Night and Day

INTRODUCTION

For even the most ardent devotee of modern literature, the title Night and Day is likely to bring to mind Fred Astaire professing undying love—courtesy of Cole Porter—to Ginger Rogers in the 1934 film The Gay Divorcee, rather than Virginia Woolf ’s novel, her second, published in 1919. Since the book appeared, it has been the frequent target of mockery, scorn, and incomprehension—if people have paid attention to it at all. Shortly after its publication, fellow novelist Katherine Mansfield criticized the book’s “aloofness” and “air of quiet perfection,” lamented its indifference to the Great War, and incredulously exclaimed, “a novel in the tradition of the English novel... we had never thought to look upon its like again!” Woolf’s friend E. M. Forster wrote of the “normalised and dulled” style of the novel in his short book about her, published a year after her death. Critic D. S. Savage found it the “dullest novel in the English language.” And Woolf herself called it “interminable” and marveled in a 1938 letter to her friend Ottoline Morrell, “I can’t believe any human being can get through Night and Day.”

It is true that readers opening the book expecting the stylistic fireworks and structural innovations of Woolf ’s later novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931) will be sorely disappointed. For at first glance, the plot of Night and Day—a young woman choosing between two suitors—is indeed simple and old-fashioned, the very sort of thing Woolf would take to task in her essays on modern fiction, and its lucid, straightforward style offers only the slenderest hints of what would follow.

So why read Night and Day? Although it is among the most consistently neglected of modern novels, it is also one of the most sadly underrated; and readers willing to set aside their expectations for a “typical” Woolf novel will be rewarded in an almost embarrassing variety of ways. They will see Woolf transfiguring people and events from her own life—her family, her marriage, her involvement in the struggle for women’s equality—into vibrant and compelling fictional form. They will watch as she turns, as Jane Austen had done before her, the “universal truth” that young women need husbands from a stale plot device into an uncertain proposition to be undermined from within. They will take pleasure in her wickedly satirical wit and her vivid descriptions of London crowds, the English countryside, and the burning political issues of the day. They will wait in suspense as she searches for a sustainable modern love, a way for women to possess both husbands and independence. And they will enjoy some of the most richly complex and intriguing characters she ever created.

When Woolf began writing Night and Day in late 1914 or early 1915, she had already published one novel, The Voyage Out (1915), as well as many essays and reviews. But she had been ill for several years, and had succumbed to a major breakdown in the first months of 1915. Work offered her a new kind of “voyage out”; as she poignantly admitted in 1930 to her friend Ethel Smyth, she started a new novel largely to keep herself healthy and distracted:

I was so tremblingly afraid of my own insanity that I wrote Night and Day mainly to prove to my own satisfaction that I could keep entirely off that dangerous ground. I wrote it, lying in bed, allowed to write only for one half hour a day (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, p. 231; see “For Further Reading”).

Initially Woolf intended the novel to be a sweeping study of three generations—the great Victorian poet Richard Alardyce, his daughter Mrs. Hilbery, and her daughter Katharine—but she soon decided to focus more closely on Katharine, her relationship to her family and her courtship by two very different men. Despite a major relapse in February 1916, and her fear (as she confessed to her friend Lytton Strachey) “of finishing a book on this method—I write one sentence—the clock strikes—Leonard appears with a glass of milk,” she made steady progress on the manuscript, and by March 1917 she was “well past 100,000 words.” Night and Day was finished in late 1918 and published by Duckworth the following October.

The novel’s heroine, Katharine Hilbery, has much in common with Woolf, particularly her upbringing in an exceedingly literary household. Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), was one of the most distinguished men of letters of the Victorian era, the first editor of the vastly influential Dictionary of National Biography, and the frequent host, at the Stephens’ Kensington residence, to a galaxy of some of the brightest stars in the British cultural firmament. Katharine’s grandfather Richard Alardyce—on whose biography Katharine and her mother labor throughout the novel—is a Victorian of comparable eminence, and the Hilbery house, as the first chapter reveals, remains a place where writers and artists come together for conversation and refreshment. Mr. Hilbery’s literary bent—he edits the fictitious Critical Review—gives him a certain resemblance to Leslie Stephen, but the force of Alardyce’s legacy makes him a closer fictional equivalent. (Woolf’s decision to skip a generation is puzzling: Perhaps she thought that doing so would make her novel’s theme of past and present more pronounced, and its personal content easier to confront?)

Katharine’s charmingly flustered, Shakespeare-obsessed mother is modeled after Woolf ’s aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, daughter of the author of Vanity Fair and elder sister of Leslie Stephen’s first wife, Minny. “Aunt Anny,” as she was known, resembled Mrs. Hilbery in both her spirited intelligence and her chronic absentmindedness. And like Mrs. Hilbery, she was known—in the words of Woolf ’s biographer Quentin Bell—for her “extraordinarily youthful, vigorous and resilient optimism,” even though “it is not hard to believe that such cheerful impetuosity could sometimes be exasperating.” Aunt Anny, like Mrs. Hilbery, had been a constant companion and assistant to her father as well.

Also like Woolf, the intelligent and beautiful Katharine is forced to choose among suitors. William Rodney, the government clerk and aspiring poet who spends much of the novel in complicated pursuit of Katharine, may have been modeled after several men who had courted Woolf: her eventual brother-in-law, Clive Bell; the classical scholar Walter Headlam; and the writer Lytton Strachey, whose proposal Woolf had accepted and rejected over the course of twenty-four hours in 1909. Rodney’s rival, Ralph Denham, strongly resembles Leonard Woolf—whom Virginia married in 1912—in his lower-class origins, his lust for travel (Leonard spent seven years in Ceylon with the Colonial Service), and his residence with his widowed mother, adoring sister, and large family in a house in the London suburbs (although Woolf has curiously omitted Leonard’s Jewishness).

But despite these resemblances between Katharine and Virginia, Woolf insisted that her protagonist was inspired by her sister Vanessa, to whom she was extremely close all her life. Indeed, she urged her friend Janet Case to “try thinking of Katharine as Vanessa, not me,” told Vanessa in a letter of 1916 that she was considering “writing another novel” about her, and in another letter called Vanessa “mysterious and romantic,” adjectives that certainly suit Katharine. It is easy to see how Katharine’s fascination with the nonverbal discipline of mathematics suggests Vanessa’s talent and success as a painter. In fact, in a passage Woolf later deleted, Katharine observes, “If I had to be an artist... I should certainly be a painter; because then at least you have solid things to deal with.” But the most simple and powerful evidence of Woolf ’s tribute to her sister is the novel’s dedication: “To Vanessa Bell.”

E. M. Forster, in his biography Virginia Woolf, remarks that Night and Day “is an exercise in classical realism, and contains all that has characterised English fiction, for good and evil, during the last two hundred years: faith in personal relations, recourse to humorous side-shows, geographical exactitude, insistence on petty social differences.” And he is right: In this novel, Woolf displays little interest in overturning the conventions that had served her forbears so well. She works within the time-honored genre of the Bildungsroman, the novel of education. Her characters’ personal appearances and socio-economic positions are described with loving precision. Unlike The Waves, whose six characters never speak to each other directly in 300 pages, Night and Day teems with dialogue. And of course the plot—with its strictly chronological advancement and its central question of whether and to whom Katharine will get married—proves Forster correct as well.

But to condemn Night and Day as a “traditional” novel for these reasons is to overlook the endlessly inventive ways that Woolf, grappling with complex questions of gender and genre, has woven the debate between tradition and innovation into the very fabric of the novel. Woolf ’s treatment of marriage is a case in point: Just because readers are heavily invested in the labyrinthine twists and turns of Katharine’s love life from the novel’s opening chapter does not mean they are not also exposed to a dizzying spectrum of opinion concerning the institution of marriage in particular, and the value of tradition in general.

To be a member of the Hilbery household is to be steeped in the past: The talk brims with allusions to literature and history; the Cheyne Walk house is crowded with books, portraits, and the ever-present ghost of Alardyce; and the street itself is one on which a Who’s Who of nineteenth-century writers and artists—Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Henry James, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler—had lived. Amid these hallowed surroundings, an ongoing battle between the centuries plays itself out. Conversation among the Hilberys is predictably boisterous, but nevertheless their domestic rituals suggest a world where relations between the sexes have changed little since the last century:

Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of curious little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually, though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to brood over them which lends even a superstitious charm to their performance. Such was the nightly ceremony of the cigar and the glass of port, which were placed on the right hand and on the left hand of Mr Hilbery, and simultaneously Mrs Hilbery and Katharine left the room. All the years they had lived together they had never seen Mr Hilbery smoke his cigar or drink his port, and they would have felt it unseemly if, by chance, they had surprised him as he sat there. These short, but clearly marked, periods of separation between the sexes were always used for an intimate postscript to what had been said at dinner, the sense of being women together coming out most strongly when the male sex was, as if by some religious rite, secluded from the female (p. 88).

Several of the novel’s characters come down firmly on the side of such a “clearly marked” world. Although Mrs. Hilbery muses in a letter to her sister-in-law that “one doesn’t know any more, does one? One hasn’t any advice to give one’s children” (p. 126), she is still eager to see Katharine married, and admits, “I don’t believe in sending girls to college” (p. 86). She also bemoans the previous generation’s “vitality” that “we haven’t got! We’re virtuous, we’re earnest, we go to meetings, we pay the poor their wages, but we don’t live as they lived. As often as not, my father wasn’t in bed three nights out of the seven, but always fresh as paint in the morning” (p. 103).

Even more staunchly conservative is William Rodney. “A man naturally alive to the conventions of society,” Woolf mockingly writes, “he was strictly conventional where women were concerned, and especially if the women happened to be in any way connected with him” (p. 215). Marriage, to him, is the sum and glory of a woman’s existence, and while Katharine, in a revealing scene, stares distractedly at the skies, Rodney rhapsodizes on the joys of wedlock:

“But for me I suppose you would recommend marriage?” said Katharine, with her eyes fixed on the moon.

“Certainly I should. Not for you only, but for all women. Why, you’re nothing at all without it; you’re only half alive; using only half your faculties; you must feel that for yourself” (p. 56).

Rodney admires Katharine’s beauty and intelligence, but he is also deeply threatened by her unwillingness to admire him uncritically: “Beneath her steady, exemplary surface,” he reflects, “ran a vein of passion which seemed to him now perverse, now completely irrational, for it never took the normal channel of glorification of him and his doings” (p. 214). Not long after Katharine has rejected Rodney’s first proposal of marriage, he indignantly remarks to Denham:

“She lives... one of those odious, self-centred lives—at least, I think them odious for a woman—feeding her wits upon everything, having control of everything, getting far too much her own way at home—spoilt, in a sense, feeling that every one is at her feet.... She has taste. She has sense. She can understand you when you talk to her. But she’s a woman, and there’s an end of it” (pp. 60-61).

As his feeble attempts at poetry make hilariously clear, Rodney’s blind allegiance to the past has a cost: an inflexibility that makes him sadly unfit for the complex demands of modern life and love.

But Katharine, as is only proper for a heroine, does not yield to propriety’s pull so easily. Whether working on her grandfather’s biography or simply wandering around her house, she feels both drawn to and overwhelmed by the past:

Sometimes Katharine brooded, half crushed, among her papers; sometimes she felt that it was necessary for her very existence that she should free herself from the past; at others, that the past had completely displaced the present, which, when one resumed life after a morning among the dead, proved to be of an utterly thin and inferior composition (p. 35).

Yet even though “a great part of her time was spent in imagination with the dead” (p. 32), Katharine also has a fine and searching mind of her own. Alone among the Hilberys, she has a passion for mathematics, rather than for more traditional accomplishments like music or poetry. This passion gives rise to guilt as well as rapture:

Perhaps the unwomanly nature of the science made her instinctively wish to conceal her love of it. But the more profound reason was that in her mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature. She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose. There was something a little unseemly in thus opposing the tradition of her family; something that made her feel wrong-headed, and thus more than ever disposed to shut her desires away from view and cherish them with extraordinary fondness. Again and again she was thinking of some problem when she should have been thinking of her grandfather (pp. 37-38).

But torn though she may be, Katharine never abandons her dearly held preferences. She dreams frequently—in language that anticipates Woolf ’s pioneering A Room of One’s Own (1929)—of getting away from the suffocations of family life to a remote cottage with “two rooms” and “ships just vanishing on the horizon” (p. 291). And her unconventionality extends to matters of the heart as well; barely a chapter passes without a fierce attempt on her part to decide what kind of romantic future she wants. She clearly resents Rodney’s priggishly outmoded behavior; when, out walking with her one night, he worries what people will think, she tartly responds, “You may come of the oldest family in Devonshire, but that’s no reason why you should mind being seen alone with me on the Embankment.” And after more bickering, she adds cruelly: “There’s more of the old maid in you than the poet” (p. 58).

Flattered by William’s attentions but unable to return his love, Katharine considers marrying him anyway because she thinks that it might, paradoxically, allow her to preserve her identity and independence. In lyrical flights of fancy that would make her grandfather proud, she dreams of an all-consuming love, a “superb catastrophe in which everything was surrendered, and nothing might be reclaimed” (p. 93). But she also worries about the dissolution of her self that such a cataclysm might cause, and is therefore “able to contemplate a perfectly loveless marriage, as the thing one did actually in real life, for possibly the people who dream thus are those who do the most prosaic things” (p. 93). Perhaps, she cynically reflects, “to be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveller’s story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true” (p. 189).

All these simmering dilemmas come to a boil when Katharine, halfway through the novel, hears “a collection of voices” firing a salvo of questions at her: Should she mind that Rodney has transferred his affections to her cousin Cassandra? Should she let herself be seen walking outdoors with Ralph? “ ‘What are you going to do? What does honour require you to do?’ they repeated.” And indeed, for a brief moment she finds solace in the fact that, “like all people brought up in a tradition, [she] was able, within ten minutes or so, to reduce any moral difficulty to its traditional shape and solve it by the traditional answers.” It is comforting to know that “the rules which should govern the behaviour of an unmarried woman are written in red ink, graved upon marble, if, by some freak of nature, it should fall out that the unmarried woman has not the same writing scored upon her heart.” But ultimately Katharine resigns herself to the fact that “the traditional answer would be of no use to her individually” (p. 272).

They are certainly of no use to her in her tortuous relations with Ralph Denham, a solicitor with literary inclinations whom she meets at one of the Hilberys’ gatherings. From the moment he is introduced, he is an altogether more sympathetic character than Rodney. Erudite yet excitable, ambitious but strongly attached to his working-class family, possessing an “odd combination of Spartan self-control and... romantic and childish folly” (p. 25), he seems a fine match for the similarly multifaceted Katharine. But precisely because Ralph and Katharine are so alike, their union is plagued on all sides by doubt and confusion. Their chaotic courtship can make for frustrating reading—occasionally one grows weary of their endless reveries and vacillations—but it also results in some of the most ravishing passages in the novel, and one of the most moving accounts ever written of being in love.

Katharine and Ralph are both “dreamers” who have a painful and difficult time reconciling their lofty dreams—of life, art, love—to fragile reality. The very first time they meet in the Hilbery house, both are struck silent amid the smart chatter and feel “prohibited from the use of a great many convenient phrases which launch conversation into smooth waters” (p. 9). Ralph lives “a life rigidly divided into the hours of work and those of dreams” (p. 112); Katharine, too, frequently falls into “a dream state, in which... there dwelt the realities of the appearances which figure in our world; ... the things one might have felt, had there been cause; the perfect happiness of which here we taste the fragment; the beauty seen here in flying glimpses only” (p. 124). By crude contrast, voices from the real world sound to her “as if they came from people in another world, a world antecedent to her world, a world that was the prelude, the antechamber to reality” (p. 307). (Given all these meditative moments, it should not be surprising that Woolf ’s original title for the novel was Dreams and Realities.)

Their perpetual residence in two worlds may make Katharine a fine mathematician and Ralph a passionate poet, but it also makes for rough going on the seas of love. Having barely met her, indeed finding her combination of “quick, impulsive movements” and air of “contemplation and self-control” (p. 8) disarming, he allows a powerful and shadowy image of her to form in his brain, finding himself

much at the mercy of a phantom Katharine, who came to him when he sat alone, and answered him as he would have her answer, and was always beside him to crown those varying triumphs which were transacted almost every night, in imaginary scenes, as he walked through the lamplit streets home from the office (p. 80).

But at the same time, Ralph is “well aware that the bulk of Katharine was not represented in his dreams at all, so that when he met her he was bewildered by the fact that she had nothing to do with his dream of her” (p. 80). She has, in short, become his muse—someone who will praise his victories and spur him to new ones—before they have had a real conversation.

Sensing Katharine’s affection for him, and full of despair over his impossible love for her, Ralph becomes close to Mary Datchet, a crusader for women’s suffrage. Strolling with her in the Lincoln countryside, he realizes that his entire relationship with Katharine “had been made up of dreams” (p. 218) and makes a halfhearted proposal to Mary, admitting, “I never said I loved you.” When Mary understandably tells him that she has no interest in a loveless marriage, a heated Ralph expounds on the risk of a loving one:

“But love—don’t we all talk a great deal of nonsense about it? ... It’s only a story one makes up in one’s mind about another person, and one knows all the time it isn’t true. Of course one knows; why, one’s always taking care not to destroy the illusion. One takes care not to see them too often, or to be alone with them for too long together. It’s a pleasant illusion, but if you’re thinking of the risks of marriage, it seems to me that the risk of marrying a person you’re in love with is something colossal” (p. 220).

This searingly painful outburst goes a long way toward explaining the fondness poets have for acquiring muses to whom they have never spoken, as well as the popularity of long-distance romances—be they the lovers Heloise and Abelard or simply couples on opposite coasts—through the ages. Katharine also despairs of intimacy with Ralph, confessing to her mother that “it’s impossible that we should ever marry.... At the same time... we can’t live without each other” (p. 421).

But Ralph and Katharine cannot abandon each other so easily. A significant turning point in their relationship occurs when they visit Kew Gardens. Walking among the splendid botanical profusion, the pair achieve a new intimacy when Katharine asks Ralph “to inform her about flowers,” and he points out that

they were, in the first instance, bulbs or seeds, and later, living things endowed with sex, and pores, and susceptibilities which adapted themselves by all manner of ingenious devices to live and beget life... by processes which might reveal the secrets of human existence (p. 288).

Far from being shocked by his frankness, Katharine is thrilled: “For weeks she had heard nothing that made such pleasant music in her mind. It wakened echoes in all those remote fastnesses of her being where loneliness had brooded so long undisturbed” (p. 288). For the first time, the couple seem aware of one another not as ghosts but as human beings with bodies and desires. Soon Katharine is intrigued by some orchids, and so, “in defiance of the rules she stretched her ungloved hand and touched one” (p. 289). By the end of the visit and the chapter, she reflects that her love for Ralph may not be hopeless after all:

Why, she reflected, should there be this perpetual disparity between the thought and the action, between the life of solitude and the life of society, this astonishing precipice on one side of which the soul was active and in broad daylight, on the other side of which it was contemplative and dark as night? Was it not possible to step from one to the other, erect, and without essential change? Was this not the chance he offered her—the rare and wonderful chance of friendship? (p. 295).

Further fears ensue in the form of what Ralph calls “lapses”—painful moments when the lovers “cease to be real” (p. 412) to each other—but from this point forth, both Katharine and Ralph grow increasingly eager to move from dreams to reality, from night to day. Ralph writes a letter to Katharine in which, fully aware of the risks of their love, he argues for it anyway in a guarded encomium, since

although human beings are woefully ill-adapted for communication, still, such communion is the best we know; moreover, they make it possible for each to have access to another world independent of personal affairs, a world of law, of philosophy, or more strangely a world such as he had had a glimpse of the other evening when together they seemed to be sharing something, creating something, an ideal—a vision flung out in advance of our actual circumstances (pp. 423-424).

The lovers now “shared the same sense of the impending future, vast, mysterious, infinitely stored with undeveloped shapes which each would unwrap for the other to behold” (p. 429-430). Solitude and company are not mutually exclusive. Emotional carnage gives way to boundless joy. And reality, at least for the time being, wins out over dreams.

The original and profound story of Katharine and Ralph would make Night and Day worth the price of admission. But the novel has much more to admire. Particularly striking is the character of Mary Datchet, whose role in Night and Day can be compared to that of Lily Briscoe in Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, a self-doubting but driven artist who questions the supremacy of marriage and motherhood. While Katharine is fiercely independent, her self-reliance does not take the form of attending a university or obtaining a job. Mary has done both; and her selfless labors remind us, even as we follow the progress of Katharine’s love, of the alternatives to marriage—whether as a novel’s ending, or a woman’s fate. Katharine even seems fleetingly jealous of Mary’s lifestyle when she inspects her rooms in the Strand: “The whole aspect of the place started another train of thought and struck her as enviably free; in such a room one could work—one could have a life of one’s own” (p. 236).

Woolf herself briefly worked as a volunteer for the suffragist cause, and as she was writing Night and Day, women were slowly acquiring more rights. Early in 1918 those over thirty were granted the vote; perhaps this happy development led Woolf to steer Mary from her work for the society for general suffrage to a society with more broadly leftist concerns. But whomever she is working for, Mary, unlike both Rodney and Ralph, takes great pleasure in her work; and although her attachment to Ralph causes her all manner of suffering and confusion, our final sight of her, working late by lamplight, assures us that “another love burnt in the place of the old one” (p. 389).

Mary is also the only character in Night and Day with a strong sense of her own body. Like Denham, Datchet is the name of a real town west of London, and her scenes with other characters are notable for their physicality. Visiting Mary at home, Katharine is “conscious of Mary’s body beside her” (p. 48). Vacationing in the Lincoln countryside, Mary fondly strokes her brother’s “thick, reddish-coloured locks this way and that” (p. 168) and, out for a walk with Ralph, she gets some “bodily exercise” (p. 192). Back in London, after a long conversation in which Mary tells Katharine of her love for Ralph—who unfortunately loves Katharine—the two women “sat silent, side by side, while Mary fingered the fur on the skirt of the old dress” (p. 242). Mary may finally decide that she prefers work to love, but her bodily awareness, as well as her knowledge that she is capable of passion, ensure that she will avoid the fate of her colleague Sally Seal, whose barely disguised sexual repression makes for one of the novel’s most painfully witty scenes:

Mrs Seal emitted a most peculiar chuckle. She seemed for one moment to acknowledge the terrible side of life which is concerned with the emotions, the private lives, of the sexes, and then to sheer off from it with all possible speed into the shades of her own shivering virginity. She was made so uncomfortable by the turn the conversation had taken, that she plunged her head into the cupboard, and endeavoured to abstract some very obscure piece of china (p. 228).

Also striking is Woolf ’s use of symbolism, which both anticipates her later novels and gives Night and Day its own remarkable texture. Especially notable are birds, whose appearances throughout the novel teach us much about the characters. The night he meets Katharine, a smitten Ralph considers her mind, He then scornfully contemplates his room, which contains “a large perch, ... upon which a tame and, apparently, decrepit rook hopped dryly from side to side.” In a grim parody of his vision of Katharine, “the bird, encouraged by a scratch behind the ear, settled upon Denham’s shoulder” (p. 21). Later Katharine appears to him as “some vast snowy owl” (p. 129). The chintz curtains in the Hilberys’ drawing room are decorated with red parrots—perhaps a hint that Katharine, who wants to soar, feels trapped there; a pompous friend of the Hilberys, chatting with Ralph, calls him “a rara avis [rare bird] in your generation” (p. 131)—another sad travesty of Ralph’s and Katharine’s dreams of flight. And whenever Mary and Ralph are together, the presence of birds—sparrows (p. 140), a “little grey-brown bird” (p. 197), “the swift and noiseless birds of the winter’s night” (pp. 162-163)-reminds both Ralph and us of the true object of his affection. (Mary, back from one of these outings, decides that she will “take up the study of birds” [p. 143].) In the depths of his despair over Katharine, he imagines “a lighthouse besieged by the flying bodies of lost birds,” then has “a strange sensation that he was both lighthouse and bird; he was steadfast and brilliant; and at the same time he was whirled... senseless against the glass” (p. 342). And once the mutual love between them is assured, he “likened her to a wild bird just settling with wings trembling to fold themselves within reach of his hand” (p. 428). We have come a long way from rooks.

which, for reasons of his own, he desired to be exalted and infallible, and of such independence that it was only in the case of Ralph Denham that it swerved from its high, swift flight, but where he was concerned, though fastidious at first, she finally swooped from her eminence to crown him with her approval (p. 19).

Another important stylistic feature of the novel is Woolf ’s use of leitmotifs—frequently repeated words that call our attention to important themes and that gain new weight and meaning with each appearance. Two words, feelings and consciousness, occur countless times throughout Night and Day. The result is not only poetic resonance but historical context as well, for feelings were of the utmost concern to Woolf ’s Bloomsbury circle, just as they are to characters in the novel (“What is happiness?” Ralph asks in chapter II), and the nature of consciousness had recently been made the subject of intensive study by Sigmund Freud, whose works were first published in English by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press.

And of course the binaries of the novel’s title make themselves everywhere apparent. If “day” is the comforting clarity of norm and tradition, “night” is the alluring murk of vision and innovation. If Mrs. Hilbery’s speech is sunlight, then Katharine’s silence is shadow. The different literary tastes that the characters profess—Rodney enjoys Alexander Pope, while Katharine prefers the brooding Dostoevsky—are as opposite as sun and moon, too. And the contrast between the novel’s two couples vividly illustrates the poles of its title: Rodney’s fondness for Mozart and his residence in “high eighteenth-century houses” (p. 62), and Cassandra’s likeness to “a French lady of distinction in the eighteenth century” (p. 299) (not to mention her sharing a name with Jane Austen’s sister), could not be more different from Ralph and Katharine’s tempestuous romance, as the following conversation between the latter pair shows:

“Rodney seems to know his own mind well enough,” he said almost bitterly. The music, which had ceased, had now begun again, and the melody of Mozart seemed to express the easy and exquisite love of the two upstairs.

“Cassandra never doubted for a moment. But we—” she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, “we see each other only now and then—”

“Like lights in a storm—”

“In the midst of a hurricane,” she concluded, as the window shook beneath the pressure of the wind. They listened to the sound in silence (p. 369).

But if Woolf’s use of leitmotifs gives Night and Day a Wagnerian density, her sparkling wit comes straight out of Shakespearean comedy. The plot’s intricacies—two couples falling in and out of love; frequent eavesdropping; escape to a “green world,” which brings perspective on the dilemmas of urban life—could have been lifted from plays such as As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Wearing her literary debt on her sleeve, Woolf calls constant attention to these parallels, whether in the form of Mrs. Hilbery’s theories about Shakespeare’s sonnets, or the novel’s many comparisons between Katharine and Rosalind, the lively heroine of As You Like It. (Mrs. Hilbery remarks, “she is Shakespeare—Rosalind, you know” (p. 154.) And when characters step back from the action to comment on its madness—Rodney alone calls it a “season of lunacy” (p. 358), dismisses his love of Cassandra as “a dream” (p. 358), and exclaims to Ralph, “My God... what fools we both are!” (p. 347)—they might be paraphrasing Puck’s astonished conclusion, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (act 3, scene 2). Far from being charming embellishments, these Shakespearean echoes serve a vital function in the novel: They allow Woolf (long before her critics did) to highlight the artificial elements of her plot, and to balance its more solemn moments with a welcome lightness of touch.

Woolf ’s contemporary George Gershwin observed in the song “But Not for Me” that “Every happy plot ends with a marriage knot,” and readers who have consumed their fair share of classic novels can make educated guesses about the conclusion of Night and Day. Woolf ’s later work—its method and purpose, its structure and style—may be less predictable and more dazzlingly new. But this one, in its way, dazzles too, and it would therefore be a great shame to view it as a minor ball of fire in the constellation of her novels, rather than a bright star giving off its own unique and radiant light.

Rachel Wetzsteon received her doctorate in English from Columbia University in 1999 and is Assistant Professor of English at William Paterson University. She has published two books of poems, The Other Stars and Home and Away, and has received various awards for her poetry. She also wrote the introduction and notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. Wetzsteon currently lives in New York City.