Night and Day

On its surface, Night and Day reads like a Shakespearean comedy: we follow the romantic endeavours of two friends, Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet, as love is confessed and rebuffed, weddings planned and cancelled, until we finally arrive at two engagements. But these dramas play out against the women's movement for voting rights and equal wages, and just as Woolf makes use of the tropes of romantic comedy, she pushes back against them with an undercurrent of doubt about the institution of marriage and the civic imbalance between the sexes.