On its surface, Night and Day reads like a Shakespearean comedy: we follow the romantic endeavours of two friends, Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet, as love is confessed and rebuffed, weddings planned and cancelled, until we finally arrive at two engagements. But these dramas play out against the women's movement for voting rights and equal wages, and just as Woolf makes use of the tropes of romantic comedy, she pushes back against them with an undercurrent of doubt about the institution of marriage and the civic imbalance between the sexes.

About the Author

About the Author:

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is the author of acclaimed works of fiction including Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928) as well as the feminist call to arms, A Room of One's Own (1929). At the age of 37, Woolf published her second novel, Night and Day (1919). She is remembered as one of the most important modernist writers of the twentieth century.

Reviews

"If Woolf was better acquainted with profound sorrow than most, she was also, by some mysterious manifestation of will, better than almost anyone at conveying the pure joy of being alive. The quotidian pleasure of simply being present in the world on an ordinary Tuesday in June. That's one of the reasons we who love her, love her as ardently as we do. She knew how bad it could get. And still, she insisted on simple, imperishable beauty, albeit a beauty haunted by mortality, as beauty always is. Woolf's adoration of the world, her optimism about it, are assertions we can trust, because they come from a writer who has seen the bottom of the bottom. In her books, life persists, grand and gaudy and marvellous; it trumps the depths and discouragements."

-Michael Cunningham, The Guardian

Book Information
ISBN 9781632060327
Author Virginia Woolf
Format Paperback
Page Count 448
Imprint Restless Books
Publisher Restless Books