Married Love and War in Night and Day (1919)

Married Love and War in Night and Day (1919) with Clara Jones

This lecture opens by thinking about two contemporary responses to Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day, which have set the critical agenda for modern readings of this 1919 novel. Katherine Mansfield’s suggestion that the novel appears chillingly ‘unaware of what has been happening’ has been accepted as a broadly accurate account of a novel apparently unmarked by the First World War. Likewise, Lytton Strachey’s complaint about the absence of any ‘tupping’ in Night and Day echoes in accounts of Woolf’s failure to acknowledge sexuality in the novel. 

I want to show how a historically specific and intimately connected set of questions about the cost of war and the nature of modern marriage and sexuality are explored in the novel. A cross reading of Night and Day with Marie Stopes’s best-selling sex manual Married Love, published just a year before Woolf’s novel in March 1918, reveals Woolf weighing into the same debates about the place of passion, desire, sexual compatibility and the preservation of individual freedom in marriage that co-animate Stopes’s book.

With Clara Jones, Reader in Literature at King’s College London.

Saturday 3 October 2026
18.00-20.00 British Summer Time
19.00-21.00 Central European Summer Time
Morning or lunchtime in the Americas

Prices
£33.00 full price
£28.00 CAMcard holders
£28.00 Members of the VWSGB
£28.00 Students on a low income