Night and Day is a novel by Virginia Woolf first published on 20 October 1919. The novel sets in Edwardian London, and deals with issues concerning women's suffrage, if love and marriage can coexist, and if marriage is necessary for happiness. The novel opens with Katharine Hilbery pouring tea at an afternoon party at her parents'house.(Many of the key events and conversations in the novel take place over that peculiarly English convention, afternoon tea.) A late guest at the tea party is Ralph Denham, a young solicitor who has recently contributed an article to the review edited by...

Night and Day is a novel by Virginia Woolf first published on 20 October 1919. The novel sets in Edwardian London, and deals with issues concerning women's suffrage, if love and marriage can coexist, and if marriage is necessary for happiness. The novel opens with Katharine Hilbery pouring tea at an afternoon party at her parents'house.(Many of the key events and conversations in the novel take place over that peculiarly English convention, afternoon tea.) A late guest at the tea party is Ralph Denham, a young solicitor who has recently contributed an article to the review edited by...

Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship and is launched on a course of self-discovery in a kind of modern mythical voyage. The mismatched jumble of passengers provide Woolf with an opportunity to satirize Edwardian life. The novel introduces Clarissa Dalloway, the central character of Woolf's later novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Two of the other characters were modeled after important figures in Woolf's life. St John Hirst is a fictional portrayal of Lytton Strachey and Helen Ambrose is to some extent inspired by Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell.

Set in Edwardian London, Night and Day contrasts the daily lives and romantic attachments of two acquaintances, Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet. The novel examines the relationships between love, marriage, happiness, and success.

The novel centres, in a very ambiguous way, around the life story of the protagonist Jacob Flanders, and is presented entirely by the impressions other characters have of Jacob (except for those times when we do indeed get Jacob's perspective). Thus, although it could be said that the book is primarily a character study and has little in the way of plot or background, the narrative is constructed as a void in place of the central character, if indeed the novel can be said to have a 'protagonist' in conventional terms.