Night and Day

—from the New Yorker (March 6, 1954)

Questions

1. What is the problem in Night and Day? Is it in Katharine? In the men she knows or in men in general? In the manners and morals of her time and place? In the human condition?

2. Some of Woolf’s contemporaries described the novel as aloof, distant, classical. Is there anything in the novel that reveals the author’s relation to her material? Can you see Woolf in the book?

3. The courtship between Katharine and Ralph, writes Rachel Wetzsteon in the introduction to this edition, “results in some of the most ravishing passages in the novel, and one of the most moving accounts ever written of being in love” (see p. xxi). What in these passages, in either the style or the content, might Wetzsteon be referring to?

4. Do you sympathize with Katharine? Is one’s sympathy or lack of sympathy for Katharine likely to depend on whether one is a man or a woman? Could Night and Day be fairly described as a feminist novel?

FOR FURTHER READING

Works by Virginia Woolf

BOOKS PUBLISHED DURING WOOLF’S LIFETIME

The Voyage Out. London: Duckworth, 1915.

Night and Day. London: Duckworth, 1919.

Monday or Tuesday. London: Hogarth Press, 1921.

Jacob’s Room. London: Hogarth Press, 1922.

The Common Reader. London: Hogarth Press, 1925.

Mrs. Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press, 1925.

To the Lighthouse. London: Hogarth Press, 1927.

Orlando: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1928.

A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929.

The Waves. London: Hogarth Press, 1931.

The Common Reader: Second Series. London: Hogarth Press, 1932.

Flush: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1933.

The Years. London: Hogarth Press, 1937.

Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press, 1938.

Roger Fry: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1940.

OTHER WORKS

Between the Acts. London: Hogarth Press, 1941.

Collected Essays. Edited by Leonard Woolf. 4 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1966, 1967.

The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1975-1980.

Freshwater: A Comedy. Edited by Lucio Ruotolo. London: Hogarth Press, 1976. A play.

Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind. London: Chatto and Windus, 1976.

The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1977.

Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks. Edited by Brenda R. Silver. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.

The Complete Shorter Fiction. Edited by Susan Dick. London: Hogarth Press, 1985.

The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Andrew McNeillie. 4 vols. of a projected 6. London: Hogarth Press, 1986—.

A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909. Edited by Mitchell A. Leaska. London: Hogarth Press, 1990.

BIOGRAPHY AND BACKGROUND

Annan, Noel. Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984.

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. 2 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1972. The first major study of Woolf’s life, written by her nephew.

Bishop, Edward. A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1989.

Boyd, Elizabeth French. Bloomsbury Heritage: Their Mothers and Their Aunts. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976.

Dunn, Jane. A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990.

Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. The most thorough biography to date.

Marcus, Jane, ed. Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1987. Several useful chapters on Bloomsbury members.