For quite some time, it seems, critical orthodoxy has had it that Virginia Woolf's second novel, Night and Day (1919), has nothing to say about the events and experiences of the First World War. Ifthe topic is raised, all too of ten the response has been to brush it aside, or to refer to Katherine Mansfield's damning review in The Athenaeum on 21 November 1919, and especially her closing paragraph: “We had thought that this world was vanished for ever, that it was impossible to find on the great ocean of literature a ship that was unaware of what has been happening. Yet here is Night and Day, fresh, new and exquisite, a novel in the tradition of the English novel. In the midst of our admiration it makes us feel old and chill: we had never thought to look upon its like again!” (1227). Once this has been done, critical orthodoxy would have us move on: nothing to see here, et cetera. But then, being “unaware of” something and being uninterested in it are two very different things. Consider for instance Woolf's comment in March 1917 concerning contemporary novels about the conflict: “we do not like the war in fiction,” she wrote, explaining that this “prejudice” derived from “the feeling that the vast events now shaping across the Channel are towering over us too closely and too tremendously to be worked into fiction without a painful jolt in the perspective” (“New Novels” 104). And even if we accept that Woolf did not intend to write directly about the war in Night and Day, and the above suggests that she did not, there remains the possibility that her novel still bears the imprint of small but significant traces of the war—a “little admixture of the alien and external,” as she described it in a leading article in The Times Literary Supplement on 10 April 1919 (“Modern Novels” 189).