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    Night and Day
    Night and Day
    Night and Day
    Audiobook18 hours

    Night and Day

    Written by Virginia Woolf

    Narrated by Juliet Stevenson

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    About this audiobook

    Written before she began her experiments in the writing of fiction, Virginia Woolf's second novel, Night and Day, is a story about a group of young people trying to discover what it means to fall in love. It asks all the big questions: What does it mean to fall in love? Does marriage grant happiness? What is happiness? Night and Day is a conventional novel; however, it maps out for us the world of Virginia Woolf in its wondrous prose: for her it was the beginning, leading on to a prolonged engagement with her search for the means to express the 'inner life'
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateApr 30, 2014
    ISBN9781843797807
    Author

    Virginia Woolf

    Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, short story writer, publisher, critic and member of the Bloomsbury group, as well as being regarded as both a hugely significant modernist and feminist figure. Her most famous works include Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.

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    Reviews for Night and Day

    4/5

    259 ratings14 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Wolf’s facility with language;
      She draws the reader into the innermost thought of her subjects.
    • 4/5
      No one should die before reading as many novels from Woolf as possible.
    • 3/5
      Story of two women. Katherine and Mary. Of love, work and living in London. Very easy to follow.
    • 2/5
      I've seen this described as a comedy of manners without the comedy, which is accurate, and also as Woolf demonstrating that she can write a "conventional" novel — playing tennis with a net — before embarking on her groundbreaking Modernist journey. I suppose this is the accurate, too, and if you pay attention you can see her probing the mental processes underlying her characters' actions and words, but the plot here doesn't come close to justifying the exhausting word count. It's about a pair of overlapping love triangles — Katherine and Mary love Ralph, William and Ralph love Katherine — and it amounts to a novella's worth of action at most. I think this is actually her longest novel, yet it has the least to say. Very boring at times as we follow the cast of bumbling middle/upper-middle class amorists from Chelsea to Bloomsbury to Highgate and back on foot and in innumerable cabs.Anyway that's a wrap for Woolf's novels and my ranking is:1. Orlando2. Mrs Dalloway3. To the Lighthouse4. Between the Acts5. The Waves6. Jacob's Room7. The Years8. The Voyage Out9. Night and Daywith only the top three being essential reading imo.
    • 4/5
      Complex in its multiple scenes and points of view, frustrating when its characters confusingly, constantly change their minds and aspirations without obvious reason, Night and Day is still a great read. This is Woolf's second novel, predating the 1920s and before her move into modernism, but still is a Woolf novel and still worth reading. It follows four characters, two young men and two young women from similar layers of the upper-middle classes in London, each confused about what they want from their life and each entangled in the lives, loves, and aspirations of the other three. On one level, they are upper class twits nattering on about their own problems, but on the other hand, they are taking on modern life during a period of great change and trying to find their own way in it. The story could have been told in fewer words, but the plot and characters kept me happily taking in the words so I could find out how they solved their problems and how some of them came together at the end.
    • 4/5
      Night and Day is Woolf's second novel and is her most conventional in subject, form, and style. This is a love "pentagon" involving the wealthy Katharine Hilbery and her decision on whether to marry William Rodney or Ralph Denham. William would be the more traditional (wealthy) choice, but Denham also has a respectable job in the law. Then there is Mary Datchet, the independent woman who works for women's suffrage and has feelings for Denham. Katharine and Rodney get engaged and both immediately regret it - Katharine feeling claustrophobic and Rodney falling in love with Cassandra, who is much more enamored of him. Being Woolf, there is more to this traditional marriage novel; there is definitely an exploration of what a woman gives up when she decides to marry and thoughts about where (if anywhere) a woman's power lies. Also, Katharine's rather untraditional interest in mathematics and disinterest in the arts makes for a slightly untraditional heroine. But in the end, this is a pretty conventional novel in the Victorian tradition. As a musician, I was often taught early on in my studies that if I wanted to play something rubato (varying the tempo) or make a musical decision contrary to what was written on the page, I needed to first be able to perform the piece "correctly" as written, only then earning the right to branch out. I kept thinking about that with this novel. This struck me as Woolf proving that she could write a good novel in the tradition of other British novelists before she struck out with her highly experimental subsequent novels. I liked this but didn't find it as interesting as her later works.
    • 2/5
      Underwhelming.
    • 4/5
      Described as Woolf's attempt at a classic British romance, this story of a five-way love triangle in pre-War London is a lot weirder and more Woolfy than it initially seems after you dip down under the surface. Katherine Hilbery is wealthy, beautiful, secretly mathematical, and addicted to loneliness. She is engaged to Willam Rodney, a self-conscious but passionate lover of literature with one of the best introduction scenes in all of noveldom. And, although she isn't aware of it, Ralph Denham, the striving, intense, and awkward young lawyer who has stopped by her parents' house for tea is out of control in love with the idea of her. But maybe not with the actual her. To top things off, Mary Datchet, who works for the suffrage movement and hosts rollicking salons in her flat, realizes that she has fallen in love with her friend, Ralph. Plus Cassandra! There is a lot going on here, but Woolf keeps all the threads moving and gives us a slow-starting but effective meditation on what love is exactly, on family, on class, on literature, and on friendship. And I haven't even gotten to Katherine's mother (one of my favorite characters) and the archival implications of her lifelong project of organizing the papers of her famous literary father and turning them into a definitive biography. Right after she goes to visit Shakespeare's grave. Woolf hasn't hit her stride yet with this one, but she is getting there, and it's a fascinating second novel after the emotional explosion of The Voyage Out.
    • 4/5
      Oh Virginia Woolf, there is so much to say but will be left unsaid because that’s how things seem to work in your world. Things left unsaid.

      For that seems to be how it is in Night and Day. In this London society where cupid’s arrows seem to have flown haphazardly. For Mary loves Ralph who loves Katherine who doesn’t love William who might love Cassandra and not Katherine (his fiancée).

      And signals are crossed or missed entirely. And hands are wrung, sighs are sighed, walks are walked and lots of tea is made.

      Things sort themselves out eventually and all seems fine and dandy except that there is an odd number in this equation. And that is poor Mary, who devotes her life to causes and who sort of becomes the reluctant counselor to all these lovelorn folks. Of course she herself is caught up in this love-line (so not a triangle or even a square or a circle because no one seems to love her back….awwww!) so she is the maker of tea and her flat the convenient drop-in place for the lovelorn and the confused. It is hard not to like her (especially her family and their amusing initial shyness with Ralph) and I just wish she were treated better.

      As for Katherine, I was quite determined to boo and hiss at her, since I’m on Mary’s side and all that. But Woolf sneaks in these bits about how K has this secret love. An unspeakable atrocity as she is the granddaughter of some famous (now deceased) poet (who has a kind of cult status that has visitors calling at the house to see his writing desk and manuscripts).

      "When she was rid of the pretense of paper and pen, phrase-making and biography, she turned her attention in a more legitimate direction, though, strangely enough, she would rather have confessed her wildest dreams of hurricane and prairie than the fact that, upstairs, alone in her room, she rose early in the morning or sat up late at night to…work at mathematics."

      Yes, a secret love for mathematics. That makes me want to forgive all her faults – and she has many. But it is hard because of Mary and her fondness for Ralph, who’s in love with Katherine. And Katherine is one who believes that love should be:

      “Splendid as the waters that drop with resounding thunder from high ledges of rock, and plunge downwards into the blue depths of night, was the presence of love she dream, drawing into it every drop of the force of life, and dashing them all asunder in the superb catastrophe in which everything was surrendered, and nothing might be reclaimed. The man too, was some magnanimous hero, riding a great horse by the shore of the sea. They rode through forests together, they galloped the rim of the sea."

      As for the male characters, I didn’t think much of them. William is written as too silly and pompous a character. And Ralph too angsty.

      "At one moment he exulted in the thought that Mary loved him; at the next, it seemed that he was without feeling for her; her love was repulsive to him. Now he felt urged to marry her at once; now to disappear and never see her again."

      Night and Day might not be one of Woolf’s more lauded books but it was quite a treat to read.
    • 3/5
      Night and Day has been called Virginia Woolf's "most neglected novel," and I know why. It's too long, and too boring. This was a disappointment to me because [Night and Day] has also been called Woolf's novel that is most like Jane Austen (which just says that Woolf is not very much like Jane Austen. Neither is Stephen King, btw). My second disappointment is that the novel is about the Edwardian era--my favourite, so I was expecting great things. The novel covers the lives of a group of young adults living in London around 1908. They are each figuring out their place in the world, and each has his or her own ideas, but none of the six want to emulate their parent's Victorian world. There are two love triangles--the beautiful Katherine, her fiance William, and her cousin Cassandra; and, Katherine, a lawyer named Ralph, and a suffragette named Mary. As boring as this book was, there were some truly lovely passages and a few interesting parts. I'd say if you edit this down from the 489 pages of my edition and make it an 80 page novella, it would be a strong book. Woolf is recorded to have said that with this novel, her second, she aimed at "putting it all in," and that she did. Including two pages about a guy looking at his watch. Too, too much! I started Night and Day on June 12 (2 days less than 5 months), and have read 37 other books while chipping away at this one. It was taking me so long that I wrote a mini-review at the half-way point. This is what I said:"Katherine is the dutiful adult daughter who comes from a family of literary aristocracy. She is expected to make a good marriage, but what she really wants is to study mathematics. In the first chapter, she meets Ralph, a young lawyer from a lower class, and doesn’t like him. Hence we know that they will become love interests. Katherine soon gets engaged to William, a boring poet who reminds me of Cecil from A Room with a View. Obviously not the right love interest. And there is also Mary, who works in a suffragette office in Russell Square. Two-hundred-and-sixty-six pages in, that’s all that’s happened so far. Another two-hundred-and-twenty-three pages to go."Recommended for: Readers who liked overstuffed Victorian-style novels and Virginia Woolf completists only. Why I Read This Now: I'm a Virginia Woolf completist.
    • 5/5
      Virginia Woolf has no equal, and this early novel is no exception. N&D is an incredible cross between a novel of manners and the modernism that VW was creating. Incredible poetry, Delightful plots and characters, endlessly intelligent, there are few better novels to be read.
    • 5/5
      This book is about love and marriage - how relationships are affected by social mores and perceived obligations. Woolf also asks the bigger questions: What is love? What constitutes marriage? What is necessary for marital happiness? Is marriage necessary for happiness? What is happiness?These are the questions facing Katherine Hilbery, who has been a willing, but bored, drudge, helping her mother with the task of researching her worthy grandfather, a well-known poet and family icon. These are questions also affecting her friends, William Rodney, Mary Datchett, Cassandra Otway, and Ralph Denham.I have loved every one of Woolf's works that I've read so far, and this one is no exception. Her writing rings as clear as a bell, yet every word, every phrase, every object is imbued with layers of meaning.
    • 3/5
      Virginia Woolf's second novel that deals with two female friends Katherine and Mary, one the grand-daughter of a great poet and the other devoted to the burgeoning Woman's Movement. Enjoyable but a bit stolid.
    • 3/5
      This early novel from Virginia Woolf is superficially a romantic comedy in the classic "Austen" mode. However, Woolf broaches issues of her time such as the liberation of women and the philosophy of G. E. Moore. Moore, popular with the Bloomsbury crowd, was noted for his 'Principia Ethica' which turned the question of morality from what ought to be done to what is good. With the confusion of sexual revolution and class warfare mixed in with the traditional comedic use of misunderstandings this book, while complicated at times, is a delight. It is a real change of pace from the style that Woolf would turn to in her more mature and famous novels.