Night and Day

Second Impression. 8vo. Pp. [iv], 538, [2, advts]. Publisher's dark blue cloth, elaborate gilt decoration to spine. Dedicated to her sister, Vanessa Bell, on whom the book was modelled, to verso of title page: 'But, Looking for a Phrase, I Found None to Stand Beside Your Name.' 1/1,000 copies issued in the Covent Garden Library series. By 1929, when Duckworth transferred the sheets and moulds to the Hogarth Press, only 566 copies had been sold.

Moderate off-setting to endpapers, tanning to textblock edges, backstrip a tad weakened at hinges, board edges rubbed and gently pushed-in, else Very Good. Uncommon.

Author's second novel. The most linear and 'plotted' of Woolf's novels, the narrative ricochets between the lives and thoughts of two friends, Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet, as they seek to escape the social and moral strictures of their parent's Victorian world and forge new social norms in Edwardian London. Written during World War One and set in the suffrage campaign of the pre-war years, Woolf depicts the Victorian fetish for great men, as Katharine is engaged in the never-ending task of completing her grandfather-poet's biography, reflecting Woolf's own struggle with her illustrious father, Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography.

[Kirkpatrick A4a]