Title: Night and Day
Author: Virginia Woolf
Date: 1919, 1971
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: none
Length: 471 pages
Quote: “It suddenly came into Katharine’s mind that if some one opened the door at this moment he would think that they were enjoying themselves.”
Katharine is one of six young single adults in her neighborhood. If they were alive today, this little group would probably be a polyamorous community; they’re all young and hormonal enough to enjoy sex with practically anything, or anyone, and any of them could obviously enjoy a night with any other of them—at least, in a heterosexual pairing. They’re so hormonal, in fact, that they don’t even care that at least four of them are cousins to each other. This detail puts me off the whole pack of them, but Virginia Woolf managed to write almost 500 pages about the difficulties these incestuous Brits have in restricting themselves to one formal courtship, leading to one marriage, at a time. What a scandal it is that Katharine and William, who announce their engagement first and break it off first, actually remain friends and help each other marry the people they really want to marry.
Pet names aren’t used in this crowd. The girls are Katharine, Cassandra, and Mary. The guys are William, Henry, and Ralph. Katharine’s and William’s engagement was favored by their elders at least partly because they stand to inherit more money than Henry and Cassandra, and much more money than Mary and Ralph.
I find this tasteful, yet hormone-driven, study of youth very tiresome. I tried to read the whole novel in the 1990s, gave it up, and have only just finished it. The book qualifies as a study of why modern-style dating displaced traditional-style courtship in the twentieth century, why the rules of nineteenth-century-traditional courtship served our six characters so poorly. As such, it subjects readers to levels of impatience almost comparable with those the characters suffer…so caveat lector!
If you like long-drawn-out novels of manners, if you’ve always wished Jane Austen’s novels didn't try to be funny but just went on twice as long, if you're into incest and appreciate that in real life Virginia Woolf knew something about taboo relationships even closer than with cousins, then Night and Day might be your cup of tea. If you’re making a study of Virginia Woolf, you’ll need to refer to this novel. For readers in these two categories Night and Day is recommended.
Woolf is sometimes considered an important writer. I'm not sure why. She wasn't the first representative of any group; Pearl S. Buck, Rose Wilder Lane, Dorothy Sayers, Dorothy Parker, Marianne Moore, Edna St Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, even Mary Roberts Rinehart were writing better books, and the subcategory "suicidal women writers" was much better represented by Sylvia Plath. Call me heretical but I suspect Woolf's place in the twentieth century literary canon, such as it was, was created for her by grieving relatives in the literary community. Now they're all dead and gone, and Woolf's fiction has my permission to go and lie down among them.
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