Despite a major relapse in February 1916, and her fear (as she confessed to her friend Lytton Strachey) “of finishing a book on this method—I write one sentence—the clock strikes—Leonard appears with a glass of milk,” she made steady progress on the manuscript, and by March 1917 she was “well past 100,000 words.” Night and Day was finished in late 1918 and published by Duckworth the following October.

The novel’s heroine, Katharine Hilbery, has much in common with Woolf, particularly her upbringing in an exceedingly literary household. Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), was one of the most distinguished men of letters of the Victorian era, the first editor of the vastly influential Dictionary of National Biography, and the frequent host, at the Stephens’ Kensington residence, to a galaxy of some of the brightest stars in the British cultural firmament. Katharine’s grandfather Richard Alardyce—on whose biography Katharine and her mother labor throughout the novel—is a Victorian of comparable eminence, and the Hilbery house, as the first chapter reveals, remains a place where writers and artists come together for conversation and refreshment. Mr. Hilbery’s literary bent—he edits the fictitious Critical Review—gives him a certain resemblance to Leslie Stephen, but the force of Alardyce’s legacy makes him a closer fictional equivalent. (Woolf’s decision to skip a generation is puzzling: Perhaps she thought that doing so would make her novel’s theme of past and present more pronounced, and its personal content easier to confront?)

Katharine’s charmingly flustered, Shakespeare-obsessed mother is modeled after Woolf ’s aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, daughter of the author of Vanity Fair and elder sister of Leslie Stephen’s first wife, Minny. “Aunt Anny,” as she was known, resembled Mrs. Hilbery in both her spirited intelligence and her chronic absentmindedness. And like Mrs. Hilbery, she was known—in the words of Woolf ’s biographer Quentin Bell—for her “extraordinarily youthful, vigorous and resilient optimism,” even though “it is not hard to believe that such cheerful impetuosity could sometimes be exasperating.” Aunt Anny, like Mrs. Hilbery, had been a constant companion and assistant to her father as well.

Also like Woolf, the intelligent and beautiful Katharine is forced to choose among suitors. William Rodney, the government clerk and aspiring poet who spends much of the novel in complicated pursuit of Katharine, may have been modeled after several men who had courted Woolf: her eventual brother-in-law, Clive Bell; the classical scholar Walter Headlam; and the writer Lytton Strachey, whose proposal Woolf had accepted and rejected over the course of twenty-four hours in 1909. Rodney’s rival, Ralph Denham, strongly resembles Leonard Woolf—whom Virginia married in 1912—in his lower-class origins, his lust for travel (Leonard spent seven years in Ceylon with the Colonial Service), and his residence with his widowed mother, adoring sister, and large family in a house in the London suburbs (although Woolf has curiously omitted Leonard’s Jewishness).

But despite these resemblances between Katharine and Virginia, Woolf insisted that her protagonist was inspired by her sister Vanessa, to whom she was extremely close all her life. Indeed, she urged her friend Janet Case to “try thinking of Katharine as Vanessa, not me,” told Vanessa in a letter of 1916 that she was considering “writing another novel” about her, and in another letter called Vanessa “mysterious and romantic,” adjectives that certainly suit Katharine. It is easy to see how Katharine’s fascination with the nonverbal discipline of mathematics suggests Vanessa’s talent and success as a painter. In fact, in a passage Woolf later deleted, Katharine observes, “If I had to be an artist... I should certainly be a painter; because then at least you have solid things to deal with.” But the most simple and powerful evidence of Woolf ’s tribute to her sister is the novel’s dedication: “To Vanessa Bell.”

E. M. Forster, in his biography Virginia Woolf, remarks that Night and Day “is an exercise in classical realism, and contains all that has characterised English fiction, for good and evil, during the last two hundred years: faith in personal relations, recourse to humorous side-shows, geographical exactitude, insistence on petty social differences.” And he is right: In this novel, Woolf displays little interest in overturning the conventions that had served her forbears so well. She works within the time-honored genre of the Bildungsroman, the novel of education. Her characters’ personal appearances and socio-economic positions are described with loving precision. Unlike The Waves, whose six characters never speak to each other directly in 300 pages, Night and Day teems with dialogue. And of course the plot—with its strictly chronological advancement and its central question of whether and to whom Katharine will get married—proves Forster correct as well.

But to condemn Night and Day as a “traditional” novel for these reasons is to overlook the endlessly inventive ways that Woolf, grappling with complex questions of gender and genre, has woven the debate between tradition and innovation into the very fabric of the novel. Woolf ’s treatment of marriage is a case in point: Just because readers are heavily invested in the labyrinthine twists and turns of Katharine’s love life from the novel’s opening chapter does not mean they are not also exposed to a dizzying spectrum of opinion concerning the institution of marriage in particular, and the value of tradition in general.

To be a member of the Hilbery household is to be steeped in the past: The talk brims with allusions to literature and history; the Cheyne Walk house is crowded with books, portraits, and the ever-present ghost of Alardyce; and the street itself is one on which a Who’s Who of nineteenth-century writers and artists—Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Henry James, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler—had lived. Amid these hallowed surroundings, an ongoing battle between the centuries plays itself out. Conversation among the Hilberys is predictably boisterous, but nevertheless their domestic rituals suggest a world where relations between the sexes have changed little since the last century:

Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of curious little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually, though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to brood over them which lends even a superstitious charm to their performance. Such was the nightly ceremony of the cigar and the glass of port, which were placed on the right hand and on the left hand of Mr Hilbery, and simultaneously Mrs Hilbery and Katharine left the room. All the years they had lived together they had never seen Mr Hilbery smoke his cigar or drink his port, and they would have felt it unseemly if, by chance, they had surprised him as he sat there. These short, but clearly marked, periods of separation between the sexes were always used for an intimate postscript to what had been said at dinner, the sense of being women together coming out most strongly when the male sex was, as if by some religious rite, secluded from the female (p. 88).

Several of the novel’s characters come down firmly on the side of such a “clearly marked” world.