A NEW NOVELIST

Evening Star, Issue 17365, 29 May 1920, Page 3

A NEW NOVELIST

♦ Mrs Virginia Woolf s new novel ' Night and Day' is a very remarkable book, and its central figure.. Katharine Hilbery, is the most attractive and human heroine v/hom I have met in fiction for many a day. Katharine's mother is a gentle dilettante, whose father was a famous poet, and Katharine was brought up in a gentle literary atmosphere which she outwardly accepted, but against which her whole soul rebelled. Mrs Woolf makes us realise the <;irl with extraordinary skill—her practicability, her dread of emotion, her weariness of pose. THE POET IX THE TEMPLE. Mainly owing to his persistence, she becomes engaged to an extremely prosy poet w*o lives in the Temple, and whose character is summarised with appealing hamor in the following description: —"He had seen that the fire bunit well. Jam pots were on the table, tin covers shone in the fender, and the shabby comfort of the room -was extreme. Ho was dressed in his old crimson dressing gown, which was faded irregularly, and had bright new patches on it, like the paler grass which one find* on lifting a stone. ... So far as William was concerned, this appearance of ease was assumed. Three times that afternoon he had dressed himself in a tail-coat, and three times he had placed his pearl tie-pin in position, and three times he had removed ft again, the little looking-glass in his room being the witness of these changes of mind." A SENSITIVE SOUL. But Katharine wearies of William, and William's sensitive soul is continually hurt by Katharine's common sense. He loves to talk of his feelings. She hates the very word. "It would be absurd to say that I hate all books when I've read only ten, perhaps; but " Here she pulled herself up short. " Well?" * "Yes, I do hate books," she continued. "Why da you want to be for ever talking about your feelings? That's what I can't make out. And poetry's all about feelings ; novels are all about feelings. . . . I don't care much whether I ever get, to know anything, but I want to work out something in figures—something that hasn't got to do with human beings. I don't want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I'm a humbug. I mean, I'm not what you all take me for. I'm not domestic, or verv practical or sensible, really. And if Y could calculate things, and use a telescope and have to work out figures, and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy, and I believe I should give William all he wants. In the end William becomes engaged to Katharine's cousin, who has the capacity of really appreciating a poet, and Katharine, after many struggles, is forced to admit to herself that she loves Ralph Denham, a young, masterful, and very modern man. who is characterised as cleverly as the heroine is. The story is told with individual humor and with a wealth of observation and knowledge of human nature, amd it is really faint praise to say that ' Night and Day 13 the novel of the season. It is an achievement of outstanding distinction, an important addition to modern imaginative literature.—Sydney Dark, in 'John o' London's Weekly.