ABSTRACT
The story of Night and Day is a simple one. It follows, in broadest outline, the story of young lovers kept apart by misunderstanding, their own search for truth, and the day-to-day happenings of the outside world of family and society. At the end of the novel four young people become engaged to be married, and are all set to live happily ever after in the true fairy-tale manner. This outline belongs to the traditional convention of comedy, whether Shakespearean or in the kind of fictional treatment it is given by Jane Austen. The movement of Virginia Woolf's second novel is from the world of rational discourse and social convention to the irrational world of enchantment. Both modes of experience belong to what presents itself as the same surface world of mundane happenings and social intercourse. They belong together.
