The 100th Anniversary Edition of Virginia Woolf's timely, overlooked
second novel--a remarkable story of two women navigating the
possibilities opened up by the struggle for women's suffrage--introduced
for Restless Classics by bestselling author of Fates and Furies Lauren
Groff and illustrated by graphic artist Kristen Radtke.
Since its publication in 1919, Virginia Woolf's second novel has been
largely dismissed as "traditional"--but reading the book more closely
today shows us just how prescient and unconventional it was. On its
surface, Night and Day plays with the tropes of Shakespearean comedy:
We follow the romantic endeavors of two friends, Katharine Hilbery and
Mary Datchet, as love is confessed and rebuffed, partners switched,
weddings planned and cancelled, until we finally arrive at two
engagements. But these dramas play out against the first steps of the
women's suffrage movement, as women's roles in society fitfully started
to shift away from charm, subservience, and self-sacrifice toward equal
partnership. Ultimately, Woolf's novel is a subversive challenge to the
male-writer establishment of the Edwardian age--Henry James, E.M.
Forster, their forebears and successors--that undercuts the unequal
gender dialectic on which their plots depend.
The Virginia Woolf of Night and Day is every bit as brilliant, funny,
sharp, and imbued with a deep love of language as in her celebrated
later works Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. What makes Night
and Day so remarkable is its devotion to "real life." As bestselling
author of Fates and Furies Lauren Groff writes in her introduction,
"Virginia Woolf, in pushing outward in this book toward an articulation
of a new and better kind of marriage, doesn't stop for a moment to try
to seduce the reader into loving her characters--she is too fixated on
breaking new ground and exploring her ideas."
This edition, beautifully illustrated by Kristen Radtke, celebrates the
100th anniversary of this key work not only of the Woolf canon, but also
of the vital history of feminist literature.
