But torn though she may be, Katharine never abandons her dearly held preferences. She dreams frequently—in language that anticipates Woolf ’s pioneering A Room of One’s Own (1929)—of getting away from the suffocations of family life to a remote cottage with “two rooms” and “ships just vanishing on the horizon” (p. 291). And her unconventionality extends to matters of the heart as well; barely a chapter passes without a fierce attempt on her part to decide what kind of romantic future she wants. She clearly resents Rodney’s priggishly outmoded behavior; when, out walking with her one night, he worries what people will think, she tartly responds, “You may come of the oldest family in Devonshire, but that’s no reason why you should mind being seen alone with me on the Embankment.” And after more bickering, she adds cruelly: “There’s more of the old maid in you than the poet” (p. 58).
Flattered by William’s attentions but unable to return his love, Katharine considers marrying him anyway because she thinks that it might, paradoxically, allow her to preserve her identity and independence. In lyrical flights of fancy that would make her grandfather proud, she dreams of an all-consuming love, a “superb catastrophe in which everything was surrendered, and nothing might be reclaimed” (p. 93). But she also worries about the dissolution of her self that such a cataclysm might cause, and is therefore “able to contemplate a perfectly loveless marriage, as the thing one did actually in real life, for possibly the people who dream thus are those who do the most prosaic things” (p. 93). Perhaps, she cynically reflects, “to be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveller’s story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true” (p. 189).
All these simmering dilemmas come to a boil when Katharine, halfway through the novel, hears “a collection of voices” firing a salvo of questions at her: Should she mind that Rodney has transferred his affections to her cousin Cassandra? Should she let herself be seen walking outdoors with Ralph? “ ‘What are you going to do? What does honour require you to do?’ they repeated.” And indeed, for a brief moment she finds solace in the fact that, “like all people brought up in a tradition, [she] was able, within ten minutes or so, to reduce any moral difficulty to its traditional shape and solve it by the traditional answers.” It is comforting to know that “the rules which should govern the behaviour of an unmarried woman are written in red ink, graved upon marble, if, by some freak of nature, it should fall out that the unmarried woman has not the same writing scored upon her heart.” But ultimately Katharine resigns herself to the fact that “the traditional answer would be of no use to her individually” (p. 272).
They are certainly of no use to her in her tortuous relations with Ralph Denham, a solicitor with literary inclinations whom she meets at one of the Hilberys’ gatherings. From the moment he is introduced, he is an altogether more sympathetic character than Rodney. Erudite yet excitable, ambitious but strongly attached to his working-class family, possessing an “odd combination of Spartan self-control and... romantic and childish folly” (p. 25), he seems a fine match for the similarly multifaceted Katharine. But precisely because Ralph and Katharine are so alike, their union is plagued on all sides by doubt and confusion. Their chaotic courtship can make for frustrating reading—occasionally one grows weary of their endless reveries and vacillations—but it also results in some of the most ravishing passages in the novel, and one of the most moving accounts ever written of being in love.
Katharine and Ralph are both “dreamers” who have a painful and difficult time reconciling their lofty dreams—of life, art, love—to fragile reality. The very first time they meet in the Hilbery house, both are struck silent amid the smart chatter and feel “prohibited from the use of a great many convenient phrases which launch conversation into smooth waters” (p. 9). Ralph lives “a life rigidly divided into the hours of work and those of dreams” (p. 112); Katharine, too, frequently falls into “a dream state, in which... there dwelt the realities of the appearances which figure in our world; ... the things one might have felt, had there been cause; the perfect happiness of which here we taste the fragment; the beauty seen here in flying glimpses only” (p. 124). By crude contrast, voices from the real world sound to her “as if they came from people in another world, a world antecedent to her world, a world that was the prelude, the antechamber to reality” (p. 307). (Given all these meditative moments, it should not be surprising that Woolf ’s original title for the novel was Dreams and Realities.)
Their perpetual residence in two worlds may make Katharine a fine mathematician and Ralph a passionate poet, but it also makes for rough going on the seas of love. Having barely met her, indeed finding her combination of “quick, impulsive movements” and air of “contemplation and self-control” (p. 8) disarming, he allows a powerful and shadowy image of her to form in his brain, finding himself
much at the mercy of a phantom Katharine, who came to him when he sat alone, and answered him as he would have her answer, and was always beside him to crown those varying triumphs which were transacted almost every night, in imaginary scenes, as he walked through the lamplit streets home from the office (p. 80).
But at the same time, Ralph is “well aware that the bulk of Katharine was not represented in his dreams at all, so that when he met her he was bewildered by the fact that she had nothing to do with his dream of her” (p. 80). She has, in short, become his muse—someone who will praise his victories and spur him to new ones—before they have had a real conversation.
Sensing Katharine’s affection for him, and full of despair over his impossible love for her, Ralph becomes close to Mary Datchet, a crusader for women’s suffrage. Strolling with her in the Lincoln countryside, he realizes that his entire relationship with Katharine “had been made up of dreams” (p. 218) and makes a halfhearted proposal to Mary, admitting, “I never said I loved you.” When Mary understandably tells him that she has no interest in a loveless marriage, a heated Ralph expounds on the risk of a loving one:
“But love—don’t we all talk a great deal of nonsense about it? ... It’s only a story one makes up in one’s mind about another person, and one knows all the time it isn’t true. Of course one knows; why, one’s always taking care not to destroy the illusion. One takes care not to see them too often, or to be alone with them for too long together. It’s a pleasant illusion, but if you’re thinking of the risks of marriage, it seems to me that the risk of marrying a person you’re in love with is something colossal” (p. 220).
This searingly painful outburst goes a long way toward explaining the fondness poets have for acquiring muses to whom they have never spoken, as well as the popularity of long-distance romances—be they the lovers Heloise and Abelard or simply couples on opposite coasts—through the ages. Katharine also despairs of intimacy with Ralph, confessing to her mother that “it’s impossible that we should ever marry.... At the same time... we can’t live without each other” (p. 421).