Night and Day
Virginia Woolf
Night and Day
"Night and Day" by Virginia Woolf is a novel published in 1919. Set in Edwardian London, it follows two women—Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet—as they navigate love, marriage, and personal freedom. Katharine, from a literary family, secretly prefers mathematics while wrestling with romantic entanglements involving William Rodney and Ralph Denham. Mary works for women's suffrage but struggles with unrequited love. The novel asks whether marriage is necessary for happiness and whether love and duty can coexist in a changing world.
About the book
Published in 1919, Night and Day is Virginia Woolf's second novel. Katharine Hilbery, granddaughter of a famous poet, spends her days helping her mother write his biography in a cultured Chelsea household, while privately preferring mathematics and the stars. Her engagement to the correct and literary William Rodney is complicated by Ralph Denham, a clerk with a family to support, and by Mary Datchet, who works for the women's suffrage movement. Woolf writes a comedy of manners in the traditional form, but its questions are her own: whether marriage can accommodate an inner life, what work means to women who are not expected to do it, and how far anyone can be known by the people who love them.
Characters
Katharine Hilbery — Protagonist
The composed granddaughter of a famous poet, who privately loves mathematics and the stars.
Ralph Denham — Solicitor’s clerk
An ambitious young man with a family to support, who is drawn to Katharine against his own judgement.
William Rodney — Katharine’s suitor
A precise, literary civil servant who writes verse dramas and hopes to marry Katharine.
Mary Datchet — Suffrage worker
An independent young woman who works for the women’s suffrage movement and is Ralph’s friend.
Mrs Hilbery — Katharine’s mother
Katharine’s charming, scattered mother, forever at work on the life of her famous father.
Mr Hilbery — Katharine’s father
A courteous man of letters who edits a review and prefers that life stay orderly.
Cassandra Otway — Katharine’s cousin
Katharine’s young and eager cousin, who comes to stay in London.
About the author
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English novelist and essayist, and one of the central figures of literary modernism. She wrote novels that follow consciousness rather than plot — a day in a city, a decade passing in an empty house — and found a form for the way attention actually moves. With her husband Leonard she ran the Hogarth Press, which published her own books along with T. S. Eliot and the first English translations of Freud. Her work includes Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves and the essay A Room of One's Own.