Solitude and company are not mutually exclusive. Emotional carnage gives way to boundless joy. And reality, at least for the time being, wins out over dreams.

The original and profound story of Katharine and Ralph would make Night and Day worth the price of admission. But the novel has much more to admire. Particularly striking is the character of Mary Datchet, whose role in Night and Day can be compared to that of Lily Briscoe in Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, a self-doubting but driven artist who questions the supremacy of marriage and motherhood. While Katharine is fiercely independent, her self-reliance does not take the form of attending a university or obtaining a job. Mary has done both; and her selfless labors remind us, even as we follow the progress of Katharine’s love, of the alternatives to marriage—whether as a novel’s ending, or a woman’s fate. Katharine even seems fleetingly jealous of Mary’s lifestyle when she inspects her rooms in the Strand: “The whole aspect of the place started another train of thought and struck her as enviably free; in such a room one could work—one could have a life of one’s own” (p. 236).

Woolf herself briefly worked as a volunteer for the suffragist cause, and as she was writing Night and Day, women were slowly acquiring more rights. Early in 1918 those over thirty were granted the vote; perhaps this happy development led Woolf to steer Mary from her work for the society for general suffrage to a society with more broadly leftist concerns. But whomever she is working for, Mary, unlike both Rodney and Ralph, takes great pleasure in her work; and although her attachment to Ralph causes her all manner of suffering and confusion, our final sight of her, working late by lamplight, assures us that “another love burnt in the place of the old one” (p. 389).

Mary is also the only character in Night and Day with a strong sense of her own body. Like Denham, Datchet is the name of a real town west of London, and her scenes with other characters are notable for their physicality. Visiting Mary at home, Katharine is “conscious of Mary’s body beside her” (p. 48). Vacationing in the Lincoln countryside, Mary fondly strokes her brother’s “thick, reddish-coloured locks this way and that” (p. 168) and, out for a walk with Ralph, she gets some “bodily exercise” (p. 192). Back in London, after a long conversation in which Mary tells Katharine of her love for Ralph—who unfortunately loves Katharine—the two women “sat silent, side by side, while Mary fingered the fur on the skirt of the old dress” (p. 242). Mary may finally decide that she prefers work to love, but her bodily awareness, as well as her knowledge that she is capable of passion, ensure that she will avoid the fate of her colleague Sally Seal, whose barely disguised sexual repression makes for one of the novel’s most painfully witty scenes:

Mrs Seal emitted a most peculiar chuckle. She seemed for one moment to acknowledge the terrible side of life which is concerned with the emotions, the private lives, of the sexes, and then to sheer off from it with all possible speed into the shades of her own shivering virginity. She was made so uncomfortable by the turn the conversation had taken, that she plunged her head into the cupboard, and endeavoured to abstract some very obscure piece of china (p. 228).

Also striking is Woolf ’s use of symbolism, which both anticipates her later novels and gives Night and Day its own remarkable texture. Especially notable are birds, whose appearances throughout the novel teach us much about the characters. The night he meets Katharine, a smitten Ralph considers her mind, He then scornfully contemplates his room, which contains “a large perch, ... upon which a tame and, apparently, decrepit rook hopped dryly from side to side.” In a grim parody of his vision of Katharine, “the bird, encouraged by a scratch behind the ear, settled upon Denham’s shoulder” (p. 21). Later Katharine appears to him as “some vast snowy owl” (p. 129).