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��Her words... were set down as gently and cautiously and exactly as the feet of a Persian cat stepping among china ornaments.��
Woolf, writing about Katherine, could just as easily have been describing her own novel.

Choices - What does it mean to be a woman today?

Are love and marriage inextricably linked - and what sort of love: platonic, passionate, or both? Can men and women be intimate friends without being sexually intimate, or sexually intimate with someone they are not married to? ( came to mind.)

��To be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveller’s story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true.��

Where do career ambitions fit? Does wedlock confine us to conventionality and stymie opportunities outside the home? Must wives submit to their husbands (as exhorted in Ephesians 5:2)? What about less orthodox relationships? How independent can a single woman be?



This was written, and mostly set, in London, almost exactly a century ago, at a time of great social upheaval and uncertainty. The questions the characters agonise over are still valid, though the answers slightly different today.

Although war isn’t even hinted it, this was written during WW1 and finished days after the Armistice in November 1918. Queen Victoria had died less than twenty years earlier, (some) women aged 30 and over had been given the vote in February 1918, and the importance of religion was something that could be questioned, gently.

In this climate of shifting social mores, five single people in their late twenties and early thirties, in overlapping (but not equal) social circles, consider their futures. All are crippled by indecision. Uncertainty about how, when, why, who, and whether to marry, how they feel about the changing roles of men and women, issues of independence versus family obligations (as provider, or as wife and possible mother), the appeal of or need to work, and literature versus science (specifically, the secret vice of “unwomanly�� maths and astronomy).

��No work can equal in importance, or be so exciting as, the work of making other people do what you want them to do.��
Then again, that could include the “work�� of raising a child.

Night and Day, Inner and Outer

��A feeling of contempt and liking combine very naturally in the mind of one to whom another has just spoken unpremeditatedly, revealing rather more of his private feelings than he intended to reveal.��

The title has no direct bearing on the story, but is indicative of the contrasts within: platonic versus passionate love, career and independence versus commitment and family, town versus country, moneyed versus not, and past versus future.

There is a clear narrative, but much is revealed through inner thoughts (though Mrs Hilberry has a natural antipathy to introspection and Ralph Denham has no use for dreams). These insights are witty, sometimes caustic, and invariably enlightening - though more so to the reader than the person concerned. Outer actions are not necessarily clearly correlated with inner ideals.

Proxies for Passion

Although they are broad-minded for the period (a single woman visiting a man in his rooms at night arouses no angst, and cohabitation and three-way relationships are mooted), statues, gloves, handbag contents, flowers, and flames are also used as proxies for real feelings. Outer manifestations are sometimes veiled. Some passages were strongly reminiscent of DH Lawrence:

Examples hidden for brevity; no plot spoilers. (view spoiler)[

�� “The very trees and the green merging into the blue distance became symbols of the vast external world which recks so little of the happiness, of the marriages or deaths of individuals�� When he saw Katharine among the orchids, her beauty strangely emphasized by the fantastic plants, which seemed to peer and gape at her from striped hoods and fleshy throats, his ardor for botany waned, and a more complex feeling replaced it. She fell silent. The orchids seemed to suggest absorbing reflections. In defiance of the rules she stretched her ungloved hand and touched one�� He looked at her taking in one strange shape after another with the contemplative, considering gaze of a person who sees not exactly what is before him, but gropes in regions that lie beyond it�� Her still look, standing among the orchids in that hot atmosphere, strangely illustrated some scene that he had imagined in his room at home.��

�� “So secure did she feel with these silent shapes that she almost yielded to an impulse to say ‘I am in love with you�� aloud. The presence of this immense and enduring beauty [the Elgin Marbles] made her almost alarmingly conscious of her desire, and at the same time proud of a feeling which did not display anything like the same proportions when she was going about her daily work.��

�� "But he persuaded her into a broken statement, beautiful to him, charged with extreme excitement as she spoke of the dark red fire, and the smoke twined round it, making him feel that he had stepped over the threshold into the faintly lit vastness of another mind, stirring with shapes, so large, so dim, unveiling themselves only in flashes, and moving away again into the darkness, engulfed by it."
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Biography as Metaphor

While the younger generation try to make sense of the future, Mrs Hilberry tries to make sense of the past by writing a biography of her father, a famous poet. She is assisted by her daughter, Katherine, who sees the book as repayment to the world for their privileged position. But it means that, like Titus Groan, who was “suckled on shadows��, much of Katherine’s time is “spent in imagination with the dead��. But then again, perhaps the act of reading this is time spent in imagination with the dead?

It is a Sisyphean and disorganised project, with difficult and unresolved decisions about what to include and what to omit, not just in terms of length and relevance, but also of privacy and propriety.

The rambling draft includes:
��Twenty pages upon her grandfather’s taste in hats, an essay upon contemporary china, a long account of a summer day’s expedition into the country, when they had missed their train, together with fragmentary visions of all sorts of famous men and women, which seemed to be partly imaginary and partly authentic.��

Indecision - Theirs and Mine

This is carefully, insightfully, and beautifully written (see quotes), but I became increasingly exasperated at the endless overwrought indecision, and even the frequency of popping in for tea began to feel clichéd.

People fall in and out of love ludicrously quickly, and yet it’s painfully strung out too. They ponder the meaning and necessity of love, and whether their (current) love object is same as their imagined, idealised version of them: passion is greater in absence than reality. Some wonder about mere happiness or whether to settle for being less unhappy. They also flip-flop decisions about where to live, what job to do, and whether to go for tea.

Woolf turned me into Lady Bracknell, as I recalled her comment in The Importance of Being Earnest (see my review here) about Bunbury needing to make up his mind whether he was going to live or to die: “This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd.��

Woolf created indecision in me: I loved the first third of this book: exquisite social comedy (comedy is too strong, but I’m not sure of a better word). I enjoyed the second third. But the final third was hugely disappointing: often farcical, with people behind curtains and furniture accidentally hearing crucial information. And then it redeemed itself in the final two or three pages. Hurrah for ambiguity.

QUOTES

Reading this was often like walking alongside a bubbling brook on a sunny day: sparking prose catching my eye at every turn. The descriptions of place (London, and people’s rooms) are especially immersive.

General Quotes

Hidden for brevity; no plot spoilers. (view spoiler)[

�� “One can’t help believing gentlemen with Roman noses, even if one meets them in omnibuses.��

�� “He was amused and gratified to find that he had the power to annoy his oblivious, supercilious hostess, if he could not impress her; though he would have preferred to impress her.��

�� “There are some books that live... They are young with us, and they grow old with us.��

�� “It was like tearing through a maze of diamond-glittering spiders�� webs to say good-bye and escape.��

�� "She pressed her eyeballs until they struck stars and suns into her darkness. She convinced herself that she was stirring among ashes."

�� "Why, you're nothing at all without it [marriage]; you're only half alive; using only half your faculties." Said to a woman, of course.

�� A “Frown of well-simulated annoyance, which presently dissolved in a kind of half-humorous, half-surly shrug, as of a large dog tormented by children who shakes his ears.��

�� “One of those martyred spirits to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost intolerable irritation.��

�� “Mary felt, at last, that she was the centre ganglion of a very fine network of nerves which fell over England, and one of these days, when she touched the heart of the system, would begin feeling and rushing together and emitting their splendid blaze of revolutionary fireworks—for some such metaphor represents what she felt about her work, when her brain had been heated by three hours of application.��

�� “She was much inclined to sit on into the night, spinning her light fabric of thoughts until she tired of their futility, and went to her mathematics.��

�� “Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.��

�� “Much as a literary person in like circumstances would begin, absent-mindedly, pulling out volume after volume, so she stepped into the garden in order to have the stars at hand, even though she did not look at them.��

�� “The first signs of spring, even such as make themselves felt towards the middle of February, not only produce little white and violet flowers in the more sheltered corners of woods and gardens, but bring to birth thoughts and desires comparable to those faintly coloured and sweetly scented petals in the minds of men and women. Lives frozen by age, so far as the present is concerned, to a hard surface, which neither reflects nor yields, at this season become soft and fluid, reflecting the shapes and colours of the present, as well as the shapes and colours of the past. In the case of Mrs. Hilbery, these early spring days were chiefly upsetting inasmuch as they caused a general quickening of her emotional powers, which, as far as the past was concerned, had never suffered much diminution. But in the spring her desire for expression invariably increased. She was haunted by the ghosts of phrases. She gave herself up to a sensual delight in the combinations of words. She sought them in the pages of her favourite authors.��

�� “For the more she looked into the confusion of lives which, instead of running parallel, had suddenly intersected each other, the more distinctly she seemed to convince herself that there was no other light on them than was shed by this strange illumination, and no other path save the one upon which it threw its beams.��

�� “She needed nothing that he could give her.��

�� “He wished to keep this distance between them—the distance which separates the devotee from the image in the shrine.��

�� “There were ghosts in the room, and one, strangely and sadly, was the ghost of herself.��
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Edwardian London - Quotes



Hidden for brevity; no plot spoilers. (view spoiler)[

�� “Breathing raw fog, and in contact with unpolished people who only wanted their share of the pavement.��

�� “They looked�� first at the hard silver moon, stationary among a hurry of little grey-blue clouds, and then down the roofs of London, with all their upright chimneys, and then below them at the empty moonlit pavement of the street, upon which the joint of each paving-stone was clearly marked out.��

�� “When the traffic thins away, the walker becomes conscious of the moon in the street, as if the curtains of the sky had been drawn apart, and the heaven lay bare, as it does in the country.��

�� “London, in the first days of spring, has buds that open and flowers that suddenly shake their petals—white, purple, or crimson—in competition with the display in the garden beds, although these city flowers are merely so many doors flung wide in Bond Street and the neighbourhood, inviting you to look at a picture, or hear a symphony, or merely crowd and crush yourself among all sorts of vocal, excitable, brightly coloured human beings. But, all the same, it is no mean rival to the quieter process of vegetable florescence. Whether or not there is a generous motive at the root, a desire to share and impart, or whether the animation is purely that of insensate fervour and friction, the effect, while it lasts, certainly encourages those who are young, and those who are ignorant, to think the world one great bazaar, with banners fluttering and divans heaped with spoils from every quarter of the globe for their delight.��

�� “The blend of daylight and of lamplight made her an invisible spectator, just as it gave the people who passed her a semi-transparent quality, and left the faces pale ivory ovals in which the eyes alone were dark. They tended the enormous rush of the current—the great flow, the deep stream, the unquenchable tide. She stood unobserved and absorbed, glorying openly in the rapture that had run subterraneously all day.��
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People Revealed by their Rooms - Quotes

Hidden for brevity; no plot spoilers. (view spoiler)[

�� “The room of a person [Rodney] who cherishes a great many personal tastes, guarding them from the rough blasts of the public with scrupulous attention.��

�� “The room, with its combination of luxury and bareness, its silk dressing-gowns and crimson slippers, its shabby carpet and bare walls, had a powerful air of Katharine herself.��

�� "Cassandra began to take down the books which stood in a row upon the shelf above the bed. In most houses this shelf is the ledge upon which the last relics of religious belief lodge themselves as if, late at night, in the heart of privacy, people, sceptical by day, find solace in sipping one draught of the old charm for such sorrows or perplexities as may steal from their hiding-places in the dark. But there was no hymn-book here. "

�� “The unsparing light revealed more ugliness than Katharine had seen in one room for a very long time. It was the ugliness of enormous folds of brown material, looped and festooned, of plush curtains, from which depended balls and fringes, partially concealing bookshelves swollen with black school-texts.��
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Key Characters

Hidden for brevity; no plot spoilers. (view spoiler)[There are five main, intertwined protagonists.

Katherine Hilberry is very self-contained, something of a loner, yet she is the flame to which the other characters are repeatedly drawn. She is loosely based on Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell.

She is contrasted with her Lincolnshire cousin, Cassandra Otway, who is younger, but more Victorian. Whereas Katherine is an only child, Cassandra is one of a dozen, and though her father is titled, they are no longer wealthy. “Where Katharine was simple, Cassandra was complex; where Katharine was solid and direct, Cassandra was vague and evasive. In short, they represented very well the manly and the womanly sides of the feminine nature.��

The men are Ralph Denham and William Rodney. The former is a young lawyer of “eccentric�� hobbies (bulldogs, wildflowers, and heraldry), supporting his widowed mother and siblings. The latter is a stuffier, wealthier (though not hugely successful) writer of plays and poems.

And among them all is Mary Datchet, a Lincolnshire vicar’s daughter, living alone in London, passionately committed to her work for a women’s suffrage campaign.
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Image Sources
�� Woman considering options:
�� London in the style of (Victorian) artist Atkinson Grimshaw, by William Dudley:


Tl;dnr

As Apatt suggests in a comment below, this is a feminist novel, but it's not a strident or preachy one. It predates common use of the term, but all the main characters are reassessing the evolving roles of women and men.

There is no simple answer to the dilemma of marriage and domesticity versus independence, but if Woolf is to be believed, literature (especially Shakespeare) and tea will fix most things.