Night and Day by Virginia Woolf (love story novels in english .txt) 📕
Description
Although known for her later experiments with style and structure, Virginia Woolf set out in her early novels to master the traditional form. Her second novel, Night and Day, presents itself as a seemingly conventional marriage plot, complete with love triangles, broken engagements, and unrequited affections. Beneath these conventional trappings, however, the book’s deeper concerns are resolutely subversive. The main characters—a quartet of friends and would-be lovers—come together, pull apart, and struggle to reconcile socially-prescribed norms of love and marriage with their own beliefs and ambitions.
Read free book «Night and Day by Virginia Woolf (love story novels in english .txt) 📕» - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
- Author: Virginia Woolf
Read book online «Night and Day by Virginia Woolf (love story novels in english .txt) 📕». Author - Virginia Woolf
“I wish you could help her to take an interest in something that other people are interested in, Katharine,” she observed, rather plaintively, detailing her grievances. “It’s all Henry’s doing, you know, giving up her parties and taking to these nasty insects. It doesn’t follow that if a man can do a thing a woman may too.”
The morning was sufficiently bright to make the chairs and sofas in Lady Otway’s private sitting-room appear more than usually shabby, and the gallant gentlemen, her brothers and cousins, who had defended the Empire and left their bones on many frontiers, looked at the world through a film of yellow which the morning light seemed to have drawn across their photographs. Lady Otway sighed, it may be at the faded relics, and turned, with resignation, to her balls of wool, which, curiously and characteristically, were not an ivory-white, but rather a tarnished yellow-white. She had called her niece in for a little chat. She had always trusted her, and now more than ever, since her engagement to Rodney, which seemed to Lady Otway extremely suitable, and just what one would wish for one’s own daughter. Katharine unwittingly increased her reputation for wisdom by asking to be given knitting-needles too.
“It’s so very pleasant,” said Lady Otway, “to knit while one’s talking. And now, my dear Katharine, tell me about your plans.”
The emotions of the night before, which she had suppressed in such a way as to keep her awake till dawn, had left Katharine a little jaded, and thus more matter-of-fact than usual. She was quite ready to discuss her plans—houses and rents, servants and economy—without feeling that they concerned her very much. As she spoke, knitting methodically meanwhile, Lady Otway noted, with approval, the upright, responsible bearing of her niece, to whom the prospect of marriage had brought some gravity most becoming in a bride, and yet, in these days, most rare. Yes, Katharine’s engagement had changed her a little.
“What a perfect daughter, or daughter-in-law!” she thought to herself, and could not help contrasting her with Cassandra, surrounded by innumerable silkworms in her bedroom.
“Yes,” she continued, glancing at Katharine, with the round, greenish eyes which were as inexpressive as moist marbles, “Katharine is like the girls of my youth. We took the serious things of life seriously.” But just as she was deriving satisfaction from this thought, and was producing some of the hoarded wisdom which none of her own daughters, alas! seemed now to need, the door opened, and Mrs. Hilbery came in, or rather, did not come in, but stood in the doorway and smiled, having evidently mistaken the room.
“I never shall know my way about this house!” she exclaimed. “I’m on my way to the library, and I don’t want to interrupt. You and Katharine were having a little chat?”
The presence of her sister-in-law made Lady Otway slightly uneasy. How could she go on with what she was saying in Maggie’s presence? for she was saying something that she had never said, all these years, to Maggie herself.
“I was telling Katharine a few little commonplaces about marriage,” she said, with
Comments (0)