Book description
WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY ANGELICA GARNETT AND JO SHAPCOTT
In Night and Day, Virginia Woolf portrays her elder sister
Vanessa in the person of Katharine Hilbery - the gifted daughter of a
distinguished literary family, trapped in an environment which will
not allow her to express herself.
Looking at questions raised by love and marriage, Night and
Day paints an unforgettable picture of the London intelligensia
before the First World War, with psychological insight, compassion and humour.
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir
Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography.
After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa
Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of 'The Bloomsbury
Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers which included
Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early
twentieth-century British culture.
In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social
reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was
published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's
Room (1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia
Woolf's distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this
time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the
publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917,
hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey.
Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded
as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the
poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also
maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction,
journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive
Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a
passionate feminist essay. This intense creative productivity was
often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had
suffered since her mother's death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few
months before the publication of her final novel, Between the
Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
