It’s Sept. 1, which means we have only three days to wait until the U.S. Sept. 4 release of the film Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day, a playful and visually stunning adaptation of Woolf’s second and longest novel that emphasizes Woolf’s feminist theme.
Night & Day is an unromantic comedy about a passionate astronomer Katharine Hilbery who does everything she can to avoid romantic love and marriage. – official synopsis
Screenings
A Hilbery family portrait
The film will be shown in more than 100 U.S. cinemas in these cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Washington DC, Seattle, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis, Portland, Phoenix, Austin, San Diego, Miami, Detroit, Cleveland and Nashville.
Released in the UK on June 19, after premiering in the European market early this year, Digital Spy called it a “refreshing” period drama.
The cast and the changes
Katharine Hilbery in her lab
Set in 1910, Night and Day stars Haley Bennett playing Katharine Hilbery as a would-be astronomer who wants to study at Cambridge.
Coincidentally, Haley spent her early years split between Ohio and Florida, which included attending high school in Stow, an Ohio city adjacent to mine.
Justine Waddel wrote the screenplay and produced the film. Simon Goff wrote the score. Both were part of an interesting post-screening discussion at the 35th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Woolf and Sound in Istanbul in June, which was moderated by Woolf scholar Anne Fernald.
Here are some of the changes to Woolf’s novel that the film includes:
- Jennifer Saunders and Timothy Spall play Mrs. and Mr. Hilbery, who are rather different from their novelistic originals,
Katharine
- Elyas M’Barek is “working-class editor” Ralph Denham,
- Jack Whitehall is an effectual William Rodney, who confuses ‘astrologer’ with ‘astronomer’; and
- singer Lily Allen is forthright suffragette Mary Datchet.
Filming locations
Filming took place last year at sites in in the north-east of England:
- Literary and Philosophical Society (Newcastle upon Tyne)
- Common Room of the Great North (The Mining Institute, also in Newcastle)
- Ryhope Engines Museum (Sunderland)
- Tanfield Railway (Gateshead/Durham) and
- Beamish Museum (County Durham); as well as in Cologne.
Woolf’s novel and the film
Mary Datchet and Katharine
Woolf published Night and Day in 1919 and dedicated it to her artist sister Vanessa Bell, who readers — and Woolf herself — identify as Katharine Hilbery.
In writing the novel, Woolf noted in one of her letters that she was concerned with “the whole question . . . of the things one doesn’t say; what effect does that have?” (L2 400).
So does the film.
Mark Hussey, author of Virginia Woolf A To Z (1995), describes the novel as
“a comic novel of manners concerning five young people struggling with issue of love and work, engagement and marriage, in London in the early years of the twentieth century as the Edwardian generation Woolf herself belonged to sought to escape the social and moral strictures of their parents’ Victorian world. (183).
So does the film.
Fun and contemporary in tone, this refreshing film showcases an ensemble of humourous performances against the ravishing backdrop of London in 1910, advances in science and technology and crumbling Edwardian patriarchy. – official synopsis
Watch the trailer below.
