Night and Day: A Novel Summary
Virginia Woolf

Night and Day: A Novel Overview

Virginia Woolf's second novel, Night and Day, follows the privileged Katherine Hilbery as she navigates her way through the expectations placed on young single women at the beginning of the twentieth century. Told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, Katherine's story is one that explores a number of potential futures, some characterized by love and companionship, some by obedience and domesticity, and some by labor and independence. As she teeters back and forth between an engagement to the well-respected poet William Rodney and a budding relationship with middle-class lawyer Ralph Denham, Katherine must decide whether her own desires correlate with those of her wealthy family or with the changing social landscape of late nineteenth century London. Bearing witness to a number of women across generations, including her own mother Margaret and suffragist worker Mary Datchet, Katherine inhabits a unique position of social suspension which she is tasked with mobilizing into a future that is both socially respectable and personally fulfilling.