Night and Day: 100th Anniversary Edition

Praise for

Virginia Woolf

All of the characters are drawn with art; their thoughts and actions are minutely observed and dissected. In point of literary style the book is distinctive.

—New York Times Review of

Night and Day, 1920

I could see, even as an untutored and rather lazy child, the density and symmetry and muscularity of Woolf’s sentences. I thought, wow, she was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar. By which I meant she walked a line between chaos and order, she riffed, and just when it seemed that a sentence was veering off into randomness, she brought it back and united it with the melody.

—Michael Cunningham,

author of The Hours

Virginia Woolf is my other favorite. I feel as if she is writing not simply about the mind, but about my mind. Her books are as visceral to me as music. I find that Woolf, like chocolate, requires rationing; I could easily become emotionally obese if I let myself consume her work too often.

—Andrew Solomon,

author of Far from the Tree

In ten novels Mrs. Woolf lifted veil after veil to reveal what she perceived as the secret meaning of life. When one finishes a book of hers it is not characters he remembers but their spiritual emanations, which are in reality manifestations or facets of Virginia Woolf’s supervision. Her peculiar interest not in surfaces but in mysterious motivations and subterfuges that do not meet the eye. And no other English novelist has ever written more dazzling passages of poetry undefiled than Virginia Woolf. Like the great poets—Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Blake—Mrs. Woolf could say the unsayable, and it is there in her books for those who have ears attuned to unheard melodies, even if they can never recommunicate it in any language except Mrs. Woolf’s own precisely…. The physical embodiment of Virginia Woolf is no more, but her inimitable voice remains to speak to generations yet unborn.

—Hudson Strode, New York Times Review

of Between the Acts, 1941

"What I like best about Woolf is how ceaselessly alive her prose is. She thought of writing and reading as active experiences, not sedate pastimes."

—Danny Heitman,

The Christian Science Monitor

Blessed with luck and innocence, I fell upon the novel that once and forever opened the door of imaginative fiction for me, and read it cold, in all its wonder and magnitude.

—Eudora Welty on

To the Lighthouse

This book, this slender plaything of an excursion, is, perhaps, the most transgressive experiment she ever made: the merging of a double-exposure portrait, in the vernacular of her paternal inheritance, as a kind of talisman of hopefulness and carefree abandon toward something better than a brightening future—rather a glorious, trustworthy present…. For me, this trifle of phantasmagoria has always been a practical manual. A tourist guide to human experience, the best of wise companions. At least, it was my first: a message in a bottle from an imaginary friend.

—Tilda Swinton on Orlando

Also by Virginia Woolf

The Voyage Out (1915)

Kew Gardens (1919)

Night and Day (1919)

Monday or Tuesday (1921)

Jacob’s Room (1922)

Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

To the Lighthouse (1927)

Orlando (1928)

A Room of One’s Own (1929)

The Waves (1931)

Flush (1933)

The Years (1937)

Three Guineas (1938)

Roger Fry: A Biography (1940)

Between the Acts (1941)

Contents

Introduction by Lauren Groff

Chronology

Night and Day

Suggestions for Further Reading

A Guide for Restless Readers

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Introduction

A Sign of Things to Come

On Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day

Beware, sweet Night and Day reader, of being seduced by the name of Virginia Woolf on the spine of this novel into believing you are about to read a work of high modernism, a sister to the author’s towering To the Lighthouse and Orlando and The Waves. Along that path lies only bewilderment. This is not to say that you won’t find the Virginia Woolf you know and love in this book, because you certainly will, if mostly after the first half, and in an endearingly tender, nascent form. What I mean is that the conversation Virginia Woolf is conducting in her second novel is not the conversation of her later books, the one with avant-garde authors of the early twentieth century like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, but rather a shrewd and ultimately subversive discussion with the male writers of the Edwardian age, like Henry James, John Galsworthy, and her friend E. M. Forster. This is a book that gazes backward in time with skepticism and a virago’s impulse to shred into tatters all that it sees.

No book is written in a vacuum, and an author’s sophomore novel is in many respects a product of the trauma caused by writing and publishing her debut. In Virginia Woolf’s case, that trauma was severe. Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915, when the writer was thirty-three years old, after more than seven years of composition, massive revisions to temper the sharper and angrier of her political commentary, a dropped engagement to her friend Lytton Strachey, a marriage to Leonard Woolf, and at least one nervous breakdown and suicide attempt. Woolf’s mental state had never been secure since the sudden death of her mother when she was thirteen, after which, in the severity of her grief, she tried to throw herself out a window. Two years after her mother died, her stepsister, Stella—the de facto mother figure to the four bereaved Stephen siblings, a soft and good-hearted young woman who was able to control the egomaniacal rages of their father—married, moved out, and within two months died of a sudden illness, and the life that Virginia and her siblings had been able to piece together after their mother’s death was totally obliterated. This was the story that Virginia Woolf tried to master by fictionalizing it in The Voyage Out: an innocent, naive young girl slowly awakening into her sexuality, falling in love, and dying suddenly, leaving her lover bereft. I find hers a thoroughly strange and beautiful first novel, with its flights of brilliance and awkward misfit moments, a book that inhabited a South America that Virginia Woolf had visited only in her imagination, yet one that was already masterful in its delineation of the swift, ineffable, barely glimpsable currents of emotion that were Woolf’s great genius to explore. I sense real madness in The Voyage Out, and a corresponding real courage in the young writer who left those wild, mad parts intact in her novel.

Yet her first book took everything out of Virginia Woolf, and shortly after its publication she had another breakdown, with another attempt at suicide. At the time, the rest cure was the primary mode of treatment, and between 1913 and 1915, there were multiple times that Woolf was limited to a pallid diet of milk and meat, no gardening or exertion or nights out, very little reading, and only an hour of writing every day. She had already encountered the rest cure with her previous madnesses, and fear of it would haunt her times of wellness throughout her life. It wouldn’t be until 1917 that she would begin work on Night and Day.

Perhaps because of the severity of this post-publication breakdown, there is a sense, particularly at the beginning of Night and Day, of great caution, almost of overcorrection, of a careful forward progression that takes place only when the author feels utterly in control of her material. The great project of the book is to describe the shift taking place in the social order as the Victorian age bled into the Edwardian age. Woolf describes society’s first faltering steps into women’s suffrage and activism based on her own somewhat ambivalent work as an activist at a small and earnest suffrage organization. She contrasts Katharine Hilbery’s intellectual seeking of a new kind of feminine role within a romantic relationship with Mary Datchet’s quiet, passionate self-possession and freedom from romantic relations. Through the two women, she traces the burgeoning greater equality of relations between men and women, and explores the way that a new generation can destroy the givens of a previous one. Her scope was wildly ambitious; and one can see why, to keep it all under rigid control, Woolf chose for this book a conventional structure and format that was so often and energetically deployed by the great male writers of the time. How crushing it must have been, then, for Woolf to hear the faint praise of her friend E. M. Forster (whom she called Morgan), who, about a month after Night and Day’s publication, told her that he liked her second novel less than her first, because, as she confides with touching bravado in her diary:

N. and D. is a structurally formal and classical work; that being so requires, or he requires, a far greater degree of lovability in the characters than in a book like V.O., which is vague and universal. None of the characters in N. and D. is lovable. He did not care how they sorted themselves out. Neither did he care for the characters in V.O., but there he felt no need to care for them. Otherwise, he admired practically everything; his blame does not consist in saying that N. and D. is less remarkable than t’other. O and beauties it has in plenty—in fact, I see no reason to be depressed on his account…. Morgan has the artist’s mind; he says the simple things that clever people don’t say; I find him the best of critics for that reason.

It is a fair enough criticism, one that I have some sympathy for: I, too, find that nobody is particularly lovable in Night and Day, and I also agree with Forster’s unstated belief that his own novels work so brilliantly, in part, through their characters’ lovability. And yet! It seems to me that this criticism by a male writer in some ways hilariously and unconsciously underlines the points Woolf is making in her book. In Night and Day, Woolf is documenting the shift from a woman’s self-conception in marriage from being at the center of domestic life to being more of a partner among equals. In her new idea of marriage, traditional modes of femininity—charm, subservience, self-sacrifice, and yes, lovability—begin to lose their necessity as tools for women’s survival, not only in marriage but also in the larger world. The characters of Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet, the two women around whom this book is built, have such a strong desire to feel their own way through the dark of the new social order being born around them that neither finds it necessary to fall backward into comfortable traditional female roles. Likewise, Virginia Woolf, in pushing outward in this book toward an articulation of a new and better kind of marriage, doesn’t stop for a moment to try to seduce the reader into loving her characters—she is too fixated on breaking new ground and exploring her ideas. Even the great Henry James sees marriage for his heroines as a kind of inescapable if often gilded trap, necessary and hungered-for and resented; Woolf was more interested in undermining the idea of marriage being a trap for women.

In literary fiction, lovability (or its more insipid twin, likability) serves only to fondle the reader’s ego, presenting a way of looking into the mirror of a book and finding oneself reflected in a beautifying or heroic light. There is irony in Forster’s finding a lack of lovability in this book, as, by the end of Night and Day, it becomes clear that Virginia Woolf’s project was in deliberate opposition to the kinds of fiction that Forster himself wrote, where women are the ones asked to sacrifice parts of themselves to bring unity or comfort to the people around them. I’m thinking of my favorite of his books, Howards End—whose Schlegel sisters are modeled clearly on Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, down to the peevishly intellectual brother Tibby, modeled on Thoby Stephen—and the way that Margaret Schlegel (the Vanessa character) both supports her sister Helen (the Virginia character) through her scandalous out-of-wedlock pregnancy, while simultaneously giving up her desire to divorce her husband when he falls ill. Margaret’s husband is a rigid Victorian—unlikable, but of course that’s all right in a man—who bilks Margaret out of inheriting Howards End before he ever truly knows her, and who later acts so cruelly to Margaret’s family in the name of propriety. It is only through Margaret’s great-souled self-sacrifice, as well as her submissiveness to dramatic events that arise from the foolishness of others, that the family can achieve a measure of peace at the end, Forster’s book says placidly.

But why, Woolf’s book responds with some heat, must anyone, male or female, sacrifice anything of themselves for familial peace and unity? Like Forster’s Margaret, Virginia Woolf’s protagonist Katharine Hilbery was modeled on her sister Vanessa, a great beauty and painter and lover of abstraction, whose force of will undermined her glittering, conventionally beautiful surface all her life.

The title Night and Day carries tremendous symbolism, referring most obviously to this shift of a woman’s role in domestic life and in society at large. But it also refers to the tension between Katharine Hilbery’s bourgeoise training and Mary Datchet’s intellectual and emotional independence and leadership in suffrage; the shift from the Victorian into the Edwardian; the vastness in the gulf between the sensibilities of men and those of women; as well as to larger socioeconomic points such as the bleeding of the middle class into the more calcified upper classes through the solvent of love, the way that Ralph Denham’s energetic, aesthetically outrageous family mixes in the end with Katharine Hilbery’s dusty literary aristocracy, a marriage that would have been far less thinkable in earlier eras. Woolf’s title also traces the fault line between public compliance and private dreams and ambitions.

Night and Day becomes increasingly interesting the more one considers it. The literary critic Jane Marcus wrote that the architecture of the book depends structurally on Mozart, stylistically on Jane Austen, and thematically on Ibsen, and there’s great joy in discovering these conversations that are happening below the level of the line. Woolf also draws a great deal on Shakespeare, particularly on the figure of the wise fool, embodied here in Mrs. Hilbery, with her attention deficit, her inability to finish her biography of her famous writer grandfather, and her sideways truth-telling. Woolf, too, was playing on the partner-switching of Shakespeare’s plays like As You Like It, and she borrowed her protagonist’s name, Katharine, from the eponymous shrew of The Taming of the Shrew, though the shrewishness of Katharine is transformed by Woolf into a private resistance to expectations and a hunger for abstractions in her literary family: