Night and Day

Night and Day is a novel by Virginia Woolf first published on 20 October 1919. The novel sets in Edwardian London, and deals with issues concerning women's suffrage, if love and marriage can coexist, and if marriage is necessary for happiness. The novel opens with Katharine Hilbery pouring tea at an afternoon party at her parents'house.(Many of the key events and conversations in the novel take place over that peculiarly English convention, afternoon tea.) A late guest at the tea party is Ralph Denham, a young solicitor who has recently contributed an article to the review edited by Katharine's father. At first meeting, Katharine and Denham take a slight dislike to each other: He is unimpressed by her aristocratic heritage (she belongs to one of the most distinguished families in England), and she finds him dull. At this point in the proceedings, Katharine is being courted by William Rodney, a cultured but somewhat vain man, who works in a government office during the day but indulges his chief love, literature, in the evenings. Denham's closest friendship is with Mary Datchet, who is involved in the women's suffrage movement. She and Denham have known each other for two years, but she is an independent spirit and does not want to marry him, or anyone else... Virginia Woolf did a wonderful job of revealing the many facts of an individual. In this novel, she applied that task to couples in love. It is a marvel that she not only identified the many nuances of a glance, a word, a movement, but that she also conveyed them to the reader in perfect sentences.