Night and Day: Analysis of Major Characters

Author: Virginia Woolf

First published: 1919

Genre: Novel

Locale: London, England

Plot: Domestic

Time: Pre-World War I

Katharine Hilbery, the only daughter of upper-middle-class, literary parents. She lives in her family's London home, runs the household, and is helping her mother to write a biography of the famous poet Richard Alardyce, Katharine's grandfather. In secret, she studies mathematics. At the age of twenty-seven, she has begun to contemplate marriage, primarily as a way of attaining autonomy and a house of her own. Tall, beautiful, and elegantly dressed, she attracts both men and women with her statuesque appearance and a calm bearing that seems to suggest hidden depths. In the course of the novel, she becomes engaged to William Rodney, only to reject him for the freer, more stimulating companionship of Ralph Denham. In defiance of her family's Victorian mores, she declares her intention to live with him outside wedlock.

Ralph Denham, a clerk in a law office. At the age of twenty-nine, he still lives at home with his mother and seven siblings but longs to escape the routine of his work and the constricting conventions of the family household. He spends evenings in the privacy of his upstairs room, poring over law books and daydreaming of Katharine, whom he meets over tea at her house in the novel's first chapter. His love for Katharine thrives on her absence and apparent unattainability; he constructs her in his mind as an ideal, “a shape of light.” Alternately arrogant and insecure, disheveled but striking in appearance, he pursues Katharine's friendship with a fierce determination and ends by winning her love.

William Rodney, a government clerk with a passion for Elizabethan literature, intelligent but pretentious, elegantly appareled but physically unappealing. He is intent on marrying Katharine. After wooing her into engagement, he is oppressed by the awareness that, far from being madly in love, she finds him somewhat ridiculous. He alternately begs and bullies but fails to make her into the docile woman he desires.

Mary Datchet, a volunteer worker in the campaign for woman suffrage. Her main characteristic is a capacity for devotion, exercised chiefly at her work but focused for a time on her friend Ralph Denham. During the Christmas holidays, she invites Ralph to her family home in the country, where, on an impulse, he proposes to her. She recognizes both his insincerity and his secret love for Katharine Hilbery, renounces him, and accepts a position as secretary of a new organization for social improvement. To Katharine, Mary's life as an unmarried woman seems both enviable in its autonomy and undesirable in its loneliness.

Cassandra Otway, a young cousin of Katharine Hilbery who lives with her parents at their moldering country estate, plays the flute, and collects silkworms. She charms William Rodney, who meets her at Christmas, with her eccentricity and ingenuousness. When Katharine detects William's feelings, she invites Cassandra to visit London and makes room for the two to become acquainted. Cassandra is scandalized when William first confesses his interest in her, but after hearing that he and Katharine have secretly broken their engagement, she admits her own love. By the end of the book, she and William are blissfully engaged.

Mrs. Hilbery, the daughter of Richard Alardyce and mother of Katharine. Flighty, impetuous, and fantastical, she is by nature unsuited to her life's task, the composition of her famous father's biography. Her foremost function in the novel is as a deus ex machina. Returning from a visit to William Shakespeare's tomb at the moment of greatest crisis among the four lovers, she whisks Ralph Denham away from his work and takes him home in her carriage, convincing him along the way that he must marry Katharine.

Mr. Hilbery, the benevolent but remote father of Katharine. He remains blind to the goings-on under his own roof until a sister informs him that his daughter and niece are causing a scandal. He then becomes outraged, is defied by Katharine, and is ultimately reconciled to the new state of affairs among the younger generation.