Unavailable
Unavailable
Unavailable
Audiobook18 hours
Night and Day
Written by Virginia Woolf
Narrated by Juliet Stevenson
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
Written before she began her experiments in the writing of fiction, Virginia Woolf's second novel, Night and Day, is a story about a group of young people trying to discover what it means to fall in love. It asks all the big questions: What does it mean to fall in love? Does marriage grant happiness? What is happiness? Night and Day is a conventional novel; however, it maps out for us the world of Virginia Woolf in its wondrous prose: for her it was the beginning, leading on to a prolonged engagement with her search for the means to express the 'inner life'
Unavailable
Author
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, short story writer, publisher, critic and member of the Bloomsbury group, as well as being regarded as both a hugely significant modernist and feminist figure. Her most famous works include Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.
Related to Night and Day
Related audiobooks
Anna Karenina Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Counterfeit Scoundrel: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Unwritten Novel (Unabridged) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Society (Unabridged) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Howards End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Monday or Tuesday (Unabridged) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pygmalion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cat Among the Pigeons: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blue and Green (Unabridged) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Portrait of a Lady Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Northanger Abbey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe String Quartet (Unabridged) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Horse Dealer's Daughter Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Mrs Dalloway Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Tess of the d'Urbervilles Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Beautiful and the Damned Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How To Marry A Marble Marquis: A Regency Monster Romance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tragic Muse Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How Pearl Button was Kidnapped Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Northanger Abbey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Side of Paradise Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Vanity Fair Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Virginia Woolf - The Short Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Mark on the Wall (Unabridged) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: Book II: The Hidden Gallery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Evgenii Onegin: New Translation by Mary Hobson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Haunted House (Unabridged) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ambassadors Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Voyage Out Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Villette Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Classics For You
Winnie-the-Pooh - Unabridged Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5To Kill a Mockingbird Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Fountainhead Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Atlas Shrugged Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Treasure Island Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Frankenstein Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Les Misérables Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Sherlock Holmes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Series of Unfortunate Events #1 Multi-Voice, A: The Bad Beginning Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Tale of Two Cities Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Iliad: A New Translation by Caroline Alexander Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Complete Tales and Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Perks of Being a Wallflower Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Bell Jar Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For Whom the Bell Tolls Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Classic Tales Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Picture of Dorian Gray: Classic Tales Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Their Eyes Were Watching God Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pride and Prejudice: Classic Tales Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Thousand Ships: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5CATCH-22 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stone Blind: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Schindler's List Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Emma: Classic Tales Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Night and Day
Rating: 3.7596900484496123 out of 5 stars
4/5
258 ratings11 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Underwhelming.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Described as Woolf's attempt at a classic British romance, this story of a five-way love triangle in pre-War London is a lot weirder and more Woolfy than it initially seems after you dip down under the surface. Katherine Hilbery is wealthy, beautiful, secretly mathematical, and addicted to loneliness. She is engaged to Willam Rodney, a self-conscious but passionate lover of literature with one of the best introduction scenes in all of noveldom. And, although she isn't aware of it, Ralph Denham, the striving, intense, and awkward young lawyer who has stopped by her parents' house for tea is out of control in love with the idea of her. But maybe not with the actual her. To top things off, Mary Datchet, who works for the suffrage movement and hosts rollicking salons in her flat, realizes that she has fallen in love with her friend, Ralph. Plus Cassandra! There is a lot going on here, but Woolf keeps all the threads moving and gives us a slow-starting but effective meditation on what love is exactly, on family, on class, on literature, and on friendship. And I haven't even gotten to Katherine's mother (one of my favorite characters) and the archival implications of her lifelong project of organizing the papers of her famous literary father and turning them into a definitive biography. Right after she goes to visit Shakespeare's grave. Woolf hasn't hit her stride yet with this one, but she is getting there, and it's a fascinating second novel after the emotional explosion of The Voyage Out.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Story of two women. Katherine and Mary. Of love, work and living in London. Very easy to follow.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No one should die before reading as many novels from Woolf as possible.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wolf’s facility with language;
She draws the reader into the innermost thought of her subjects. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Oh Virginia Woolf, there is so much to say but will be left unsaid because that’s how things seem to work in your world. Things left unsaid.
For that seems to be how it is in Night and Day. In this London society where cupid’s arrows seem to have flown haphazardly. For Mary loves Ralph who loves Katherine who doesn’t love William who might love Cassandra and not Katherine (his fiancée).
And signals are crossed or missed entirely. And hands are wrung, sighs are sighed, walks are walked and lots of tea is made.
Things sort themselves out eventually and all seems fine and dandy except that there is an odd number in this equation. And that is poor Mary, who devotes her life to causes and who sort of becomes the reluctant counselor to all these lovelorn folks. Of course she herself is caught up in this love-line (so not a triangle or even a square or a circle because no one seems to love her back….awwww!) so she is the maker of tea and her flat the convenient drop-in place for the lovelorn and the confused. It is hard not to like her (especially her family and their amusing initial shyness with Ralph) and I just wish she were treated better.
As for Katherine, I was quite determined to boo and hiss at her, since I’m on Mary’s side and all that. But Woolf sneaks in these bits about how K has this secret love. An unspeakable atrocity as she is the granddaughter of some famous (now deceased) poet (who has a kind of cult status that has visitors calling at the house to see his writing desk and manuscripts).
"When she was rid of the pretense of paper and pen, phrase-making and biography, she turned her attention in a more legitimate direction, though, strangely enough, she would rather have confessed her wildest dreams of hurricane and prairie than the fact that, upstairs, alone in her room, she rose early in the morning or sat up late at night to…work at mathematics."
Yes, a secret love for mathematics. That makes me want to forgive all her faults – and she has many. But it is hard because of Mary and her fondness for Ralph, who’s in love with Katherine. And Katherine is one who believes that love should be:
“Splendid as the waters that drop with resounding thunder from high ledges of rock, and plunge downwards into the blue depths of night, was the presence of love she dream, drawing into it every drop of the force of life, and dashing them all asunder in the superb catastrophe in which everything was surrendered, and nothing might be reclaimed. The man too, was some magnanimous hero, riding a great horse by the shore of the sea. They rode through forests together, they galloped the rim of the sea."
As for the male characters, I didn’t think much of them. William is written as too silly and pompous a character. And Ralph too angsty.
"At one moment he exulted in the thought that Mary loved him; at the next, it seemed that he was without feeling for her; her love was repulsive to him. Now he felt urged to marry her at once; now to disappear and never see her again."
Night and Day might not be one of Woolf’s more lauded books but it was quite a treat to read. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Night and Day has been called Virginia Woolf's "most neglected novel," and I know why. It's too long, and too boring. This was a disappointment to me because [Night and Day] has also been called Woolf's novel that is most like Jane Austen (which just says that Woolf is not very much like Jane Austen. Neither is Stephen King, btw). My second disappointment is that the novel is about the Edwardian era--my favourite, so I was expecting great things. The novel covers the lives of a group of young adults living in London around 1908. They are each figuring out their place in the world, and each has his or her own ideas, but none of the six want to emulate their parent's Victorian world. There are two love triangles--the beautiful Katherine, her fiance William, and her cousin Cassandra; and, Katherine, a lawyer named Ralph, and a suffragette named Mary. As boring as this book was, there were some truly lovely passages and a few interesting parts. I'd say if you edit this down from the 489 pages of my edition and make it an 80 page novella, it would be a strong book. Woolf is recorded to have said that with this novel, her second, she aimed at "putting it all in," and that she did. Including two pages about a guy looking at his watch. Too, too much! I started Night and Day on June 12 (2 days less than 5 months), and have read 37 other books while chipping away at this one. It was taking me so long that I wrote a mini-review at the half-way point. This is what I said:"Katherine is the dutiful adult daughter who comes from a family of literary aristocracy. She is expected to make a good marriage, but what she really wants is to study mathematics. In the first chapter, she meets Ralph, a young lawyer from a lower class, and doesn’t like him. Hence we know that they will become love interests. Katherine soon gets engaged to William, a boring poet who reminds me of Cecil from A Room with a View. Obviously not the right love interest. And there is also Mary, who works in a suffragette office in Russell Square. Two-hundred-and-sixty-six pages in, that’s all that’s happened so far. Another two-hundred-and-twenty-three pages to go."Recommended for: Readers who liked overstuffed Victorian-style novels and Virginia Woolf completists only. Why I Read This Now: I'm a Virginia Woolf completist.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Virginia Woolf has no equal, and this early novel is no exception. N&D is an incredible cross between a novel of manners and the modernism that VW was creating. Incredible poetry, Delightful plots and characters, endlessly intelligent, there are few better novels to be read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is about love and marriage - how relationships are affected by social mores and perceived obligations. Woolf also asks the bigger questions: What is love? What constitutes marriage? What is necessary for marital happiness? Is marriage necessary for happiness? What is happiness?These are the questions facing Katherine Hilbery, who has been a willing, but bored, drudge, helping her mother with the task of researching her worthy grandfather, a well-known poet and family icon. These are questions also affecting her friends, William Rodney, Mary Datchett, Cassandra Otway, and Ralph Denham.I have loved every one of Woolf's works that I've read so far, and this one is no exception. Her writing rings as clear as a bell, yet every word, every phrase, every object is imbued with layers of meaning.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Virginia Woolf's second novel that deals with two female friends Katherine and Mary, one the grand-daughter of a great poet and the other devoted to the burgeoning Woman's Movement. Enjoyable but a bit stolid.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This early novel from Virginia Woolf is superficially a romantic comedy in the classic "Austen" mode. However, Woolf broaches issues of her time such as the liberation of women and the philosophy of G. E. Moore. Moore, popular with the Bloomsbury crowd, was noted for his 'Principia Ethica' which turned the question of morality from what ought to be done to what is good. With the confusion of sexual revolution and class warfare mixed in with the traditional comedic use of misunderstandings this book, while complicated at times, is a delight. It is a real change of pace from the style that Woolf would turn to in her more mature and famous novels.