Night and Day

Katharine Hilbery is a beautiful and privileged woman, but she is uncertain of her future. Torn between becoming engaged to the oddly prosaic poet William Rodney or pursuing her dangerous attraction to the passionate Ralph Denham. As she struggles with her indecision, the lives of two other women - women's rights activist Mary Datchet and Katharine's mother, Margaret, struggling to weave together the documents, events and memories of her own father's life into a biography - impinge on hers with unexpected and intriguing consequences. Virginia Woolf's second novel is a love story and a social comedy, yet it also subtly undermines these traditions, questioning a woman's role and the very nature of experience.