of whether love and marriage can co-exist are explored in this novel through the fortunes of four main characters. Woolf uses several recurring motifs throughout the novel, the sky, stars the River Thames and walking – especially through London recur time and again. The structure of the novel and the narrative are tighter – more so even, I think than her first novel, which had a more meandering quality at times. The prose is less poetic than To the Lighthouse for example and Orlando which I read last year. Night and Day is a slightly longer novel than I associate with Woolf, I confess on a busy tiring week it took me the whole week to read. I enjoyed it enormously – it isn’t a difficult read, and these were characters I liked spending time with. Although a little over four hundred pages it is a novel with a very simple plot – it is however, the complex, changing relationships between the central characters, which give the novel its depth. The narrative, like that of The Voyage Out – which I read last year – is much more conventional than her later modernist novels To the Lighthouse, and Mrs Dalloway that I read in January. Night and Day – Virginia Woolf’s second novel is a social comedy and a love story but also a subtle examination of women’s roles. “I’ve seen more trouble come from long engagements than from any other forms of human folly.”
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