Night and Day & Jacob’s Room

Night and Day, Virginia Woolf’s second novel published in 1919, is on the surface an elaborate novel of manners and social comedy in the style of Jane Austen and Shakespeare. It tells the story of Katharine Hilbery, a young woman contemplating marriage and the two potential husbands competing for her favour, and Mary Datchet, whose passion for one of Katharine’s suitors is not reciprocated. Underlying the comic episodes is an ambitious novel of women and men and their search for freedom against the background of the rise of the women’s suffrage movement.

Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s third novel, is a more experimental portrait of the life of a young man, Jacob Flanders. Using stream of consciousness, inner monologue, and Jacob’s letters to his mother, the novel examines Jacob’s attempts to reconcile his admiration of the Classical world with the reality of modern society, and the chaos of the First World War.

Taken together this accessible edition of two of Woolf’s early novels showcases her development both as a writer and as a brilliant observer of the inner lives of men and women. Also included is Virginia Woolf’s important essay Modern Fiction in which she lays down a marker for a new style of writing, which we now know as ‘modernist’.