Night and Day - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

3.76

9,366 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1412811600 ISBN 13: 9781412811606

Publisher: Transaction Pub Large Print, 2009

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Night and Day was Virginia Woolf's second novel and it has been overlooked by critics and readers in favor of her more experimental works. It is important for its treatment of women and modernity, in the city, in politics and in the workplace. It is a novel about social transition. Set before the First World War, but written after the war, Woolf hints at the sense of chaos and relativism which the war will bring about.

The novel looks backwards as well as forwards. Katharine and her mother are engaged in the seemingly never-ending project of writing the biography of poet Richard Alardyce, Katharine's maternal grandfather. Woolf depicts the Victorian fetish for great men. As Ralph Denham, Katharine's eventual fiance, says, "I hate great men. The worship of greatness in the nineteenth century seems to me to explain the worthlessness of that generation." His middle-class family in Highgate boasts no such great figures, and the cross-class relationship between Ralph and Katharine is a sign of the novel's modernity.

Katherine is harnessed to a "great" man, taught to remember her own insignificance in the face of his greatness. "One finds them [the Alardyces] at the tops of professions, with letters after their names; they sit in luxurious public offices, with private secretaries attached to them; they write solid books in dark covers, issued by the presses of the two great universities, and when one of them dies the chances are that another of them writes his biography." "They" are, of course, all men, and Woolf here launches an attack on the perpetuation of privilege through the patriarchal institutions which she would analyze in A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas.

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Book Description:

The edition is intended for literary scholars and students with an interest in Virginia Woolf, modernist literature, women's writing, and the history of the novel in the twentieth century. It is more thorough than any previous edition, as regards textual variants, explanatory notes, and the Introduction.

From the Back Cover:

Night and Day, Virginia Woolf's second novel, is both a love story and a social comedy in the tradition of Jane Austen; yet it also questions that tradition, recognizing that the goals of society and the individual may not necessarily coincide. At its centre is Katharine Hilbery, the beautiful grand-daughter of a great Victorian poet. She must choose between becoming engaged to the oddly prosaic poet William Rodney and her attraction to Ralph Denham, with whom she feels a more profound and disturbing affinity. Katharine's hesitation is vividly contrasted with the approach of her friend Mary Datchet, dedicated to the Women's Rights movement. The ensuing complications are underlined and to some extent unravelled by Katharine's mother, Mrs Hilbery, whose struggles to weave together the known documents, events and memories of her father's life into a coherent biography reflect Woolf's own sense of the unique and elusive nature of experience.

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