Night and Day

Night and Day is Virginia Woolf's second novel, and while it may appear on its surface to be a traditional love story, it is quietly and subversively a book about what women sacrifice when they follow their hearts .
Set in Edwardian London, the novel follows the interwoven lives of two very different women. Katharine Hilbery is the granddaughter of a famous poet, trapped in a world of literary tea parties when her true passion lies secretly in mathematics. Mary Datchet has chosen a different path: she works tirelessly for the women's suffrage movement, pouring her energy into a cause larger than herself.
As Katharine navigates an engagement to the conventional poet William Rodney while attracting the intense, brooding lawyer Ralph Denham, Mary watches from the margins, nursing an unrequited love for Ralph. Woolf contrasts the glittering drawing rooms of Chelsea with the quiet determination of Mary's suffrage office, asking the questions that would define her career: Can love and freedom coexist? Is marriage necessary for happiness? And what becomes of the woman who chooses neither?
Written before Woolf's experiments with stream of consciousness, this novel is a bridge between the Victorian novel and the modernism to come-a warm, witty, and unexpectedly feminist exploration of the lives women lead when no one is watching.