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 [b:Night and Day|116056|Night and Day|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1368337020s/116056.jpg|1019503] 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, [b:Jacob's Room|225396|Jacob's Room|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388466257s/225396.jpg|3272732], would address WWI from her own unique angle.

this review is for the audiobook edition, narrated by juliet stevenson.

okay... those who know me know that the novel that make me the crankiest is woolf's [b:Mrs. Dalloway|14942|Mrs. Dalloway|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1479336522s/14942.jpg|841320]. i realize that this is not the general consensus, and i tried to truly appreciate the book. i just could not. but i i have always intended to try woolf again. night and day kind of ticked all the boxes for me in its description, and had the benefit of being published before mrs. dalloway, and before the stream-of-consciousness style really took hold.

the good:
• juliet stevenson is an excellent narrator. i believe she made me care about the story more than if i had i read it in print.
• i was fully able to appreciate woolf's writing. her writing is elegant.

the not-so-good:
• i just didn't feel much for these characters at all and, consequently, struggled to get into the story. as happened with mrs. dalloway, i felt irritated while reading, and couldn't muster empathy.

i had high hopes for this novel and wish it had gone better for me.

Night and Day was an incredibly detailed study of four people - Mary, Katherine, Ralph and Rodney - as they negotiate their feelings for each other, their family and the world around them during pre-WWI England. Not at all surprising, the writing is stunningly impressive. Woolf expressed the minutest of feelings as vividly as setting and imagery, to the point where individual reflection felt like settings in and of themselves at times. And of course, the main characters fell into and out of love with one another at varying points in the book, lending a drop of Shakespearean comedy (of the Midsummer Night’s Dream variety) to an otherwise serious portrayal of changing and unpredictable emotions. The book can go on at times, and complaints that the content does not justify the length are not unfounded, but I personally did not mind spending more time than necessary with such insightful and expressive prose :-)

This feels like a very different Woolf novel, and one I attempted to read on numerous occasions and am so grateful I finally got into it! Her prose is truly delicious and only Woolf could describe choosing different roads to walk down in London to bring about different types of thoughts and feelings or that plants in Kew Gardens gape and peer at the beauty of the protagonist, each flower suggesting her different types of thoughts. So so stunning :)

This book started out dreadfully slow. Though it was quite different from Virginia Woolf's other novels, I approached this novel with a similar sort of skepticism that I did her others. It is hard for me to look at any of Woolf's novel and see a clear "point" that is not buried under deflection or prose. Surprisingly this novel is very clear--and that was refreshing. Without worrying about missing or misunderstanding, I was able to enjoy the plot, the beautiful prose. I felt that of all her novels I've read thus far (Voyage out, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse), the characters in this one were true characters with complexities and good points and faults, not just caricatures designed to symbolize some abstract purpose.

So to my surprise, I really enjoyed this book, particularly the latter half. I came to actually like Kathrine, though she is not a particularly sympathetic heroine, and I really liked Mary and Ralph. Even William, despite his many faults.

Overall, a good story with some of the most beautiful English prose I've ever read. She has a way of writing that captures the wild mess of human existence perfectly and in the way I feel it.

This book echoes my own love life, showing a different shade of it. Woolf is a genius. I will read this book again.