Night and Day

COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

The reader of Night and Day will find that, while each scene is complete, full of life, present significance, suggestive allusion, the progression of scenes is so arranged as to draw him on to a point in the story which—‘only a love-story’ though this be—is so exciting that to read it is to pass through a keen emotional experience. And thence comes the gradual descent, not into a house with shut doors and windows, but to a point whence the future prospect can be seen stretching away into the blue distance.

—October 30, 1919

KATHERINE MANSFIELD

To those of us who love to linger down at the harbour, as it were, watching the new ships being builded, the old ones returning, and the many putting out to sea, comes the strange sight of Night and Day sailing into port serene and resolute on a deliberate wind. The strangeness lies in her aloofness, her air of quiet perfection, her lack of any sign that she has made a perilous voyage—the absence of any scars. There she lies among the strange shipping—a tribute to civilization for our admiration and wonder....

We had thought that this world was vanished for ever, that it was impossible to find on the great ocean of literature a ship that was unaware of what has been happening. Yet here is Night and Day, fresh, new and exquisite, a novel in the tradition of the English novel. In the midst of our admiration it makes us feel old and chill: we had never thought to look upon its like again!

—from Athenaeum (November 21, 1919)

W. L. GEORGE

Here is perfect aloofness, entire distinction; Mrs. Virginia Woolf outstrips all novelists of her period, for she possesses two qualifications for high literature: pity, and fine disdain.

—from English Review (March 1920)

RUTH MURRAY UNDERHILL

The half expressed thought, the interrupted sentences by which the action of Night and Day proceeds, are baffling. Carry this sort of thing a few steps further and you have [Maurice] Maeterlinck. Yet even this intent study of a fragmentary and delicate thing strikes one as in the spirit of Tennyson’s ‘flower in the crannied wall’ whose complete comprehension means comprehension of what God and man is.

—from Bookman (August 1920)

CLIVE BELL

Night and Day is, I think, [Virginia Woolf’s] most definite failure. She chose a perfectly conventional, a Victorian, theme, the premiers amours of five young people.... She should have written about the quatre-vingt-dixième to make her work strong and passionate and real (the grand desideratum); she should have written about Life.

—from The Dial (December 1924)

E. M. FORSTER

Night and Day seems to me a deliberate exercise in classicism. It contains all that has characterised English fiction for good or evil during the last hundred and fifty years—faith in personal relations, recourse to humorous side shows, insistence on petty social differences. Even the style has been normalised, and though the machinery is modern, the resultant form is as traditional as Emma. Surely the writer is using tools that don’t belong to her.

—from New Criterion (April 1926)

ARNOLD BENNETT

Virginia Woolf has passionate praisers, who maintain that she is a discoverer in psychology and in form. Disagreeing, I regard her alleged form as the absence of form, and her psychology as an uncoordinated mass of interesting details, none of which is truly original.

—from The Realist (April 1929)

W. H. AUDEN

I cannot imagine a time, however bleak, or a writer, whatever his school, when and for whom [Virginia Woolf’s] devotion to her art, her industry, her severity with herself—above all, her passionate love, not only or chiefly for the big moments of life but also for its daily humdrum “sausage-and-haddock” details—will not remain an example that is at once an inspiration and a judge.

—from the New Yorker (March 6, 1954)

Questions

1. What is the problem in Night and Day? Is it in Katharine? In the men she knows or in men in general? In the manners and morals of her time and place? In the human condition?

2. Some of Woolf’s contemporaries described the novel as aloof, distant, classical. Is there anything in the novel that reveals the author’s relation to her material? Can you see Woolf in the book?

3. The courtship between Katharine and Ralph, writes Rachel Wetzsteon in the introduction to this edition, “results in some of the most ravishing passages in the novel, and one of the most moving accounts ever written of being in love” (see p. xxi). What in these passages, in either the style or the content, might Wetzsteon be referring to?

4. Do you sympathize with Katharine? Is one’s sympathy or lack of sympathy for Katharine likely to depend on whether one is a man or a woman? Could Night and Day be fairly described as a feminist novel?