Only the beauty of Virginia Woolf's fine prose managed to pull me through this wholly conventional novel. It surprised me just how conventional Night and Day is, given the interesting narrative subversions of her previous (and first) novel The Voyage Out. I'm not sure if Woolf was aiming for some kind of mainstream success or trying not to offend anyone, but the utter predictability and ordinariness if this story, its characters, and the novel's narrative style disallowed more than a passing interest in any of these elements. There was some odd variations in tone, too--veering from what appeared to be serious descriptions of lover's rapture to character parodies, none of which really payed off at either extreme. The novel was best when it merely presented the acts and facts of the characters' struggles to get on with the day-to-day. But 500 pages are a lot to read about privileged and middle class Londoners of the 1890s having minor love problems. There were some politics brought in, but nothing about them even remotely prescriptive or controversial, so even that fizzled as a sub-theme or plot, leaving the reader saddled with the stiffest lovers ever to be featured in a novel--seriously emotionally repressed British types with no George Emerson to stir things up. The plot lacked the color or characters of Forrester, the irony that Henry James or Edith Wharton would have given the story, or even the bells and whistles that some of the other, flashier modernists like Hemingway or Jean Rhys narrative style might have done for it. Somehow Virginia's heart just didn't seem to be in this one. Well, on to Jacob's Room, which I've read before, but of which I remember very little.