Katherine Hilbery has everything - she is beautiful, well-born, intelligent, kind, reflective, sensitive, though not in a sentimental way, but... bored. She must find a purpose in life, other than being of a wealthy Chelsea family and the descendant of a famous poet, and she must choose between the weak-willed sophisticate William and the tempestuous Ralph. Though the love of the self-sacrificing suffragette Mary Datchet for Ralph and the upcoming law-clerk's failure to realise he is in thrall to Katherine provide a few twists and turns, such is in essence the plot of Night and Day.
All would be well if this were the psychological drama it appears to be, set in an atmospheric turn-of-the-century London. But Virginia Woolf also pursues a political message: in this novel, women answer to male stereotypes and vice versa. The women are logical and career-minded, the men coy and romantic. This might be fine, and it makes for a few good scenes, except that it doesn't quite fit the characters. Mary's ill-starred fate seems gratuitous. Katherine's interest in mathematics is too obviously a code, never properly illustrated. And her falling in love with Ralph isn't credible - she is too good for him, and it is all too sudden. It seems Night and Day can't quite choose what it is supposed to be: psychological or social comedy. It lacks the simplicity of Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out, the wistfulness of Mrs Dalloway, or the experimental complexity of her later works.