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Night and Day (DUCKWORTH) is the title of VIRGINIA WOOLF’S last book; but there is no night for the author’s clarity of vision, or her cleverness in describing every detail she has seen, or her delicate precision of style; there is only daylight, temperate, pervading, but at times, I am afraid, almost irritatingly calm.  “Give me one indiscretion of sympathy or emotion on behalf of your characters,” the reader is tempted to implore her; “let me feel that you are a little bit excited about them and I shall feel excited too.”  The story, after all, is the simple one (to put it in the shudderingly crude language of former days) of a girl’s change of heart from an unreal love to one of whose sincerity she eventually convinces herself. Katharine Hilbery, the granddaughter of a great poet, brought up by a father whose only interest is in literature, and a charming mother who wanders in fields of Victorian romance, breaks off her engagement with a civil servant who has more taste than talent for letters, and chooses instead a man slightly below her in social position, but with firmness and decision of character and genuine skill in—­what?  Ironmongery?  No, literature.  All through the book I found myself wondering whether a mind so finely tempered as Katharine’s, a perception so acute, was really fitted for anything so commonplace as, after all, love is.  And I longed for the authoress, who explained every mood so amazingly well, to explain this too.

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Mrs. NORRIS is evidently a specialist in unconventional situations.  In her last novel her theme was the intrigue between a man and his step-mother.  In Sisters (MURRAY) it is the passion of a man for his living wife’s married sister, and in neither case does the author seem to be conscious of anything out of the ordinary.  Not that there is any air of naughtiness about the business. Peter, a rich cripple, loved Cherry, the youngest and prettiest of the three Strickland girls.  But Martin, a casual impecunious stranger, stepped in and took her in one bite before Peter could quite realise she was no longer a child.  So in default he married Alix, who was, incidentally, worth six of her.  Meeting his Cherry, disillusioned about an unsatisfactory and unsuccessful Martin, he reaches out his hand for this forbidden fruit.  Whereupon Alix, the selfless, drives herself and Martin over a cliff by way of making things smooth for Peter and Cherry, which was inconsiderate, if resourceful; for, while Alix is happily killed, poor Martin only breaks his back, so that all may end with the balance on the credit side of the Recording Angel’s ledger with Cherry nursing her hopeless invalid.  An unlikely story, pleasantly and competently told.

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