Audiobook · read by volunteers
Night and Day
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
Read by J. M. Smallheer · 34 chapters · 15 h 53
About the book
Katharine Hilbery lives in a house full of famous ancestors, and her family expects her to write the biography of her grandfather, the great poet. She would rather study mathematics in secret. Mary Datchet works for the cause of votes for women and lives on her own in a small flat. Around them gather suitors, friends and rivals, and the question that lies behind every conversation is how to find love, and who to marry, without losing yourself. Virginia Woolf's second novel is set in Edwardian London and follows a group of young people as they try to reconcile feeling and reason, duty and freedom. It is a quieter and more traditional book than her later work, and rich in character. Thirty-four chapters, nearly sixteen hours of conversation, doubt and hope.
Introduction
Virginia Woolf lived from 1882 to 1941. She became one of the major figures of literary modernism, and her novels, among them Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, changed the way fiction could represent consciousness. She was also a critic, an essayist and, with her husband, the founder of the Hogarth Press.
Night and Day was published in 1919 and was her second novel. It is set in Edwardian London and contrasts the daily lives of two friends, Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet. The novel examines the relationships between love, marriage, happiness and success. Katharine, granddaughter of a celebrated poet, is expected to help write his biography, while Mary works for the cause of votes for women. In form the book is more conventional than the experimental works that followed, closer to the nineteenth-century novel of manners, though it already shows her gift for conversation and for the movements of the mind.
The recording was made by a single volunteer of the LibriVox project, who reads all thirty-four chapters. It runs to nearly sixteen hours.
The conversations, in drawing rooms, offices and on the pavement, are the heart of the book, and Woolf uses them to show how much is left unsaid between people who care for one another. Why listen? Because the book is a rewarding way into Woolf for anyone who finds her later work forbidding. It offers a clear plot, appealing characters and a vivid picture of a certain London, with its drawing rooms, committees and walks along the river.
Public domain
Virginia Woolf died in 1941: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text