Her manifesto on modern writing, “Modern Novels,” appears in the Times Literary Supplement.  She and Leonard buy Monks House in Rodmell, a small village on the River Ouse in southern England.

1921   Hogarth publishes a collection of Virginia’s short stories, Monday or Tuesday. 
1922   The Hogarth Press publishes Virginia’s novel Jacob’s Room  and also begins to release works by Freud. Virginia meets Vita Sackville-West; the two will become lovers in 1925.
1923   British writer Katherine Mansfield dies. 
1925   Hogarth publishes Virginia’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, whose characters first appear in less sympathetic form in The Voyage Out. Her volume of essays The Common Reader  appears.
1927  To the Lighthouse,  arguably Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, is published; characters in the novel are based on her own family.
1928  Orlando: A Biography,  a novel inspired by Sackville-West, is published.
1929   The influential feminist book A Room of One’s Own  appears. Two of its most important themes are financial independence for women and the need for a private space in which to work.
1931   Virginia’s novel The Waves  is published.

1932   Lytton Strachey dies. Virginia publishes her essay “A Letter to a Young Poet” and The Common Reader: Second Series. 
1933  Flush: A Biography,  a fictional life of English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, is published.
1934   Roger Fry dies. 
1935   Leonard and Virginia visit Nazi Germany. Her play Fresh water,   a comedy based on the life of her great aunt, is performed in Vanessa Bell’s studio.
1937   Virginia Woolf’s novel The Years  is published.
1938  Three Guineas,  her second feminist work, is published.
1939   On September 3 Britain and France declare war on Germany. Living mostly in Rodmell, Leonard and Virginia make a plan to commit suicide in the event of an invasion. 
1940   Virginia publishes Roger Fry’s biography. Amid air raids and the threat of invasion, she finishes her eighth novel, Between the Acts.  Her chronic depression and the strain of war propel her on a downward spiral.
1941   On March 28, after writing a note to her husband, Virginia Woolf fills her pockets with stones and drowns herself in the River Ouse. Between the Acts  is published posthumously.

INTRODUCTION

For even the most ardent devotee of modern literature, the title Night and Day is likely to bring to mind Fred Astaire professing undying love—courtesy of Cole Porter—to Ginger Rogers in the 1934 film The Gay Divorcee, rather than Virginia Woolf ’s novel, her second, published in 1919. Since the book appeared, it has been the frequent target of mockery, scorn, and incomprehension—if people have paid attention to it at all. Shortly after its publication, fellow novelist Katherine Mansfield criticized the book’s “aloofness” and “air of quiet perfection,” lamented its indifference to the Great War, and incredulously exclaimed, “a novel in the tradition of the English novel... we had never thought to look upon its like again!” Woolf’s friend E. M. Forster wrote of the “normalised and dulled” style of the novel in his short book about her, published a year after her death. Critic D. S. Savage found it the “dullest novel in the English language.” And Woolf herself called it “interminable” and marveled in a 1938 letter to her friend Ottoline Morrell, “I can’t believe any human being can get through Night and Day.”

It is true that readers opening the book expecting the stylistic fireworks and structural innovations of Woolf ’s later novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931) will be sorely disappointed. For at first glance, the plot of Night and Day—a young woman choosing between two suitors—is indeed simple and old-fashioned, the very sort of thing Woolf would take to task in her essays on modern fiction, and its lucid, straightforward style offers only the slenderest hints of what would follow.

So why read Night and Day? Although it is among the most consistently neglected of modern novels, it is also one of the most sadly underrated; and readers willing to set aside their expectations for a “typical” Woolf novel will be rewarded in an almost embarrassing variety of ways. They will see Woolf transfiguring people and events from her own life—her family, her marriage, her involvement in the struggle for women’s equality—into vibrant and compelling fictional form. They will watch as she turns, as Jane Austen had done before her, the “universal truth” that young women need husbands from a stale plot device into an uncertain proposition to be undermined from within. They will take pleasure in her wickedly satirical wit and her vivid descriptions of London crowds, the English countryside, and the burning political issues of the day. They will wait in suspense as she searches for a sustainable modern love, a way for women to possess both husbands and independence. And they will enjoy some of the most richly complex and intriguing characters she ever created.


When Woolf began writing Night and Day in late 1914 or early 1915, she had already published one novel, The Voyage Out (1915), as well as many essays and reviews. But she had been ill for several years, and had succumbed to a major breakdown in the first months of 1915. Work offered her a new kind of “voyage out”; as she poignantly admitted in 1930 to her friend Ethel Smyth, she started a new novel largely to keep herself healthy and distracted:

I was so tremblingly afraid of my own insanity that I wrote Night and Day mainly to prove to my own satisfaction that I could keep entirely off that dangerous ground. I wrote it, lying in bed, allowed to write only for one half hour a day (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, p. 231; see “For Further Reading”).

Initially Woolf intended the novel to be a sweeping study of three generations—the great Victorian poet Richard Alardyce, his daughter Mrs. Hilbery, and her daughter Katharine—but she soon decided to focus more closely on Katharine, her relationship to her family and her courtship by two very different men.