Dave's Book Blog: "Night and Day" by Virginia Woolf

This novel was published in 1919. Woolf published Mrs Dalloway in 1925. What a difference! Mrs D is stream of consciousness; in contrast Night and Day seems Victorian and Woolf's trademark lyricism repeatedly tips over into melodrama.

It is written in the third person omniscient, though usually from the point of view of one of the main characters, and in the past tense.

Katherine Hilbery is the grand-daughter of a famous poet. Her father edits a Review. Her mother is writing the poet's biography, with Katherine's help. The family hosts tea parties where eminent novelists (eg Mr Fortescue who might be a portrait of E M Forster) pontificate. Very Bloomsbury! We are instantly in a world of privilege.

The initiating incident is when young Ralph Denham (usually referred to by his surname), a solicitor's clerk with a desire to be better cultured - just like Leonard Bast in Howards End - attends the tea party. He is gauche, but instantly falls in love with Katherine.

The plot then flows like that of a Midsummer Night's Dream. There are two pairs of lovers and, almost inevitably he fancies her but she doesn't fancy him and the other he fancies her but she doesn't fancy him either - or does she? - and the other he fancies him but knows that he fancies someone else. This set up starts when the four young people all wander into the 'enchanted forest' of Lincoln and its surroundings, where they meet by accident. Katherine regularly changes her mind.

Of course we have to throw obstacles in the way of a resolution. Despite the characters thinking they are aware of what another is thinking, there must be opportunities for misunderstanding, such as a conversation held outside in which the wind snatches words away leaving ambiguous sentence fragments. Unbelievably, one resolution is achieved through a Shakespearean cliche when one of the characters overhears a conversation between two others while hiding behind a curtain.

There are some passages when Woolf abandons herself to Victorian baroque:

“The smaller room was something like a chapel in a cathedral, or a grotto in a cave, for the booming sound of the traffic in the distance suggested the soft surge of waters, and the oval mirrors, with their silver surface, were like deep pools trembling beneath starlight. But the comparison to a religious temple of some kind was the more apt of the two, for the little room was crowded with relics.” (Ch 1)
“She no longer completely possessed her love, since her share in it was doubtful; and now, to make things yet more bitter, her Clear Vision of the way to face life was rendered tremulous and uncertain, because another was witness of it. Feeling her desire for the old unshared intimacy too great to be born without tears, she rose, walked to the farther end of the room, held the curtains apart, and stood there mastered from a moment. The grief itself was not ignoble; the sting of it lay in the fact that she had been led to this act of treachery against herself. Trapped, cheated, robbed, first by Ralph and then by Katharine, she seemed all dissolved in humiliation, and bereft of anything she could call her own. Tears of weakness welled up and rolled down her cheeks.” (Ch 21)
“She had gone without speaking; abruptly a chasm had been cut in his course, down which the tide of his being plunged in disorder; fell upon rocks; flung itself to destruction. The distress had an effect of physical ruin and disaster. He trembled; he was white; he felt exhausted, as if by a great physical effort.” (Ch 28)
“But gaining upon this clearness of sight against her will, and to her dislike, was a flood of confusion, of relief, of certainty, of humility, of desire no longer to strive and to discriminate, yielding to which, she let herself sink within his arms and confessed her love.” (Ch 31)

As ever, with Woolf, there is an atmosphere of cultural elitism which can become outright intellectual snobbery:

“‘No one ever does do anything worth doing nowadays,’ she remarked. ... ‘No, we haven't any great men,’ Denham replied.” (Ch 1)
"The Baskerville Congreve ... I couldn't read him in a cheap edition." (Ch 6)
“‘The office atmosphere is very bad for the soul ... Still, if the clerks read poetry there must be something nice about them.’ ‘No, because they don't read it as we read it.’” (Ch 7)
“She ought to be given the chance of hearing good music, as it is played by those who have inherited the great tradition.” (Ch 22)

When Denham, disappointed in love, decides to live as a hermit is seems utterly inevitable that he intends to write a book.

I suppose you can't blame Virginia. Write what you know, they say, and she lived in a very precious bubble.

But it is fascinating to wonder what happened to Virginia in those six years between 1919 and 1925 which so changed her writing. What were her influences? I can only point to the Stream of Consciousness pioneers. Dorothy Richardson had been publishing since 1915 (Pointed Roofs) but I don't know whether (or when) Woolf read her. We do know she read (and didn't like, possibly for reasons of snobbery) Ulysses by James Joyce and given that Mrs Dalloway is, like Ulysses, about people wandering around a city and occasionally interacting, it seems a likely influence. We also know she started reading Proust in 1922. I wonder if she also was influenced by the modernist short stories of her friend (at the time) Katherine Mansfield?

The Characters

Katherine Hilbery

The main character. Her secret passion is maths. She spends much of her time flip-flopping about whether she is in love, and if so with whom.

Mary Datchet

One if many children of a vicar, she lives in a flat on the Strand and works (unpaid; I'm not quite sure how she makes ends meet) on a committee promoting women's suffrage. She holds meetings in her rooms. At one of these Mr Rodney reads a paper about the use of metaphor in Elizabethan poetry. Mary is good sense personified.

Ralph Denham

The Leonard Bast character, the disrupting influence, Ralph is a poor boy who aspires to be posh but never quite fits in because he doesn't have good breeding. He wants to watch birds rather than shoot them! “He had always made plans since he was a small boy; for poverty, and the fact that he was the eldest son of a large family, had given him the habit of thinking of spring and summer, autumn and winter, as so many stages in a prolonged campaign.” (Ch 2)
“Denham was ... too positive, as to what was right and what wrong. ... He appeared to be a rather hard and self-sufficient young man, with a queer temper, and manners that were uncompromisingly abrupt, who was consumed with a desire to get on in the world, which was natural ... but not engaging." (Ch 10)

Somewhat improbably, in chapter 28 we discover that Ralph isn't quite sure of how many brothers and sisters he has; "Six or seven", he thinks.

William Rodney

Both fool and villain, Rodney is a playwright and poet of skill but no talent whose behaviour with the women he loves is patronising and controlling.

“By profession a clerk in a government office, he was one of those martyred spirits to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost intolerable irritation. Not content to rest in their love of it, they must attempt to practice it themselves, and they are generally endowed with very little facility in composition." (Ch 4)

Minor characters

Mrs Hilbery, Katharine's mother, is a scatterbrain who can never settle to anything without being sidetracked.
Aunt Celia is the childless, self-appointed guardian of the family morals.

Selected quotes:

“It may be said, indeed, that English society being what it is, no very great merit is required, once you bear a well-known name, to put you in the position where it is easier on the whole to be imminent then obscure. ... and when one of them dies the chances are that another writes his biography.” (Ch 3)
“Beneath all her education she preserved the anxieties of one who owns china.” (Ch 4)
“The night was very still, and on such nights, 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.” (Ch 5)
“Katharine’s ignorance of Shakespeare did not prevent her feeding fairly certain that plays should not produce a sense of chill stupor in the audience, such as overcame her as the lines flowed on, sometimes long and sometimes short, but always delivered with the same lilt of voice, which seemed to nail each line firmly onto the same spot in the hearer's brain.” (Ch 11)
“We want some one to show us what a good man can be. We have Laura and Beatrice, Antigone and Cordelia, but we have no heroic man.” (Ch 12)
“He snuffed the air, and felt more keenly than he had done for many weeks the pleasure of owning a body.” (Ch 15)
“She spent most of her time in pretending to herself and her neighbours that she was a dignified, important, much-occupied person, of considerable social standing and sufficient wealth. In view of the actual state of things this game needed a great deal of skill; and, perhaps, at the age she had reached ... she played far more to deceive herself than to deceive any one else.” (Ch 17)
“As so often happens in these large families, a distinct dividing-line could be traced, about half-way in the succession, where the money for educational purposes had run short, and the six younger children had grown up far more economically than the elder.” (Ch 17)
“If you can give way to your husband ... a happy marriage is the happiest thing in the world.” (Ch 17)
“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 with the story can be true.” (Ch 17)
“The best of life is built on what we say when we're in love.” (Ch 24)
“She thought gloomily of her loneliness, of life's futility, of the barren prose of reality ... and the unfinished book.” (Ch 27)