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Fionnuala

April 01 2015

Night and Day indeed! He: would like to write verses comparing her eyes to the stars. She: would like to take a compass and a ruler and measure the distance between the stars. He: believes women can only feel and not reason. She: believes she must renounce a life of reason to satisfy his feelings. There are several versions of He and She in this book as if Woolf set out to analyse men and women in general and offer us examples, some very diametrically opposed, as in the example above, and some hardly at all. Surprisingly, it is between the portraits of the women that there is the most opposition; the men offer less variation of type. This fits with the period in which the book seems to be set, the early decades of the twentieth century; there are horses and carriages but also motor omnibuses, a focus on the suffragette movement yet no talk of war. The suffragette movement offered women possibilities for change, so alongside the portrait of the woman who is eager to please, happy to be loved and eager to found a family, we get the portrait of the woman who has made the the cause of humanity her life’s work, and also the woman who is seeking freedom simply to be by herself, measuring the stars. In the middle ground of this novel two of the characters stand alone, one male (not the He of the first paragraph) and one female, and they are almost interchangeable: they differ in outward aspects of course but when it comes to thinking and feeling, they overlap, both searching for the forbidden freedom to live without obligation or duty. And surprisingly, it is the She of the pair who has the most difficulty in the area of ‘feeling’. Woolf takes a contrary view to the usual one that states that men cannot access their emotions because their upbringing trains them not to, and instead points out how a woman’s upbringing can make her into an automaton in the area of the emotional, acting as is expected of her without accessing what she truly feels, as if her sentient self is locked inside the hard shell of her corset. I would hazard that the encounter between these two characters had never before been written in fiction. He had a strange sensation that he was both lighthouse and bird; he was steadfast and brilliant; and at the same time he was whirled, with all other things, senseless against the glass. She could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single shape coloured upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualise it, took form as a wind scouring the flanks of northern hills, and flashing light upon cornfields and pools. This is Woolf’s longest novel at well over five hundred pages so the analysis of the characters is quite in-depth and there are plenty of plot twists, some more melodramatic than we are used to finding in Woolf. Her mission in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/116056.Night_and_Day" title="Night and Day by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">Night and Day</a> was to prove that she could write a traditional novel; she believed that she couldn’t begin to dismantle what she hadn’t yet mastered, in a similar way to an artist who first learns drawing and perspective before leaving them behind in favour of experimentation. This is also the novel that is principally responsible for Woolf’s reputation for being a snob. Katherine Mansfield maintained that it ‘reeked of intellectual snobbery’; other critics questioned the absence of any mention of the war or the wider world even though it was written during the war. One of the characters is the granddaughter of a famous poet and lives in perfect privilege. There are minute descriptions of the beautiful interior of her home, and some descriptions of houses belonging to members of other social classes as well: one memorable one describes her visit to a middle-class home where she cringes inwardly at the tasteless wallpaper and ornaments. But I trusted Woolf here, and was not surprised that it was from that very middle-class home that the most interesting character springs, or that the poet's granddaughter is eventually able to see past her petty prejudice and recognise the ferment of intellectual curiosity that fizzes forth from that shabby house. The novel was written during a period when Woolf was in very fragile health, so it is perhaps not surprising that she didn’t mention the war. In any case, her next book, <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/225396.Jacob_s_Room" title="Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">Jacob's Room</a>, would address WWI from her own unique angle.

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Piyangie

August 20 2018

Night and Day is Virginia’s attempt at reconciling the past and the present. Here Virginia Woolf submits to the traditional form of a novel. Yet this submission is qualified, for one can see the traces of stream of conscious writing which was fully developed in her later novels. Edwardian time marked a change in social perception and a deviation from rigid Victorian conventions. These changes affected the concepts of love, relationship, and marriage. In Night and Day Virginia attempts to throw some light on these slow changes that were steadily taking place. One of the unique features of Virginia Woolf is that she does not write a story. Instead, she writes about events, about places, about concepts, about moments, about feelings, about emotions. In Night and Day, she writes about the daily life of four youths, their personalities, their perceptions of love, marriage, happiness, and success. Katherine Hilbery, the protagonist, is a complex character. Her idea of a happy and successful life is to study mathematics and live in freedom. Being a privileged middle-class girl, her learnings and duties are restricted to the “drawing room”. This highly unsatisfactory life makes her unfeeling, moody, and absent-minded. Katherine finds her trapped in a love triangle but her view on marriage as an encumbrance makes her shy away from it. Even after falling in love, she contemplates an unconventional living that scandalizes her parents. William Rodney, one of the pursuers of Katherine is an unsuccessful poet. He is the traditional wing of the story. Ralph Denham, the other pursuer, is a solicitor, and he represents the modern wing. Mary Datchet, a suffragist, represents the social and political changes that are slowly coming about. The main characters of the story are in stark contrast with each other, but at the same time, they are similar in their inconsistencies and inarticulate manner of expression. Their differences as to personalities, feelings, and emotions are intensely and passionately described so that one forgets them to be fictitious. All these characters, places, moments, feelings, emotions will however be bare, if not for her beautiful writing. It’s her writing with its poetic beauty that I love the most. Night and Day, being an early work of Virginia, descriptive writing dominates although traces of stream of consciousness can be observed. But what struck me with awe is her description of emotions and feelings through symbols, colours, and landscapes. The effect had such a strong impact on me that I found myself, struck with its beauty, unable and refusing to move on. Undoubtedly Virginia’s writing is her most treasured gift to the literary world. But reading her is not easy. It is demanding, and it saps your energy. All the same, the effort is worth it. With Night and Day, I have read four of her works; and I can say each is unique and original. I feel privileged and honored to have met her through her books. Decidedly Virginia Woolf is the best literary production of the twentieth century.

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Dolors

May 12 2016

London, Early 20thC. Four characters; two men and two women, estranged by their social status but tightly knotted by the invisible strings of their restrained yearnings feature the storyline of this novel. More traditional in style and form than Woolf’s later and more exploratory works, Night and Day, as the title implies, juxtaposes the struggles of a younger generation to disengage from the corseted legacy of the Victorian era and to find a place in the shifting tides of impending modernity. The result could have easily emerged as a hybrid between a novel of manners and a romantic comedy, but in Woolf’s hands it becomes an introspective meditation on the search of identity, the fluctuating whims versus the rational expectations of human beings, of the trade-off between alienated solitude and individual freedom and a call into question of the social conventions regarding marriage and the emancipation of women. The female protagonists in Night and Day, Katharine and Mary, wish to be liberated from the imposed roles attached to their gender and, in their particular circumstances, they both ponder on the importance of having a professional career to achieve such goal, a theme that will be further developed in A Room of One’s Own, and subsequently in To the Lighthouse . As a matter of fact, there is literal association between the characters’ fleeting emotions and the flashing beams of a lighthouse that recurs throughout the text and bespeaks of sporadic moments of vision in which man and woman communicate from equal to equal through intuition rather than through verbal expression. Woolf’s prose conquers the unconquerable. Her ability to evoke the solidness of London in all its shapes, smells and sounds is simply magisterial: the Strand shrouded in misty darkness, the smoldering warmth of Mary’s fireplace, the small window of Ralph’s alcove at the top of a hill with the sparkling city sprawled out underneath, the twittering of docile sparrows that delights impromptu strollers… The precision of these static images contrasts with the fluidity of the river Thames, location where Ralph and Katharine speak freely, ignoring the constraints ascribed to their sex, role or class, giving substance to silent conversations, to things left unsaid. The characters’ inner life is minutely dissected and probed into, defying the tedium of time and the romantic idealization of the object of one’s desires until it becomes the truncal aspect of the story as it approaches a climatic, if also conventional ending. Such deliberations reminded me of D.H. Lawrence’s controversial novels, although physical intimacy is not as overtly discussed in this book. Not that it needs to be. Woolf’s prose is delectable; it flows with unfeigned sophistication, flickering with flashes of subtle irony. Her unrestrained voice calls out to the melancholic disposition of a person trapped in her own mind, a person whose poetic vision will triumph over the external hindrances of reality. It transfigures shady “dailiness” into blinding cascades of light, where words become the one and only materialization of dreams, even the ones you never had.

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Violet wells

February 18 2014

One way of describing Night and Day might be a comedy of manners without the comedy. Much of the novel takes place in a Victorian drawing room. Katherine Mansfield famously took exception to Woolf’s utter disregard of the war that had recently taken place. And it’s true there’s something distasteful about the relentless vivisection of nuanced sexual emotion that occupies much of this novel. Like Lawrence but without his vitality and flaming insights. It’s difficult to place exactly when this novel is set. There are allusions to the suffragettes but no mention of the war which is a jarring contradiction. It’s as if Woolf is warping historical context for her own artistic ends. Nothing wrong with that if the end product is successful but it just isn’t here. At times the various characters seem to be living in different centuries. The house in which Katherine, the heroine, lives is Woolf’s childhood home which would place it in the late 19th century. It’s apparently a portrait of her sister Vanessa but at this time in her life Vanessa was already ripping to shreds many of the Victorian social constraints Katherine struggles with. What Woolf is attempting to do is show through the divergence of generational social mores the transition from the Victorian to the Edwardian age, something Forster was already doing with much more subtlety. There’s little of Forster’s playful disregard for realism, his mischievous lightness of touch here. This is porridge in comparison. Katherine has two choices for a husband. William, a slave to convention and appearances and Ralph, the penniless idealist who tends to fall in love with creations of his imagination rather than flesh and blood women. Not much of a choice, in other words. It was odd to trawl through nearly 500 pages of Woolf writing about romantic sexual feeling considering how little interest she was to take in it in later life, both in literary and personal terms. I’d say she was wise to drop it as a principal theme of her writing. It’s also interesting how dismissive she was of the novel’s suffragette. There’s barely any indication in this novel that Virginia would go on to write the ground-breaking novels that followed. She had a breakdown after finishing The Voyage Out, and perhaps fearing she had ventured too far into perilous parts of her mind played it safe with this one. True, it’s a more controlled novel than her debut but essentially, it’s hard to view it as anything but much ado about next to nothing. It’s a novel the interfering Victorian aunt in this novel probably wouldn’t disapprove of. Perhaps an act of clearing out her closet and all its Victorian appendages. Katherine Mansfield did her an invaluable favour by dismissing it as decorous. It stung her into changing her entire perspective.

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Petra on hiatus - having fun in the city

March 28 2012

(With apologies to Cole Porter) Night and day you are the one Only you beneath the moon or under the sun Whether near to me or far it's no matter I struggle to get through you. By my bedside, in the kitchen I'm reading you Day and night, night and day. Why is it so that this determination to finish you Nags at me where ever I go In the roaring traffic's boom, in the silence of my lonely room I'm gritting my teeth and pressing on with you Night and day, day and night. Under the duvet, next to the hob, pulled out of my purse, There's oh such an annoying yearning burning to finish you And this torment won't be through Till I'm done with you Day and night, night and day Let's put it this way, Harlequin does it better. Who cares about 'good' writing when the story is crap, when the characterisations are stupid - men sighing and moaning around the place like lovesick pubescent girls having a crush on a boy in fourth form? How this has passed as a classic, as literature has to rest on Woolf's membership of the much-vaunted (but I've never been able to discern why) Bloomsbury Set - upperclass twits who lived off family money, wrote, painted, screwed whatever moved and made all sorts of 'modern' political pronouncements that they had no intention of ever following themselves. As does Woolf herself, displaying as it does her fake political preoccupations. She espouses feminism and work, but not for her and her friends who take tea (prepared by maids) endlessly. Those who work are to be pitied, "Mary was 25 but looked older as she was earning her own living." For one of our heroines, voluntary work proves too arduous when there are romantic problems to be pondered. Even the men give up work for country existence of the well-off or dabble at writing, even if they aren't very good at it. Snobbery abounds. "You may come from the oldest family in Devonshire but that is no reason why you can't be seen talking to me." That from one of the leisured classes. And worse, it goes on for 600 pages. Harlequin's are done in just about half that. <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="df202d96-536f-41c6-b1d3-953d1fa9976c" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="df202d96-536f-41c6-b1d3-953d1fa9976c">Truth be told, I've never read a Harlequin and refuse to even stock them. But I have seen them in the supermarket :-)</label>

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Cheryl

September 15 2014

Every now and then, when you think you’re having a busy and difficult week, you come across the book. There is an indescribable feeling you get, once you’ve come into contact with such words blended with adroitness, words which add measure to the beat of human thought through a scheme of scenes. How else does one describe the sensation one gets from a book whose author takes such a conventional story, adds psychological potency through inner thought narrative, and makes one fall in love with the English novel? It is the giddy you feel, when you’re reading about fully fleshed characters (particularly female characters of the classic novel) with diversity of mind and personality, when you can relate to a main character so wholeheartedly, even after thinking that you would most relate to her friend. It is the relief that comes not with the novel’s beginning or ending, but with what happens in between. Here, perfect sentences give way to perfect sequence and humdrum scenes turn delightful with each passing remark, each carefully thought out dialogue, for love is not about when it happens but how it happens, marriage is an idea considered, not a mere happenstance, and women are not just decorative beings, but partners, with intellectual capabilities. Are the great ones ever really about the plot alone, or is a great book a compound of narrative elements? I’m still unsure what the plot was in Proust’s <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/12749.Swann_s_Way__In_Search_of_Lost_Time___1_" title="Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1) by Marcel Proust" rel="noopener">Swann's Way</a>, or where Dostoyevsky really intended on meandering in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/4934.The_Brothers_Karamazov" title="The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky" rel="noopener">The Brothers Karamazov</a>, but like both of these books, Night and Day has left an imprint upon my reading conscience and if I were to attempt a reason, I would attribute this to the psychological adeptness of all three books. However, a much more simple answer would be this: they gave me what I needed when I most needed it, one word spoke more than a sentence. Woolf wrote this on her sick bed (where she battled depression), for "one half hour a day" (according to The Letters of Virginia Woolf), after she published <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/148905.The_Voyage_Out" title="The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">The Voyage Out</a>, and three years later, we were blessed with this masterpiece. This sentence from the novel sums it up with more fluidity than I can: <blockquote>Moments, fragments, a second of vision, and then the flying waters, the winds dissipating and dissolving; then, too, the recollection from chaos, the return of security, the earth firm, superb and brilliant in the sun.</blockquote>

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Cecily

May 13 2017

“Her words... were set down as gently and cautiously and exactly as the feet of a Persian cat stepping among china ornaments.” Woolf, writing about Katherine, could just as easily have been describing her own novel. Choices - What does it mean to be a woman today? Are love and marriage inextricably linked - and what sort of love: platonic, passionate, or both? Can men and women be intimate friends without being sexually intimate, or sexually intimate with someone they are not married to? (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098635/" rel="nofollow noopener">When Harry Met Sally</a> came to mind.) “To be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveller’s story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true.” Where do career ambitions fit? Does wedlock confine us to conventionality and stymie opportunities outside the home? Must wives submit to their husbands (as exhorted in Ephesians 5:2)? What about less orthodox relationships? How independent can a single woman be? <img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1494692789i/22741003.jpg" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"> This was written, and mostly set, in London, almost exactly a century ago, at a time of great social upheaval and uncertainty. The questions the characters agonise over are still valid, though the answers slightly different today. Although war isn’t even hinted it, this was written during WW1 and finished days after the Armistice in November 1918. Queen Victoria had died less than twenty years earlier, (some) women aged 30 and over had been given the vote in February 1918, and the importance of religion was something that could be questioned, gently. In this climate of shifting social mores, five single people in their late twenties and early thirties, in overlapping (but not equal) social circles, consider their futures. All are crippled by indecision. Uncertainty about how, when, why, who, and whether to marry, how they feel about the changing roles of men and women, issues of independence versus family obligations (as provider, or as wife and possible mother), the appeal of or need to work, and literature versus science (specifically, the secret vice of “unwomanly” maths and astronomy). “No work can equal in importance, or be so exciting as, the work of making other people do what you want them to do.” Then again, that could include the “work” of raising a child. Night and Day, Inner and Outer “A feeling of contempt and liking combine very naturally in the mind of one to whom another has just spoken unpremeditatedly, revealing rather more of his private feelings than he intended to reveal.” The title has no direct bearing on the story, but is indicative of the contrasts within: platonic versus passionate love, career and independence versus commitment and family, town versus country, moneyed versus not, and past versus future. There is a clear narrative, but much is revealed through inner thoughts (though Mrs Hilberry has a natural antipathy to introspection and Ralph Denham has no use for dreams). These insights are witty, sometimes caustic, and invariably enlightening - though more so to the reader than the person concerned. Outer actions are not necessarily clearly correlated with inner ideals. Proxies for Passion Although they are broad-minded for the period (a single woman visiting a man in his rooms at night arouses no angst, and cohabitation and three-way relationships are mooted), statues, gloves, handbag contents, flowers, and flames are also used as proxies for real feelings. Outer manifestations are sometimes veiled. Some passages were strongly reminiscent of DH Lawrence: Examples hidden for brevity; no plot spoilers. <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="fc1e8e6f-5167-4d5a-8a2b-a6c13bb9fba1" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="fc1e8e6f-5167-4d5a-8a2b-a6c13bb9fba1"> • “The very trees and the green merging into the blue distance became symbols of the vast external world which recks so little of the happiness, of the marriages or deaths of individuals… When he saw Katharine among the orchids, her beauty strangely emphasized by the fantastic plants, which seemed to peer and gape at her from striped hoods and fleshy throats, his ardor for botany waned, and a more complex feeling replaced it. She fell silent. The orchids seemed to suggest absorbing reflections. In defiance of the rules she stretched her ungloved hand and touched one… He looked at her taking in one strange shape after another with the contemplative, considering gaze of a person who sees not exactly what is before him, but gropes in regions that lie beyond it… Her still look, standing among the orchids in that hot atmosphere, strangely illustrated some scene that he had imagined in his room at home.” • “So secure did she feel with these silent shapes that she almost yielded to an impulse to say ‘I am in love with you’ aloud. The presence of this immense and enduring beauty [the Elgin Marbles] made her almost alarmingly conscious of her desire, and at the same time proud of a feeling which did not display anything like the same proportions when she was going about her daily work.” • "But he persuaded her into a broken statement, beautiful to him, charged with extreme excitement as she spoke of the dark red fire, and the smoke twined round it, making him feel that he had stepped over the threshold into the faintly lit vastness of another mind, stirring with shapes, so large, so dim, unveiling themselves only in flashes, and moving away again into the darkness, engulfed by it." </label> Biography as Metaphor While the younger generation try to make sense of the future, Mrs Hilberry tries to make sense of the past by writing a biography of her father, a famous poet. She is assisted by her daughter, Katherine, who sees the book as repayment to the world for their privileged position. But it means that, like Titus Groan, who was “suckled on shadows”, much of Katherine’s time is “spent in imagination with the dead”. But then again, perhaps the act of reading this is time spent in imagination with the dead? It is a Sisyphean and disorganised project, with difficult and unresolved decisions about what to include and what to omit, not just in terms of length and relevance, but also of privacy and propriety. The rambling draft includes: “Twenty pages upon her grandfather’s taste in hats, an essay upon contemporary china, a long account of a summer day’s expedition into the country, when they had missed their train, together with fragmentary visions of all sorts of famous men and women, which seemed to be partly imaginary and partly authentic.” Indecision - Theirs and Mine This is carefully, insightfully, and beautifully written (see quotes), but I became increasingly exasperated at the endless overwrought indecision, and even the frequency of popping in for tea began to feel clichéd. People fall in and out of love ludicrously quickly, and yet it’s painfully strung out too. They ponder the meaning and necessity of love, and whether their (current) love object is same as their imagined, idealised version of them: passion is greater in absence than reality. Some wonder about mere happiness or whether to settle for being less unhappy. They also flip-flop decisions about where to live, what job to do, and whether to go for tea. Woolf turned me into Lady Bracknell, as I recalled her comment in The Importance of Being Earnest (see my review <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/24046836" rel="nofollow noopener">here</a>) about Bunbury needing to make up his mind whether he was going to live or to die: “This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd.” Woolf created indecision in me: I loved the first third of this book: exquisite social comedy (comedy is too strong, but I’m not sure of a better word). I enjoyed the second third. But the final third was hugely disappointing: often farcical, with people behind curtains and furniture accidentally hearing crucial information. And then it redeemed itself in the final two or three pages. Hurrah for ambiguity. QUOTES Reading this was often like walking alongside a bubbling brook on a sunny day: sparking prose catching my eye at every turn. The descriptions of place (London, and people’s rooms) are especially immersive. General Quotes Hidden for brevity; no plot spoilers. <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="164d21dc-f810-4e48-a40e-df2775e4b060" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="164d21dc-f810-4e48-a40e-df2775e4b060"> • “One can’t help believing gentlemen with Roman noses, even if one meets them in omnibuses.” • “He was amused and gratified to find that he had the power to annoy his oblivious, supercilious hostess, if he could not impress her; though he would have preferred to impress her.” • “There are some books that live... They are young with us, and they grow old with us.” • “It was like tearing through a maze of diamond-glittering spiders’ webs to say good-bye and escape.” • "She pressed her eyeballs until they struck stars and suns into her darkness. She convinced herself that she was stirring among ashes." • "Why, you're nothing at all without it [marriage]; you're only half alive; using only half your faculties." Said to a woman, of course. • A “Frown of well-simulated annoyance, which presently dissolved in a kind of half-humorous, half-surly shrug, as of a large dog tormented by children who shakes his ears.” • “One of those martyred spirits to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost intolerable irritation.” • “Mary felt, at last, that she was the centre ganglion of a very fine network of nerves which fell over England, and one of these days, when she touched the heart of the system, would begin feeling and rushing together and emitting their splendid blaze of revolutionary fireworks—for some such metaphor represents what she felt about her work, when her brain had been heated by three hours of application.” • “She was much inclined to sit on into the night, spinning her light fabric of thoughts until she tired of their futility, and went to her mathematics.” • “Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.” • “Much as a literary person in like circumstances would begin, absent-mindedly, pulling out volume after volume, so she stepped into the garden in order to have the stars at hand, even though she did not look at them.” • “The first signs of spring, even such as make themselves felt towards the middle of February, not only produce little white and violet flowers in the more sheltered corners of woods and gardens, but bring to birth thoughts and desires comparable to those faintly coloured and sweetly scented petals in the minds of men and women. Lives frozen by age, so far as the present is concerned, to a hard surface, which neither reflects nor yields, at this season become soft and fluid, reflecting the shapes and colours of the present, as well as the shapes and colours of the past. In the case of Mrs. Hilbery, these early spring days were chiefly upsetting inasmuch as they caused a general quickening of her emotional powers, which, as far as the past was concerned, had never suffered much diminution. But in the spring her desire for expression invariably increased. She was haunted by the ghosts of phrases. She gave herself up to a sensual delight in the combinations of words. She sought them in the pages of her favourite authors.” • “For the more she looked into the confusion of lives which, instead of running parallel, had suddenly intersected each other, the more distinctly she seemed to convince herself that there was no other light on them than was shed by this strange illumination, and no other path save the one upon which it threw its beams.” • “She needed nothing that he could give her.” • “He wished to keep this distance between them—the distance which separates the devotee from the image in the shrine.” • “There were ghosts in the room, and one, strangely and sadly, was the ghost of herself.” </label> Edwardian London - Quotes <img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1494692789i/22741004._SX540_.jpg" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"> Hidden for brevity; no plot spoilers. <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="f887da4e-88e9-4ff6-9b1f-b18ac4e395e3" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="f887da4e-88e9-4ff6-9b1f-b18ac4e395e3"> • “Breathing raw fog, and in contact with unpolished people who only wanted their share of the pavement.” • “They looked… first at the hard silver moon, stationary among a hurry of little grey-blue clouds, and then down the roofs of London, with all their upright chimneys, and then below them at the empty moonlit pavement of the street, upon which the joint of each paving-stone was clearly marked out.” • “When the traffic thins away, the walker becomes conscious of the moon in the street, as if the curtains of the sky had been drawn apart, and the heaven lay bare, as it does in the country.” • “London, in the first days of spring, has buds that open and flowers that suddenly shake their petals—white, purple, or crimson—in competition with the display in the garden beds, although these city flowers are merely so many doors flung wide in Bond Street and the neighbourhood, inviting you to look at a picture, or hear a symphony, or merely crowd and crush yourself among all sorts of vocal, excitable, brightly coloured human beings. But, all the same, it is no mean rival to the quieter process of vegetable florescence. Whether or not there is a generous motive at the root, a desire to share and impart, or whether the animation is purely that of insensate fervour and friction, the effect, while it lasts, certainly encourages those who are young, and those who are ignorant, to think the world one great bazaar, with banners fluttering and divans heaped with spoils from every quarter of the globe for their delight.” • “The blend of daylight and of lamplight made her an invisible spectator, just as it gave the people who passed her a semi-transparent quality, and left the faces pale ivory ovals in which the eyes alone were dark. They tended the enormous rush of the current—the great flow, the deep stream, the unquenchable tide. She stood unobserved and absorbed, glorying openly in the rapture that had run subterraneously all day.” </label> People Revealed by their Rooms - Quotes Hidden for brevity; no plot spoilers. <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="981e881b-821c-416b-89bd-07fe6289009a" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="981e881b-821c-416b-89bd-07fe6289009a"> • “The room of a person [Rodney] who cherishes a great many personal tastes, guarding them from the rough blasts of the public with scrupulous attention.” • “The room, with its combination of luxury and bareness, its silk dressing-gowns and crimson slippers, its shabby carpet and bare walls, had a powerful air of Katharine herself.” • "Cassandra began to take down the books which stood in a row upon the shelf above the bed. In most houses this shelf is the ledge upon which the last relics of religious belief lodge themselves as if, late at night, in the heart of privacy, people, sceptical by day, find solace in sipping one draught of the old charm for such sorrows or perplexities as may steal from their hiding-places in the dark. But there was no hymn-book here. " • “The unsparing light revealed more ugliness than Katharine had seen in one room for a very long time. It was the ugliness of enormous folds of brown material, looped and festooned, of plush curtains, from which depended balls and fringes, partially concealing bookshelves swollen with black school-texts.” </label> Key Characters Hidden for brevity; no plot spoilers. <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="e08cb620-9466-4940-b148-dff2bf9489f4" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="e08cb620-9466-4940-b148-dff2bf9489f4">There are five main, intertwined protagonists. Katherine Hilberry is very self-contained, something of a loner, yet she is the flame to which the other characters are repeatedly drawn. She is loosely based on Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell. She is contrasted with her Lincolnshire cousin, Cassandra Otway, who is younger, but more Victorian. Whereas Katherine is an only child, Cassandra is one of a dozen, and though her father is titled, they are no longer wealthy. “Where Katharine was simple, Cassandra was complex; where Katharine was solid and direct, Cassandra was vague and evasive. In short, they represented very well the manly and the womanly sides of the feminine nature.” The men are Ralph Denham and William Rodney. The former is a young lawyer of “eccentric” hobbies (bulldogs, wildflowers, and heraldry), supporting his widowed mother and siblings. The latter is a stuffier, wealthier (though not hugely successful) writer of plays and poems. And among them all is Mary Datchet, a Lincolnshire vicar’s daughter, living alone in London, passionately committed to her work for a women’s suffrage campaign. </label> Image Sources • Woman considering options: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://w4wn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Decision-Making-300x193.jpg">http://w4wn.com/wp-content/uploads/20...</a> • London in the style of (Victorian) artist Atkinson Grimshaw, by William Dudley: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://gerrie-thefriendlyghost.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/around-antwerpen-school-of-printmaking_14.html">http://gerrie-thefriendlyghost.blogsp...</a> Tl;dnr As Apatt suggests in a comment below, this is a feminist novel, but it's not a strident or preachy one. It predates common use of the term, but all the main characters are reassessing the evolving roles of women and men. There is no simple answer to the dilemma of marriage and domesticity versus independence, but if Woolf is to be believed, literature (especially Shakespeare) and tea will fix most things.</["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]>

L

Lisa

July 04 2020

Night And Day by Virginia Woolf reminds me of Picasso's Blue and Pink Period. Left behind is the "grand European history painting", and all the characters appear slightly blue, with a touch of rose. You sense that something new is coming, lurking in the shadows, waiting to erupt at full force. But it is not QUITE there yet. The composition still owes its construction to the old-fashioned ideals of the human body and mind as a whole and complete unity in time and space. As you are trained in Art History, you KNOW that cubism is next in line, that the expressive modernism is hiding under the surface, already showing signs of developing prematurely in some scenes and sentences. And yet, cubism is still in the future, and the present is a play on classical Goethe's theme in the Elective Affinities. The Elective Dissonances - the next step towards modernism - are not for William and Ralph, Katherine and Cassandra. But they know they play a game that has lost its charm, and they are accordingly confused. As is the reader ... torn between the knowledge of Virginia Woolf's Roaring Twenties and the actual book, a blue and pink arrangement: pleasant and terribly well-constructed but not overwhelming - yet! Why do I seem to keep talking about something a bit off-topic, but touching it ever so lightly in a metaphorical way? Was it the essence of the book that struck me as pretend-playing with fire without getting burnt? Avoiding a critique of the book is a summary of its effect on me? A question mark that saves the day? YES!

H

Helle

May 12 2016

‘There are some books that LIVE’, she mused. ‘They are young with us, and they grow old with us’. Mrs. Hilbery, of course, is quite right about that. And this was one such book for me, I suspect. At least, I feel now, upon closing it, that it reached the span of my years and, quite unexpectedly, understood me. The first half was a bit tame to me. There was no narrative to speak of. The characters seemed mere ideas, though with occasional meaningful conversations. This set the scene for the second half, however, and something happened about half way through for me. Suddenly much of the wisdom in the novel felt too close for comfort; many times one of the characters said or thought things that were disconcertingly close to my own life (now or previously), and I found myself exclaiming, ‘I’ve felt exactly that!’ and ‘That’s been my dilemma, too!’ Woolf has reached into the depths of her understanding of human beings in this novel, and once I realized that that was what this novel uniquely had to offer me, I submerged myself in her voice. Unlike her more experimental novels, there is a (faint) storyline in this novel, along which Woolf has strewn her usual graceful words, which I obediently followed and cherished. I (mostly) listened to the novel, which is apparently (and clearly) the most autobiographical of her works, as I cycled through town, spring having finally decided to make an entrance in my northern country, and as I went about in my garden. The mellifluous, fragile voice of Juliet Stephenson was perfect for Woolf’s words - soothing when surrounded by urban noises, like gliding into a cool pool after a hot day; perfect for walking in a garden at dusk; an almost sensory experience. Virginia Woolf explores the nature of work here, of human relationships – especially romantic ones but also the relation with oneself, of family, of all connections to things that we come to see as meaningful in our own lives. There was something between the pages of this novel which made me feel strangely seen, an experience that doesn’t occur often to me and which is of course entirely dependent on our own mental luggage. Night and Day is that of Woolf’s novels which reminds me most of Forster’s books, who, as friend and fellow member of the Bloomsbury group, of course read all her books, and she his. There is, perhaps, even a tiny nod to Jane Austen, whom Woolf loved, in the storyline (who is to have whom?) and in the characters of Katherine Hilbery (who reminded me a bit of some of Austen’s most stubborn heroines (Elizabeth Bennett and Emma) and her delightful mother, Mrs. Hilbery (who, to me, was much more likeable than most of Austen’s mothers, but the caricature was there; she absolutely adores Shakespeare and is forever quoting or mentioning him, probably echoing Woolf’s own love of the Bard). It was the first of Woolf’s novels that didn’t perplex me or frustrate me or make me feel inept at seeing her brilliance. Here I see it (as she sees my flaws), and I think that this, though her longest novel (which teeters on the brink of being long-winded), might be a good place to start for anyone who has yet to try reading her. It is, in some ways, a fictionalized version of the motif of ‘a room of one’s own’. Strangely, some (incl. Katherine Mansfield) considered this novel a product of Woolf’s snobbery. I don’t see that. But I do see a sharp mind, a bookish mind, a mind which juxtaposes different characters and personalities and, thus, shows truths about human foibles. That, surely, is intelligence. Words I have come to associate with Virginia Woolf and which cropped up multiple times in this novel: alternately, omnibus, lamentable/y, truth, waves, garden, lighthouse, embankment, the dome of St. Paul’s. Life. Apart from the adverbs, clearly these words make up the fabric of her novels and/or part of the (London) backdrop that many of her novels are set in. ‘It’s life that matters, nothing but life – the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process’, said Katherine (…), ‘not the discovery itself at all.’

R

Roman Clodia

February 16 2023

<blockquote>'We want to meet as often as we like, but to be free,' Katherine continued.</blockquote> Woolf's second novel, this has a distinct <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/29777271.A_Midsummer_Night_s_Dream" title="A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare" rel="noopener">A Midsummer Night's Dream</a> vibe about it as not four but five lovers enact a merry-go-round of desire. That five, a number which upsets the even pairings, is important as Woolf, typically, upstages the English tradition and only uses 'the marriage plot' in order to unsettle it. This is a book full of literary influences in both content and style: we can find Henry James' forensic analysis of character and emotion, Jane Austen's satirical social commentary, George Eliot's concern with politics and the individual, all melded here to form probably Woolf's most conventional and, thus, accessible novel. But what upends the tradition to which she is gesturing back is a modern sensibility: Katherine Hilbery (loosely based on Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell) doesn't want to get married at the start of the book, yearns for a solitary cottage (ahead of <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/18521.A_Room_of_One_s_Own" title="A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">A Room of One's Own</a>) where she can be freed from the burdens of family and expectation and study maths and astronomy. Even when she does find love, her struggle is how to have a marriage and a sense of an independent self. Alongside Katherine, we find Mary Datchett: educated and part of a radical political set who works for the suffragist cause. <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="2a8256f0-1b91-4ae1-beb6-0ea49db9e813" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="2a8256f0-1b91-4ae1-beb6-0ea49db9e813">Mary ends up without the man she loves and the book offers up a view of her in her rooms, all the lights blazing into the night - but alight with energy and political fire... or displacement for love? We never get to find out for sure.</label> The style tends to a Jamesian close 3rd person, not slipping into stream of consciousness, but certainly giving us a sense of the interiority of the main characters. And we also find Woolf's modernist dispensation of a plot - there is movement but it consists more of moments, scenes and dialogues or confrontations, rather than actions that moves along a storyline. The book is probably too long - but it shows Woolf at her lightest with lots of wit and sly humour.

Night and Day

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Night and Day Reviews (629)