Night and Day

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London, Early 20thC. Four characters; two men and two women, estranged by their social status but tightly knotted by the invisible strings of their restrained yearnings feature the storyline of this novel.

More traditional in style and form than Woolf's later and more exploratory works, Night and Day, as the title implies, juxtaposes the struggles of a younger generation to disengage from the corseted legacy of the Victorian era and to find a place in the shifting tides of impending modernity.

The result could have easily emerged as a hybrid between a novel of manners and a romantic comedy, but in Woolf's hands it becomes an introspective meditation on the search of identity, the fluctuating whims versus the rational expectations of human beings, of the trade-off between alienated solitude and individual freedom and a call into question of the social conventions regarding marriage and the emancipation of women.

The female protagonists in Night and Day, Katharine and Mary, wish to be liberated from the imposed roles attached to their gender and, in their particular circumstances, they both ponder on the importance of having a professional career to achieve such goal, a theme that will be further developed in A Room of One's Own, and subsequently in To the Lighthouse .

As a matter of fact, there is literal association between the characters' fleeting emotions and the flashing beams of a lighthouse that recurs throughout the text and bespeaks of sporadic moments of vision in which man and woman communicate from equal to equal through intuition rather than through verbal expression.

Woolf's prose conquers the unconquerable. Her ability to evoke the solidness of London in all its shapes, smells and sounds is simply magisterial: the Strand shrouded in misty darkness, the smoldering warmth of Mary's fireplace, the small window of Ralph's alcove at the top of a hill with the sparkling city sprawled out underneath, the twittering of docile sparrows that delights impromptu strollers... The precision of these static images contrasts with the fluidity of the river Thames, location where Ralph and Katharine speak freely, ignoring the constraints ascribed to their sex, role or class, giving substance to silent conversations, to things left unsaid.