Night and Day by Virginia Woolf (love story novels in english .txt) ๐
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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 bookโs deeper concerns are resolutely subversive. The main charactersโa quartet of friends and would-be loversโcome together, pull apart, and struggle to reconcile socially-prescribed norms of love and marriage with their own beliefs and ambitions.
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- Author: Virginia Woolf
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โShe will make a perfect motherโ โa mother of sons,โ he thought; but seeing her sitting there, gloomy and silent, he began to have his doubts on this point. โA farce, a farce,โ he thought to himself. โShe said that our marriage would be a farce,โ and he became suddenly aware of their situation, sitting upon the ground, among the dead leaves, not fifty yards from the main road, so that it was quite possible for someone passing to see and recognize them. He brushed off his face any trace that might remain of that unseemly exhibition of emotion. But he was more troubled by Katharineโs appearance, as she sat rapt in thought upon the ground, than by his own; there was something improper to him in her self-forgetfulness. A man naturally alive to the conventions of society, he was strictly conventional where women were concerned, and especially if the women happened to be in any way connected with him. He noticed with distress the long strand of dark hair touching her shoulder and two or three dead beech-leaves attached to her dress; but to recall her mind in their present circumstances to a sense of these details was impossible. She sat there, seeming unconscious of everything. He suspected that in her silence she was reproaching herself; but he wished that she would think of her hair and of the dead beech-leaves, which were of more immediate importance to him than anything else. Indeed, these trifles drew his attention strangely from his own doubtful and uneasy state of mind; for relief, mixing itself with pain, stirred up a most curious hurry and tumult in his breast, almost concealing his first sharp sense of bleak and overwhelming disappointment. In order to relieve this restlessness and close a distressingly ill-ordered scene, he rose abruptly and helped Katharine to her feet. She smiled a little at the minute care with which he tidied her and yet, when he brushed the dead leaves from his own coat, she flinched, seeing in that action the gesture of a lonely man.
โWilliam,โ she said, โI will marry you. I will try to make you happy.โ
XIXThe afternoon was already growing dark when the two other wayfarers, Mary and Ralph Denham, came out on the high road beyond the outskirts of Lincoln. The high road, as they both felt, was better suited to this return journey than the open country, and for the first mile or so of the way they spoke little. In his own mind Ralph was following the passage of the Otway carriage over the heath; he then went back to the five or ten minutes that he had spent with Katharine, and examined each word with the care that a scholar displays upon the irregularities of an ancient text. He was determined that the glow, the romance, the atmosphere of this meeting should not paint what he must in future regard as sober facts. On her side Mary was silent, not because her thoughts took much handling, but because her mind seemed empty of thought as her heart of feeling. Only Ralphโs presence, as she knew, preserved this numbness, for she could foresee a time of loneliness when many varieties of pain would beset her. At the present moment her effort was to preserve what she could of the wreck of her self-respect, for such she deemed that momentary glimpse of her love so involuntarily revealed to Ralph. In the light of reason it did not much matter, perhaps, but it was her instinct to be careful of that vision of herself which keeps pace so evenly beside every one of us, and had been damaged by her confession. The gray night coming down over the country was kind to her; and she thought that one of these days she would find comfort in sitting upon the earth, alone, beneath a tree. Looking through the darkness, she marked the swelling ground and the tree. Ralph made her start by saying abruptly;
โWhat I was going to say when we were interrupted at lunch was that if you go to America I shall come, too. It canโt be harder to earn a living there than it is here. However, thatโs not the point. The point is, Mary, that I want to marry you. Well, what do you say?โ He spoke firmly, waited for no answer, and took her arm in his. โYou know me by this time, the good and the bad,โ he went on. โYou know my tempers. Iโve tried to let you know my faults. Well, what do you say, Mary?โ
She said nothing, but this did not seem to strike him.
โIn most ways, at least in the important ways, as you said, we know each other and we think alike. I believe you are the only person in the world I could live with happily. And if you feel the same about meโ โas you do, donโt you, Mary?โ โwe should make each other happy.โ Here he paused, and seemed to be in no hurry for an answer; he seemed, indeed, to be continuing his own thoughts.
โYes, but Iโm afraid I couldnโt do it,โ Mary said at last. The casual and rather hurried way in which she spoke, together with the fact that she
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