NIGHT AND DAY (The Original 1919 Edition) - Virginia Woolf - E-Book

NIGHT AND DAY (The Original 1919 Edition) E-Book

Virginia Woolf

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Beschreibung

Virginia Woolf's 'Night and Day' (The Original 1919 Edition) is a seminal novel that explores the intricacies of romantic relationships, societal conventions, and the role of women in early 20th-century England. The novel is characterized by Woolf's signature stream-of-consciousness narrative style, providing a deep dive into the inner thoughts and emotions of the characters. Set against the backdrop of London's literary scene, 'Night and Day' delves into the complexities of love, friendship, and personal identity with a keen eye for detail and nuance. Woolf's experimental approach to storytelling and subtle commentary on gender dynamics make this novel a timeless classic in the literary canon. Virginia Woolf, a prominent figure in the Bloomsbury Group, drew inspiration from her own experiences and observations of the society around her to write 'Night and Day.' Woolf's keen insight into human relationships and keen observational skills shine through in this masterful work, showcasing her intellectual prowess and progressive views on gender and society. I highly recommend 'Night and Day' to readers interested in exploring the complexities of human relationships and the evolving role of women in literature. Woolf's novel offers a compelling narrative and thought-provoking themes that continue to resonate with contemporary audiences. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.

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Virginia Woolf

NIGHT AND DAY

Enriched edition.
Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Derek Walters

(The Original 1919 Edition)

Published by

Books

- Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -
Edited and published by Musaicum Press, 2017
ISBN 978-80-272-3491-2

Table of Contents

Introduction
Synopsis
Historical Context
Author Biography
NIGHT AND DAY (The Original 1919 Edition)
Analysis
Reflection
Memorable Quotes
Notes

Introduction

Table of Contents

Between the measured light of social propriety and the shadowed pull of private desire, Night and Day traces a map of competing freedoms. Published in 1919, Virginia Woolf’s second novel examines how individuals in Edwardian London navigate love, work, and the pressures of family reputation. The Original 1919 Edition places the book at the exact threshold between an older social order and new ambitions for personal autonomy. Without announcing grand revolutions, it lets ordinary encounters carry large questions about what a life should be. The result is a poised, searching narrative that frames choice itself as a form of daring.

Night and Day holds classic status because it marries the clarity of realist storytelling with the psychological subtlety that would soon define high modernism. Its enduring themes—women’s intellectual agency, the ethics of work, the friction between romance and independence—continue to resonate. The novel’s disciplined structure proves that Woolf could excel within inherited forms even as she stretched them from within. Readers encounter a social world rendered with exactness and charity, while interior lives unfold in measured, luminous turns. As such, the book sustains a conversation across generations, influencing how later writers imagine character, conversation, and the felt texture of choice.

Composed during the late 1910s, the novel reflects a period of intense artistic consolidation for Woolf. After The Voyage Out appeared in 1915, she returned to long-form fiction over several years, refining her approach to perspective and scene. Night and Day was published in London in 1919 by Duckworth, and it is set before the First World War, in the streets, offices, and drawing rooms of Edwardian society. This temporal placement matters: the story observes a world on the cusp of change without depicting the war itself, allowing attention to settle on daily routines, courtship, friendship, and the quieter revolutions of habit and mind.

The central premise turns on several intersecting lives that test the expectations of family, class, and vocation. Katharine Hilbery, the granddaughter of a celebrated poet, is drawn into the dutiful labor of literary commemoration even as her private interests reach elsewhere. Ralph Denham, a hardworking clerk with a fiercely independent mind, enters the Hilberys’ orbit and finds his assumptions unsettled. Mary Datchet, devoted to political work for women, embodies a different model of purpose and allegiance. Conversations, visits, and chance meetings link their trajectories, composing a portrait of London where intellect, affection, and ambition negotiate uneasy terms.

Themes of autonomy and commitment unfold without melodrama. Woolf asks how a person might honor love while keeping faith with a vocation; how family legacy can inspire and constrain; and how social rank shapes, but does not finally dictate, the field of possible lives. Class and money matter here—not as crude barriers, but as quiet measures of risk and comfort. The book probes the etiquette of feeling: the difference between an admiration that flatters and an understanding that frees. Throughout, the friction between habit and aspiration makes every decision feel momentous, even when it is made over tea or during a walk home.

Formally, Night and Day is more traditional than Woolf’s later experiments, yet it displays her signature attention to interior weather. Third-person narration moves with steady tact among characters, letting sentences dilate to contain hesitation, inference, and sudden clarity. Social scenes—law offices, London rooms, committee workspaces—anchor the story, while shifts in point of view invite readers to inhabit competing truths. The comedy of manners is deliberate and exact, but never merely decorative. Woolf uses convention as a lens that magnifies inward motions: the tremor before speech, the logic of a misreading, the way an idea rearranges a feeling without altering a face.

Light and shadow, day and night, provide more than a title; they give the novel a rhythm of contrast. The visible order of schedules and streets sits beside the less legible pulse of wants and fears. London itself becomes a medium through which thought travels—river crossings, squares, and tramlines threading private contemplations into public space. Katharine’s attraction to abstract forms, including the exactness of mathematics, counters the fluctuating currents of conversation and family ceremony. The prose lingers on rooms and vistas, but its real landscapes are thresholds: the pause at a doorway, the brink between agreement and refusal, certainty and doubt.

As an early pillar of Woolf’s oeuvre, Night and Day helps explain the leap that modernist fiction was about to take. Its patience with scene and motive laid groundwork for the later aperture of consciousness in works like Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway, where time and attention become fluid. The novel shows Woolf testing the limits of inherited narrative shapes while keeping faith with their humane capacities. In doing so, it seeded critical discussions about interiority, social comedy, and women’s authorship that have influenced novelists and scholars alike. The book’s legacy thus runs both forward into craft and outward into cultural criticism.

Readers have long noted that this is not Woolf at her most formally radical, yet that observation is a measure of her range, not a limit on the book’s value. The 1919 edition situates the work within its immediate postwar publication moment, preserving the cadence and composure she achieved at that time. Far from a mere apprentice effort, Night and Day stands as a complete artistic statement whose textures reward close study: its calibration of irony, its patient mapping of misapprehensions, its care for workaday detail. In classrooms and private reading alike, it opens steadily, scene by scene, toward generous understanding.

The novel’s generosity lies in how it treats disagreement as a form of inquiry. Characters who collide in argument are not fixed types; they are minds in motion, capable of revising themselves. The suffrage office, the study, the dinner table—each becomes a testing ground where conviction encounters sympathy. Rather than offer a program, Woolf dramatizes the cost and reward of choices made under constraint. Romantic attraction is scrutinized alongside professional aspiration, as are the ethics of loyalty to family projects and public causes. The result is a narrative that honors complexity without sinking into paralysis, trusting readers to weigh competing goods.

Contemporary readers may hear clear echoes of their own dilemmas: the pull between career and partnership, the negotiation of class and opportunity in cities, the question of how to make a life that answers both intellect and feeling. The novel addresses civic engagement as lived experience—meetings, letters, schedules—rather than abstract slogan, making its political texture recognizably human. Its attention to inherited duty speaks to anyone sorting the claims of tradition and self-invention. And because the story is set just before sweeping historical change, it offers a lucid portrait of a society adjusting its posture, a vantage point that remains instructive.

To open Night and Day today is to enter a lucid, exacting meditation on freedom conducted in the ordinary medium of conversation and routine. Woolf shows that the fate of a life can turn on how one listens, what one refuses, and which obligations one chooses to transform. That is why the book endures: it makes a classic drama of modern questions, and it does so with balance, humor, and rare patience. In the Original 1919 Edition we meet the work as its first readers did, and we feel how its light still travels—across rooms, across years, from day into night.

Synopsis

Table of Contents

First published in 1919, Night and Day is Virginia Woolf’s second novel, composed in a traditional narrative manner and set in Edwardian London. It examines the intersecting lives of young men and women negotiating family obligations, professional ambitions, and changing ideas about love and marriage. The story centers on Katharine Hilbery, a granddaughter of a revered poet, and her circle, including Ralph Denham, a hardworking clerk, William Rodney, a poet and civil servant, and Mary Datchet, a committed suffrage activist. Across drawing rooms, offices, and city streets, Woolf stages conversations and encounters that probe class boundaries, social rituals, and the forms that modern companionship might take.

The novel opens within the cultured Hilbery household, a place of hospitality and literary inheritance. Katharine manages the practical details of a gathering while her mother presides with improvisatory charm, distracted by the biography she is writing of her late father, the family’s celebrated poet. Guests arrive, conversations drift from books to politics, and Ralph Denham’s first impressions of the Hilberys’ world register both fascination and skepticism. The scene establishes the novel’s social stage: the polite choreography of upper-middle-class life, the allure and weight of tradition, and the subtle frictions that arise when visitors from different backgrounds share an evening and begin to form opinions and attachments.

Katharine emerges as an intelligent, reserved young woman whose ordered mind strains against the loose, anecdotal methods surrounding her at home. The labor of helping with the poet’s biography typifies her predicament: she is tied to family legacy yet drawn to private pursuits that promise precision and independence. The prospect of marriage hovers, framed as both a social expectation and a possible means of shaping a life. Woolf sets Katharine’s composure against the household’s amiable disorder to pose a central question: can an individual’s desire for intellectual clarity coexist with the claims of kinship, romance, and the unpredictable tempo of daily social life?

Ralph Denham’s perspective introduces a contrasting milieu of narrow incomes and exacting work. He navigates an office routine in which diligence is essential, and he measures the Hilberys’ ease with a mixture of admiration and critique. Drawn to Katharine’s self-possession, he also senses the gulf carved by money, education, and inherited renown. His connections include Mary Datchet, whose friendship provides an alternative social world in which purpose is explicit and conversation turns on public issues. Through Ralph, the novel explores class mobility, professional aspiration, and the sharp awareness that accompanies moving between different rooms—literal and figurative—within the same city.

William Rodney, a polished writer and civil servant, pursues courtship with practiced manners and literary enthusiasms. He arranges refined outings, organizes reading parties, and praises forms and traditions that promise harmony. His attentions to Katharine make visible the codes governing respectable engagement: invitations, confidences, and well-phrased avowals. As Woolf traces the developing understanding between them, she balances ceremony with introspection. The scenes suggest that admiration for style and lineage may be sincere yet incomplete, and that a union crafted to satisfy aesthetic or social ideals must still withstand the private realities of temperament, intellectual curiosity, and the daily test of conversation.

Mary Datchet works in a suffrage office, where schedules, pamphlets, and meetings give structure to an existence decidedly unlike the Hilbery drawing room. Independent and purposeful, Mary is committed to political change, yet her life is not reduced to a public role. She assesses friends’ choices with clarity and is herself subject to feeling, particularly in relation to Ralph. Through Mary’s routines and gatherings, the novel articulates the appeal of work that connects the individual to a cause. It also considers the personal costs of conviction, and how ideals complicate attachment when affection and ambition press in different directions.

London’s rhythm—by day and night—frames a sequence of conversations, walks, and accidental crossings. Characters read letters, revise opinions, and attempt new declarations, only to discover that sincerity can unsettle as much as it clarifies. Engagements are weighed, questioned, and, at times, rearranged, while friendships stretch to accommodate candor. Public spaces, from meetings to musical evenings, reveal how easily a remark or gesture shifts the balance of feeling. Woolf refrains from melodrama, instead letting misunderstandings, small acts of courage, and changes of emphasis accumulate, so that readers observe how private truths surface gradually under the pressure of ordinary social exchange.

Family obligations intensify the novel’s conflicts. Mrs. Hilbery’s affectionate impulsiveness and Mr. Hilbery’s steadier judgment create a domestic climate both nurturing and destabilizing. The biography of the revered poet advances fitfully, emblem of a heritage both cherished and burdensome. Visiting relations and literary acquaintances add further currents, while cultural entertainments and recitations highlight the distance between performance and lived emotion. Within these scenes, Katharine’s discipline is tested, and other characters measure their loyalties to art, work, and one another. Comedy and discomfort mingle, revealing how tradition exerts grace and gravity even as it fails to dictate any single path forward.

Without resorting to spectacular turns, Night and Day culminates in recognitions about compatibility, self-knowledge, and the terms on which adults may bind their futures. Woolf’s closing movements preserve complexity while resisting simple verdicts, keeping outcomes subordinate to the inquiries that produced them. The book endures for its measured scrutiny of love, class, and women’s independence; its portrait of a city where public causes and private sensibilities overlap; and its contrast of brightness and opacity suggested by the title. Night and day stand less for opposites than for shifting conditions under which people learn to speak plainly and to value what they understand.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

Night and Day is set in London in the years just before the First World War, when the British Empire was near its zenith and Edwardian social conventions still organized daily life. The Church of England shaped marriage rites and respectability, while Parliament, the courts, universities, and learned societies largely excluded women from authority. London’s West End drawing rooms and City offices marked class divisions that were visible in address, accent, and leisure. The novel’s quiet rooms, tea tables, and clerks’ commutes unfold within this framework of tradition: a society confident in its institutions yet about to be unsettled by war, suffrage victories, and social reform.

Edwardian Britain (roughly 1901–1910, with many continuities into 1914) prized manners, lineage, and the rituals of polite society. Yet London was also the world’s largest city, with rapid growth in white‑collar employment, expanding suburbs, and a bustling press. The distinction between old families and self‑made professionals intensified as new clerical and managerial jobs multiplied. This social texture—well‑appointed houses, literary salons, and modest offices—appears throughout Woolf’s novel, which juxtaposes upper‑middle‑class domestic spaces with the precarious worlds of clerks and young professionals. The city’s geography itself, from Bloomsbury to the Strand, mediates encounters across class, and the novel’s conversations register those crossings.

The women’s suffrage movement forms one of the most direct historical backdrops to Night and Day. From the late nineteenth century, organizations such as the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) pursued constitutional methods—petitions, meetings, and lobbying—while the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) adopted increasingly militant tactics from 1905 onward. London housed both offices and demonstrations, especially in Westminster and central districts. Woolf’s inclusion of a suffrage office and a woman dedicated to its work mirrors the movement’s professionalization: rented rooms, paid organizers, and expanding networks. The novel recognizes suffrage as practical labor and civic engagement rather than simply a slogan or a background agitation.

Legislative change accelerated around publication. The Representation of the People Act 1918 enfranchised many women over age thirty (with property or household qualifications) and most men over twenty‑one, radically widening the electorate. The Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918 allowed women to sit in the House of Commons; Nancy Astor took her seat in 1919. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 opened entry to many professions, including law and the civil service, and permitted women to serve on juries. Night and Day, largely set before these changes, shows the constraints that made suffrage urgent: careers closed or limited, and political voice constrained within voluntary associations.

Marriage law shaped women’s choices even after reforms. Nineteenth‑century Married Women’s Property Acts (1870 and 1882) allowed wives to own and control some property, yet inequalities persisted in guardianship, income security, and divorce. Before the Matrimonial Causes Act 1923, a wife’s grounds for divorce were narrower than a husband’s. Social expectations still framed marriage as a woman’s central vocation, with engagement rituals and family negotiation regulating the match. Woolf’s careful attention to courtship, engagement, and second thoughts sits against these legal and cultural backdrops, making personal decisions carry systems of dependency and respectability that held real financial and social stakes for women.

Higher education for women had expanded yet remained unequal. Women could study at Girton (founded 1869) and Newnham (1871) at Cambridge and at women’s halls at Oxford; they sat examinations but lacked full degrees at Cambridge until 1948 (Oxford granted them in 1920). Scientific and mathematical study was possible in women’s colleges but rarely led to recognized professional appointments. In the novel, a woman’s attraction to mathematics and impersonal knowledge quietly tests these boundaries, suggesting ambitions beyond the drawing room. The world of lectures, libraries, and private reading that fills Woolf’s pages echoes the era’s partial openings—and the persistence of barriers—to women’s intellectual lives.

Woolf’s social milieu, the Bloomsbury Group, formed in the decade before the war, was influenced by Cambridge intellectual currents, including G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903), with its emphasis on friendship, sincerity, and the intrinsic value of personal relations. While Bloomsbury often questioned Victorian conventions of marriage and sexuality, Night and Day adopts a more traditional narrative frame. This tension is historically resonant: early twentieth‑century London saw both unorthodox domestic arrangements in avant‑garde circles and the continued prestige of conventional unions. Woolf’s fiction tests how far candor and equality can coexist with inherited forms without overt polemic.

Victorian legacy remained palpable in memorial culture. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were marked by “Lives and Letters” volumes, commemorative editions, and family‑edited archives of “great men.” Female relatives often performed the archival and editorial labor behind these monuments. Night and Day’s preoccupation with a literary household and the caretaking of a famous ancestor’s papers reflects that history. The work of organizing, transcribing, and domestic curating—intellectual yet unpaid—was a recognized, if undervalued, contribution to national culture. Woolf’s depiction implicitly questions who benefits from such labor and how it narrows the horizons of the women who undertake it.

The novel appeared in 1919, early in Woolf’s career. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, had been published in 1915. In 1917, Virginia and Leonard Woolf founded the Hogarth Press, which soon became central to British modernism, though Woolf’s early novels, including Night and Day, continued to appear with her previous publisher. Wartime paper shortages, changing library practices, and a growing middle‑class reading public shaped the book market of the 1910s. The circulating libraries still influenced fiction length and tone, while literary reviews were consolidating after wartime disruptions. Night and Day’s traditional structure met readers at a moment when forms were in flux.

The First World War (1914–1918) reshaped Britain—economy, class relations, and gender roles. Women took on paid work in munitions, transport, and clerical offices; casualties transformed family structures; and state intervention expanded under emergency powers. The 1918 influenza pandemic added further loss. Night and Day largely omits battlefront realities, depicting prewar London’s conversations and careful choices. That absence is historically legible: many postwar readers sought representations of a world that felt both familiar and irrevocably altered. The novel’s restraint can be read as a deliberate look backward, measuring what was at stake in ordinary life before upheaval, and what might be reclaimed or revised afterward.

Urban technologies shaped everyday rhythms that Woolf registers precisely. By the 1900s, the Underground’s deep‑level tube lines were electrified; motor buses and taxicabs displaced horse‑drawn traffic; and telephones and efficient postal deliveries connected households and offices. Public clocks, railway timetables, and office hours regimented time, while parks and embankments offered spaces for reflective walks. The novel’s letters, hasty visits, and cab rides rely on these infrastructures. They broadened women’s mobility within the city, even as social codes continued to police respectability. London’s modern tempo underlies the book’s careful pacing, where a delayed post or an unexpected meeting can alter the direction of a life.

Domestic service was the largest single occupation for women in early twentieth‑century Britain; the 1911 Census records it as the dominant female employment category. Middle‑class households relied on cooks, housemaids, and parlourmaids to sustain the smooth surfaces of social life. This labor allowed well‑to‑do women leisure for visiting, reading, and charitable work, while obscuring class dependence. Night and Day’s homes, with their regulated visits and prepared teas, presume such service. The novel’s attention to the etiquette of calling, hosting, and being protected from drudgery quietly reminds readers that freedom to ponder vocation or love rests on the invisible work of others.

The expanding white‑collar economy brought new possibilities and frustrations. Banks, publishers, solicitors’ firms, and government departments hired clerks in growing numbers. Pay was modest, prospects limited, and class anxieties acute. Boarding houses and small flats supported a new stage of young adulthood, particularly in districts like Bloomsbury. Women’s independent lodgings—“bachelor‑girl” flats—multiplied, alongside women’s clubs and suffrage offices that provided professional and social networks. Night and Day’s portrayal of an earnest clerk and a woman living independently aligns with these developments, observing how precarious incomes and rented rooms could sharpen questions about marriage, vocation, and social mobility.

The imperial context formed the backdrop to metropolitan comfort. London’s shops, tea tables, and textiles depended on imperial trade and finance. News from India, Africa, and the Dominions filled newspapers; imperial spectacles reinforced national identity. At the same time, critical voices—among intellectuals and some politicians—questioned imperial costs and ethics. 1919, the year of Night and Day’s publication, also saw the Amritsar (Jallianwala Bagh) massacre in India, intensifying debates about imperial rule. While Woolf’s novel remains domestically focused, its material culture—tea, travel, inherited fortunes—assumes global circuits. Bloomsbury circles often expressed skepticism toward imperial pomp, a mood the book’s restraint shares.

Scientific culture, especially mathematics and astronomy, occupied an exalted place in Edwardian prestige, yet women faced high barriers to recognition. The Royal Astronomical Society, after allowing two honorary women in 1835, admitted women as fellows in 1916; the Royal Society did not until 1945. Cultural stereotypes often cast women as intuitive rather than rigorous. Night and Day challenges this divide by aligning a woman’s temperament with abstraction and impersonal inquiry. The historical point is not her professional path—largely blocked—but the aspiration itself, which registers the period’s contested meanings of reason, emotion, and the kinds of knowledge women could publicly claim.

Politics beyond suffrage also pressed on drawing rooms. The constitutional crisis of 1909–1911—culminating in the Parliament Act 1911 limiting the House of Lords’ veto—animated talk about reform. The “Great Unrest” (circa 1910–1914) saw strikes by miners, transport workers, and others, signaling labor’s rising power. Such conflicts seldom erupted in polite salons, yet their tremors are felt in novels of the period in discussions of duty, national character, and fairness. Night and Day captures that atmosphere indirectly: disagreements remain courteous, but the topics—work, pay, marriage, franchise—carry the energy of a country negotiating the terms of modern citizenship.

The era’s print culture framed how lives were narrated. Newspapers, weekly reviews, and circulating libraries fostered a public sphere where essays, biographies, and serialized fiction shaped opinion. The practice of arranging marriages through extended families had softened, but expectations about a “suitable” match remained strong, aided by social pages and club life. Woolf situates conversation as a civic act within this print‑saturated milieu. Her characters read, write, and argue about literature and politics as part of belonging. That habit reflects a London where literacy was widespread, libraries busy, and talk itself operated as a bridge between private feeling and public principle.

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, and critic, a defining voice of literary modernism. Across fiction and nonfiction she explored consciousness, time, and the fragile interplay between perception and social life, creating new possibilities for narrative form. Her major novels—among them Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, and The Years—reconfigured the relationship between inner life and public world. An influential member of the Bloomsbury Group, she engaged in debates about art, ethics, gender, and politics. Woolf’s essays, lectures, and work as a small-press publisher made her a central architect of twentieth-century literary and intellectual culture.

Raised in a literary environment in London, Woolf read widely from an early age and received formal instruction at the Ladies' Department of King's College London in the late 1890s, studying history and classics. She absorbed influences from the Victorian novel, European realism, and classical literature, while also responding to new currents in psychology and philosophy. Encounters with post-impressionist art in London sharpened her focus on fleeting moments of experience. Beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, she wrote criticism and reviews for periodicals, notably the Times Literary Supplement, developing a critical voice that framed her later experiments in fiction.

Woolf's early fiction evolved alongside her critical writing. The Voyage Out (1915) introduced her as an acute observer of social convention, while Night and Day (1919) worked within a more traditional realist framework. With Jacob's Room (1922) she decisively turned toward a modernist approach, using gaps, fragments, and shifting perspectives to suggest a life largely through absence. As a participant in the Bloomsbury Group—an informal circle of writers, artists, and thinkers—she found an audience receptive to formal innovation and candid inquiry. Essays such as Modern Fiction articulated a program for fiction attentive to consciousness rather than to external materialist detail.

Her mid-1920s novels secured a lasting reputation. Mrs Dalloway (1925) compresses a single day into a web of interior monologue and social encounter, mapping private memory against public ritual. To the Lighthouse (1927) stretches narrative time, juxtaposing intimate family scenes with the impersonal passage of years, and remains a touchstone of modernist technique. Orlando (1928) playfully reimagines biography, traveling across centuries and exploring questions of identity and literary history. These works drew critical notice for their stylistic daring and emotional subtlety, establishing Woolf as a leading experimenter in prose and a commentator on the cultural possibilities of the novel.

Alongside fiction, Woolf produced landmark essays. A Room of One's Own (1929), developed from lectures at women's colleges at Cambridge, argues that material independence and private space are prerequisites for sustained creative work, and proposes a history of women's writing overlooked by canonical accounts. Three Guineas (1938) extends these concerns to education, professional life, and the links between patriarchal power and militarism. In 1917 she co-founded the Hogarth Press, which published her books, works by contemporaries of the modernist movement, and significant translations; the press gave her editorial autonomy and a laboratory for typographic and literary experimentation.

Woolf's later writing continued to test the boundaries of form. The Waves (1931) presents interwoven soliloquies that explore the rhythms of consciousness and friendship. The Common Reader (two series, 1925 and 1932) gathers essays on reading, criticism, and literary history in an accessible style. The Years (1937) considers social change across generations, while Between the Acts (1941), published shortly after her death, meditates on art and national memory. Throughout her life she experienced recurrent periods of mental ill health, which affected her working rhythms. In 1941, during the pressures of wartime, she died by suicide, leaving an extensive oeuvre.

Woolf's legacy spans literary technique, feminist thought, and cultural criticism. Her innovations in free indirect style, interior monologue, and structural design reshaped the novel for writers across languages. A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas remain central to debates on gender, work, and institutions, influencing feminist theory and activism. Her diaries and essays continue to inform scholarship on reading, authorship, and the public sphere. Adaptations for stage, film, and radio register her ongoing appeal to audiences beyond the academy. Today her work is widely taught and studied, valued for its artistic rigor and its probing, humane intelligence.

NIGHT AND DAY (The Original 1919 Edition)

Main Table of Contents
Chapter I
Chapter IIChapter IIIChapter IVChapter VChapter VIChapter VIIChapter VIIIChapter IXChapter XChapter XIChapter XIIChapter XIIIChapter XIVChapter XVChapter XVIChapter XVIIChapter XVIIIChapter XIXChapter XXChapter XXIChapter XXIIChapter XXIIIChapter XXIVChapter XXVChapter XXVIChapter XXVIIChapter XXVIIIChapter XXIXChapter XXXChapter XXXIChapter XXXIIChapter XXXIIIChapter XXXIV

Chapter I

Table of Contents

It was a Sunday evening in October, and in common with many other young ladies of her class, Katharine Hilbery was pouring out tea. Perhaps a fifth part of her mind was thus occupied, and the remaining parts leapt over the little barrier of day which interposed between Monday morning and this rather subdued moment, and played with the things one does voluntarily and normally in the daylight. But although she was silent, she was evidently mistress of a situation which was familiar enough to her, and inclined to let it take its way for the six hundredth time, perhaps, without bringing into play any of her unoccupied faculties. A single glance was enough to show that Mrs. Hilbery was so rich in the gifts which make tea-parties of elderly distinguished people successful, that she scarcely needed any help from her daughter, provided that the tiresome business of teacups and bread and butter was discharged for her.

Considering that the little party had been seated round the tea-table for less than twenty minutes, the animation observable on their faces, and the amount of sound they were producing collectively, were very creditable to the hostess. It suddenly came into Katharine’s mind that if some one opened the door at this moment he would think that they were enjoying themselves; he would think, “What an extremely nice house to come into!” and instinctively she laughed, and said something to increase the noise, for the credit of the house presumably, since she herself had not been feeling exhilarated. At the very same moment, rather to her amusement, the door was flung open, and a young man entered the room. Katharine, as she shook hands with him, asked him, in her own mind, “Now, do you think we’re enjoying ourselves enormously?” … “Mr. Denham, mother,” she said aloud, for she saw that her mother had forgotten his name.

That fact was perceptible to Mr. Denham also, and increased the awkwardness which inevitably attends the entrance of a stranger into a room full of people much at their ease, and all launched upon sentences. At the same time, it seemed to Mr. Denham as if a thousand softly padded doors had closed between him and the street outside. A fine mist, the etherealized essence of the fog, hung visibly in the wide and rather empty space of the drawing-room, all silver where the candles were grouped on the tea-table, and ruddy again in the firelight. With the omnibuses and cabs still running in his head, and his body still tingling with his quick walk along the streets and in and out of traffic and foot-passengers, this drawing-room seemed very remote and still; and the faces of the elderly people were mellowed, at some distance from each other, and had a bloom on them owing to the fact that the air in the drawing-room was thickened by blue grains of mist. Mr. Denham had come in as Mr. Fortescue, the eminent novelist, reached the middle of a very long sentence. He kept this suspended while the newcomer sat down, and Mrs. Hilbery deftly joined the severed parts by leaning towards him and remarking:

“Now, what would you do if you were married to an engineer, and had to live in Manchester, Mr. Denham?”

“Surely she could learn Persian,” broke in a thin, elderly gentleman. “Is there no retired schoolmaster or man of letters in Manchester with whom she could read Persian?”

“A cousin of ours has married and gone to live in Manchester,” Katharine explained. Mr. Denham muttered something, which was indeed all that was required of him, and the novelist went on where he had left off. Privately, Mr. Denham cursed himself very sharply for having exchanged the freedom of the street for this sophisticated drawing-room, where, among other disagreeables, he certainly would not appear at his best. He glanced round him, and saw that, save for Katharine, they were all over forty, the only consolation being that Mr. Fortescue was a considerable celebrity, so that to-morrow one might be glad to have met him.

“Have you ever been to Manchester?” he asked Katharine.

“Never,” she replied.

“Why do you object to it, then?”

Katharine stirred her tea, and seemed to speculate, so Denham thought, upon the duty of filling somebody else’s cup, but she was really wondering how she was going to keep this strange young man in harmony with the rest. She observed that he was compressing his teacup, so that there was danger lest the thin china might cave inwards. She could see that he was nervous; one would expect a bony young man with his face slightly reddened by the wind, and his hair not altogether smooth, to be nervous in such a party. Further, he probably disliked this kind of thing, and had come out of curiosity, or because her father had invited him—anyhow, he would not be easily combined with the rest.

“I should think there would be no one to talk to in Manchester,” she replied at random. Mr. Fortescue had been observing her for a moment or two, as novelists are inclined to observe, and at this remark he smiled, and made it the text for a little further speculation.

“In spite of a slight tendency to exaggeration, Katharine decidedly hits the mark,” he said, and lying back in his chair, with his opaque contemplative eyes fixed on the ceiling, and the tips of his fingers pressed together, he depicted, first the horrors of the streets of Manchester, and then the bare, immense moors on the outskirts of the town, and then the scrubby little house in which the girl would live, and then the professors and the miserable young students devoted to the more strenuous works of our younger dramatists, who would visit her, and how her appearance would change by degrees, and how she would fly to London, and how Katharine would have to lead her about, as one leads an eager dog on a chain, past rows of clamorous butchers’ shops, poor dear creature.

“Oh, Mr. Fortescue,” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, as he finished, “I had just written to say how I envied her! I was thinking of the big gardens and the dear old ladies in mittens, who read nothing but the “Spectator[2],” and snuff the candles. Have they all disappeared? I told her she would find the nice things of London without the horrid streets that depress one so.”

“There is the University,” said the thin gentleman, who had previously insisted upon the existence of people knowing Persian.

“I know there are moors there, because I read about them in a book the other day,” said Katharine.

“I am grieved and amazed at the ignorance of my family,” Mr. Hilbery remarked. He was an elderly man, with a pair of oval, hazel eyes which were rather bright for his time of life, and relieved the heaviness of his face. He played constantly with a little green stone attached to his watch-chain, thus displaying long and very sensitive fingers, and had a habit of moving his head hither and thither very quickly without altering the position of his large and rather corpulent body, so that he seemed to be providing himself incessantly with food for amusement and reflection with the least possible expenditure of energy. One might suppose that he had passed the time of life when his ambitions were personal, or that he had gratified them as far as he was likely to do, and now employed his considerable acuteness rather to observe and reflect than to attain any result.

Katharine, so Denham decided, while Mr. Fortescue built up another rounded structure of words, had a likeness to each of her parents, but these elements were rather oddly blended. She had the quick, impulsive movements of her mother, the lips parting often to speak, and closing again; and the dark oval eyes of her father brimming with light upon a basis of sadness, or, since she was too young to have acquired a sorrowful point of view, one might say that the basis was not sadness so much as a spirit given to contemplation and self-control. Judging by her hair, her coloring, and the shape of her features, she was striking, if not actually beautiful. Decision and composure stamped her, a combination of qualities that produced a very marked character, and one that was not calculated to put a young man, who scarcely knew her, at his ease. For the rest, she was tall; her dress was of some quiet color, with old yellow-tinted lace for ornament, to which the spark of an ancient jewel gave its one red gleam. Denham noticed that, although silent, she kept sufficient control of the situation to answer immediately her mother appealed to her for help, and yet it was obvious to him that she attended only with the surface skin of her mind. It struck him that her position at the tea-table, among all these elderly people, was not without its difficulties, and he checked his inclination to find her, or her attitude, generally antipathetic to him. The talk had passed over Manchester, after dealing with it very generously.

“Would it be the Battle of Trafalgar or the Spanish Armada, Katharine?” her mother demanded.

“Trafalgar, mother.”

“Trafalgar, of course! How stupid of me! Another cup of tea, with a thin slice of lemon in it, and then, dear Mr. Fortescue, please explain my absurd little puzzle. One can’t help believing gentlemen with Roman noses, even if one meets them in omnibuses.”

Mr. Hilbery here interposed so far as Denham was concerned, and talked a great deal of sense about the solicitors’ profession, and the changes which he had seen in his lifetime. Indeed, Denham properly fell to his lot, owing to the fact that an article by Denham upon some legal matter, published by Mr. Hilbery in his Review, had brought them acquainted. But when a moment later Mrs. Sutton Bailey was announced, he turned to her, and Mr. Denham found himself sitting silent, rejecting possible things to say, beside Katharine, who was silent too. Being much about the same age and both under thirty, they were prohibited from the use of a great many convenient phrases which launch conversation into smooth waters. They were further silenced by Katharine’s rather malicious determination not to help this young man, in whose upright and resolute bearing she detected something hostile to her surroundings, by any of the usual feminine amenities. They therefore sat silent, Denham controlling his desire to say something abrupt and explosive, which should shock her into life. But Mrs. Hilbery was immediately sensitive to any silence in the drawing-room, as of a dumb note in a sonorous scale, and leaning across the table she observed, in the curiously tentative detached manner which always gave her phrases the likeness of butterflies flaunting from one sunny spot to another, “D’you know, Mr. Denham, you remind me so much of dear Mr. Ruskin[1]…. Is it his tie, Katharine, or his hair, or the way he sits in his chair? Do tell me, Mr. Denham, are you an admirer of Ruskin? Some one, the other day, said to me, ‘Oh, no, we don’t read Ruskin, Mrs. Hilbery.’ What do you read, I wonder?—for you can’t spend all your time going up in aeroplanes and burrowing into the bowels of the earth.”

She looked benevolently at Denham, who said nothing articulate, and then at Katharine, who smiled but said nothing either, upon which Mrs. Hilbery seemed possessed by a brilliant idea, and exclaimed:

“I’m sure Mr. Denham would like to see our things, Katharine. I’m sure he’s not like that dreadful young man, Mr. Ponting, who told me that he considered it our duty to live exclusively in the present. After all, what is the present? Half of it’s the past, and the better half, too, I should say,” she added, turning to Mr. Fortescue.

Denham rose, half meaning to go, and thinking that he had seen all that there was to see, but Katharine rose at the same moment, and saying, “Perhaps you would like to see the pictures,” led the way across the drawing-room to a smaller room opening out of it.

The smaller room was something like a chapel in a cathedral, or a grotto in a cave, for the booming sound of the traffic in the distance suggested the soft surge of waters, and the oval mirrors, with their silver surface, were like deep pools trembling beneath starlight. But the comparison to a religious temple of some kind was the more apt of the two, for the little room was crowded with relics.

As Katharine touched different spots, lights sprang here and there, and revealed a square mass of red-and-gold books, and then a long skirt in blue-and-white paint lustrous behind glass, and then a mahogany writing-table, with its orderly equipment, and, finally, a picture above the table, to which special illumination was accorded. When Katharine had touched these last lights, she stood back, as much as to say, “There!” Denham found himself looked down upon by the eyes of the great poet, Richard Alardyce, and suffered a little shock which would have led him, had he been wearing a hat, to remove it. The eyes looked at him out of the mellow pinks and yellows of the paint with divine friendliness, which embraced him, and passed on to contemplate the entire world. The paint had so faded that very little but the beautiful large eyes were left, dark in the surrounding dimness.

Katharine waited as though for him to receive a full impression, and then she said:

“This is his writing-table. He used this pen,” and she lifted a quill pen and laid it down again. The writing-table was splashed with old ink, and the pen disheveled in service. There lay the gigantic gold-rimmed spectacles, ready to his hand, and beneath the table was a pair of large, worn slippers, one of which Katharine picked up, remarking:

“I think my grandfather must have been at least twice as large as any one is nowadays. This,” she went on, as if she knew what she had to say by heart, “is the original manuscript of the ‘Ode to Winter.’ The early poems are far less corrected than the later. Would you like to look at it?”

While Mr. Denham examined the manuscript, she glanced up at her grandfather, and, for the thousandth time, fell into a pleasant dreamy state in which she seemed to be the companion of those giant men, of their own lineage, at any rate, and the insignificant present moment was put to shame. That magnificent ghostly head on the canvas, surely, never beheld all the trivialities of a Sunday afternoon, and it did not seem to matter what she and this young man said to each other, for they were only small people.

“This is a copy of the first edition of the poems,” she continued, without considering the fact that Mr. Denham was still occupied with the manuscript, “which contains several poems that have not been reprinted, as well as corrections.” She paused for a minute, and then went on, as if these spaces had all been calculated.

“That lady in blue is my great-grandmother, by Millington. Here is my uncle’s walking-stick—he was Sir Richard Warburton, you know, and rode with Havelock to the Relief of Lucknow[3]. And then, let me see—oh, that’s the original Alardyce, 1697, the founder of the family fortunes, with his wife. Some one gave us this bowl the other day because it has their crest and initials. We think it must have been given them to celebrate their silver wedding-day.”

Here she stopped for a moment, wondering why it was that Mr. Denham said nothing. Her feeling that he was antagonistic to her, which had lapsed while she thought of her family possessions, returned so keenly that she stopped in the middle of her catalog and looked at him. Her mother, wishing to connect him reputably with the great dead, had compared him with Mr. Ruskin; and the comparison was in Katharine’s mind, and led her to be more critical of the young man than was fair, for a young man paying a call in a tail-coat is in a different element altogether from a head seized at its climax of expressiveness, gazing immutably from behind a sheet of glass, which was all that remained to her of Mr. Ruskin. He had a singular face—a face built for swiftness and decision rather than for massive contemplation; the forehead broad, the nose long and formidable, the lips clean-shaven and at once dogged and sensitive, the cheeks lean, with a deeply running tide of red blood in them. His eyes, expressive now of the usual masculine impersonality and authority, might reveal more subtle emotions under favorable circumstances, for they were large, and of a clear, brown color; they seemed unexpectedly to hesitate and speculate; but Katharine only looked at him to wonder whether his face would not have come nearer the standard of her dead heroes if it had been adorned with side-whiskers. In his spare build and thin, though healthy, cheeks, she saw tokens of an angular and acrid soul. His voice, she noticed, had a slight vibrating or creaking sound in it, as he laid down the manuscript and said:

“You must be very proud of your family, Miss Hilbery.”

“Yes, I am,” Katharine answered, and she added, “Do you think there’s anything wrong in that?”

“Wrong? How should it be wrong? It must be a bore, though, showing your things to visitors,” he added reflectively.

“Not if the visitors like them.”

“Isn’t it difficult to live up to your ancestors?” he proceeded.

“I dare say I shouldn’t try to write poetry,” Katharine replied.

“No. And that’s what I should hate. I couldn’t bear my grandfather to cut me out. And, after all,” Denham went on, glancing round him satirically, as Katharine thought, “it’s not your grandfather only. You’re cut out all the way round. I suppose you come of one of the most distinguished families in England. There are the Warburtons and the Mannings—and you’re related to the Otways, aren’t you? I read it all in some magazine,” he added.

“The Otways are my cousins,” Katharine replied.

“Well,” said Denham, in a final tone of voice, as if his argument were proved.

“Well,” said Katharine, “I don’t see that you’ve proved anything.”

Denham smiled, in a peculiarly provoking way. He was amused and gratified to find that he had the power to annoy his oblivious, supercilious hostess, if he could not impress her; though he would have preferred to impress her.

He sat silent, holding the precious little book of poems unopened in his hands, and Katharine watched him, the melancholy or contemplative expression deepening in her eyes as her annoyance faded. She appeared to be considering many things. She had forgotten her duties.

“Well,” said Denham again, suddenly opening the little book of poems, as though he had said all that he meant to say or could, with propriety, say. He turned over the pages with great decision, as if he were judging the book in its entirety, the printing and paper and binding, as well as the poetry, and then, having satisfied himself of its good or bad quality, he placed it on the writing-table, and examined the malacca cane with the gold knob which had belonged to the soldier.

“But aren’t you proud of your family?” Katharine demanded.

“No,” said Denham. “We’ve never done anything to be proud of—unless you count paying one’s bills a matter for pride.”

“That sounds rather dull,” Katharine remarked.

“You would think us horribly dull,” Denham agreed.

“Yes, I might find you dull, but I don’t think I should find you ridiculous,” Katharine added, as if Denham had actually brought that charge against her family.

“No—because we’re not in the least ridiculous. We’re a respectable middle-class family, living at Highgate.”

“We don’t live at Highgate, but we’re middle class too, I suppose.”

Denham merely smiled, and replacing the malacca cane on the rack, he drew a sword from its ornamental sheath.

“That belonged to Clive, so we say,” said Katharine, taking up her duties as hostess again automatically.

“Is it a lie?” Denham inquired.

“It’s a family tradition. I don’t know that we can prove it.”

“You see, we don’t have traditions in our family,” said Denham.

“You sound very dull,” Katharine remarked, for the second time.

“Merely middle class,” Denham replied.

“You pay your bills, and you speak the truth. I don’t see why you should despise us.”

Mr. Denham carefully sheathed the sword which the Hilberys said belonged to Clive.

“I shouldn’t like to be you; that’s all I said,” he replied, as if he were saying what he thought as accurately as he could.

“No, but one never would like to be any one else.”

“I should. I should like to be lots of other people.”

“Then why not us?” Katharine asked.

Denham looked at her as she sat in her grandfather’s arm-chair, drawing her great-uncle’s malacca cane smoothly through her fingers, while her background was made up equally of lustrous blue-and-white paint, and crimson books with gilt lines on them. The vitality and composure of her attitude, as of a bright-plumed bird poised easily before further flights, roused him to show her the limitations of her lot. So soon, so easily, would he be forgotten.

“You’ll never know anything at first hand,” he began, almost savagely[1q]. “It’s all been done for you. You’ll never know the pleasure of buying things after saving up for them, or reading books for the first time, or making discoveries.”

“Go on,” Katharine observed, as he paused, suddenly doubtful, when he heard his voice proclaiming aloud these facts, whether there was any truth in them.

“Of course, I don’t know how you spend your time,” he continued, a little stiffly, “but I suppose you have to show people round. You are writing a life of your grandfather, aren’t you? And this kind of thing”—he nodded towards the other room, where they could hear bursts of cultivated laughter—“must take up a lot of time.”

She looked at him expectantly, as if between them they were decorating a small figure of herself, and she saw him hesitating in the disposition of some bow or sash.

“You’ve got it very nearly right,” she said, “but I only help my mother. I don’t write myself.”

“Do you do anything yourself?” he demanded.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “I don’t leave the house at ten and come back at six.”

“I don’t mean that.”

Mr. Denham had recovered his self-control; he spoke with a quietness which made Katharine rather anxious that he should explain himself, but at the same time she wished to annoy him, to waft him away from her on some light current of ridicule or satire, as she was wont to do with these intermittent young men of her father’s.

“Nobody ever does do anything worth doing nowadays,” she remarked. “You see”—she tapped the volume of her grandfather’s poems—“we don’t even print as well as they did, and as for poets or painters or novelists—there are none; so, at any rate, I’m not singular.”

“No, we haven’t any great men,” Denham replied. “I’m very glad that we haven’t. I hate great men. The worship of greatness in the nineteenth century seems to me to explain the worthlessness of that generation.”

Katharine opened her lips and drew in her breath, as if to reply with equal vigor, when the shutting of a door in the next room withdrew her attention, and they both became conscious that the voices, which had been rising and falling round the tea-table, had fallen silent; the light, even, seemed to have sunk lower. A moment later Mrs. Hilbery appeared in the doorway of the ante-room. She stood looking at them with a smile of expectancy on her face, as if a scene from the drama of the younger generation were being played for her benefit. She was a remarkable-looking woman, well advanced in the sixties, but owing to the lightness of her frame and the brightness of her eyes she seemed to have been wafted over the surface of the years without taking much harm in the passage. Her face was shrunken and aquiline, but any hint of sharpness was dispelled by the large blue eyes, at once sagacious and innocent, which seemed to regard the world with an enormous desire that it should behave itself nobly, and an entire confidence that it could do so, if it would only take the pains.

Certain lines on the broad forehead and about the lips might be taken to suggest that she had known moments of some difficulty and perplexity in the course of her career, but these had not destroyed her trustfulness, and she was clearly still prepared to give every one any number of fresh chances and the whole system the benefit of the doubt. She wore a great resemblance to her father, and suggested, as he did, the fresh airs and open spaces of a younger world.

“Well,” she said, “how do you like our things, Mr. Denham?”

Mr. Denham rose, put his book down, opened his mouth, but said nothing, as Katharine observed, with some amusement.

Mrs. Hilbery handled the book he had laid down.

“There are some books that live,” she mused. “They are young with us, and they grow old with us. Are you fond of poetry, Mr. Denham? But what an absurd question to ask! The truth is, dear Mr. Fortescue has almost tired me out. He is so eloquent and so witty, so searching and so profound that, after half an hour or so, I feel inclined to turn out all the lights. But perhaps he’d be more wonderful than ever in the dark. What d’you think, Katharine? Shall we give a little party in complete darkness? There’d have to be bright rooms for the bores….”

Here Mr. Denham held out his hand.

“But we’ve any number of things to show you!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed, taking no notice of it. “Books, pictures, china, manuscripts, and the very chair that Mary Queen of Scots sat in when she heard of Darnley’s murder. I must lie down for a little, and Katharine must change her dress (though she’s wearing a very pretty one), but if you don’t mind being left alone, supper will be at eight. I dare say you’ll write a poem of your own while you’re waiting. Ah, how I love the firelight! Doesn’t our room look charming?”

She stepped back and bade them contemplate the empty drawing-room, with its rich, irregular lights, as the flames leapt and wavered.

“Dear things!” she exclaimed. “Dear chairs and tables! How like old friends they are—faithful, silent friends. Which reminds me, Katharine, little Mr. Anning is coming to-night, and Tite Street, and Cadogan Square…. Do remember to get that drawing of your great-uncle glazed. Aunt Millicent remarked it last time she was here, and I know how it would hurt me to see my father in a broken glass.”

It was like tearing through a maze of diamond-glittering spiders’ webs to say good-bye and escape, for at each movement Mrs. Hilbery remembered something further about the villainies of picture-framers or the delights of poetry, and at one time it seemed to the young man that he would be hypnotized into doing what she pretended to want him to do, for he could not suppose that she attached any value whatever to his presence. Katharine, however, made an opportunity for him to leave, and for that he was grateful to her, as one young person is grateful for the understanding of another.

Chapter II

Table of Contents

The young man shut the door with a sharper slam than any visitor had used that afternoon, and walked up the street at a great pace, cutting the air with his walking-stick. He was glad to find himself outside that drawing-room, breathing raw fog, and in contact with unpolished people who only wanted their share of the pavement allowed them. He thought that if he had had Mr. or Mrs. or Miss Hilbery out here he would have made them, somehow, feel his superiority, for he was chafed by the memory of halting awkward sentences which had failed to give even the young woman with the sad, but inwardly ironical eyes a hint of his force. He tried to recall the actual words of his little outburst, and unconsciously supplemented them by so many words of greater expressiveness that the irritation of his failure was somewhat assuaged. Sudden stabs of the unmitigated truth assailed him now and then, for he was not inclined by nature to take a rosy view of his conduct, but what with the beat of his foot upon the pavement, and the glimpse which half-drawn curtains offered him of kitchens, dining-rooms, and drawing-rooms, illustrating with mute power different scenes from different lives, his own experience lost its sharpness.

His own experience underwent a curious change. His speed slackened, his head sank a little towards his breast, and the lamplight shone now and again upon a face grown strangely tranquil. His thought was so absorbing that when it became necessary to verify the name of a street, he looked at it for a time before he read it; when he came to a crossing, he seemed to have to reassure himself by two or three taps, such as a blind man gives, upon the curb; and, reaching the Underground station[4], he blinked in the bright circle of light, glanced at his watch, decided that he might still indulge himself in darkness, and walked straight on.

And yet the thought was the thought with which he had started. He was still thinking about the people in the house which he had left; but instead of remembering, with whatever accuracy he could, their looks and sayings, he had consciously taken leave of the literal truth. A turn of the street, a firelit room, something monumental in the procession of the lamp-posts, who shall say what accident of light or shape had suddenly changed the prospect within his mind, and led him to murmur aloud:

“She’ll do…. Yes, Katharine Hilbery’ll do…. I’ll take Katharine Hilbery[2q].”