Night and Day by Virginia Woolf

Lauren Groff, in her excellent essay on Virginia Woolf's second novel, Night and Day, compares it to the drawings Picasso did as a young man. Picasso's draftsmanship was not revolutionary; it was, however, superb: evidence that he had mastered the tradition. In much the same way, Woolf's novel is evidence that she was more than competent in the tradition that gave us the novels of Henry James and of Woolf's friend E.M. Forster. Like Picasso, she would go on to break the traditional mold.

Night and Day is not as formally adventurous as her later work. It is, though, daring in its vision of English society moving from the Victorian era to the Edwardian, and especially what that might mean for women. The two women around whom the novel revolves, Katherine Hilbery and Mary Datchet, struggle to see how to live in the new world they are entering. Katherine, the granddaughter of a famous poet comes from a family that might now be called "bourgeois bohemian." They have enough money to live comfortably without sullying themselves with what the rest of us might recognize as work. Mary Datchet seems also to come from a comfortable background, but unlike Katherine, she has chosen to work: She is a secretary at an organization fighting for women's suffrage. Katherine and Mary are in love with the same man. Mary realizes in the end that her work—a room of her own— is more important to her than love. Hilbery opts for love, but the love relationship she enters into will look very different from that of the previous generation. It will, we are lead to believe, be something like a partnership of equals.

Much of the novel, particularly in its first half, is a kind of comedy of manners and Woolf certainly does that as well as Forster. In the second half there are flashes of the kind of modernist brilliance that would characterize her later work. I look forward to moving on to that work.