Katharine Hilbery keeps house for a famous grandfather's memory, does mathematics in secret, and is engaged to a poet she does not love. Woolf wrote her second novel while recovering from a breakdown, deliberately in the old shape — Katherine Mansfield called it a lie in the soul, and Woolf never wrote a conventional novel again. The suffrage office and the mathematics are the tell. Fifty-seven plates by painters including Whistler and Lavery bring the Thames, the fleet, and the society portrait into a novel about a woman weighing marriage against mathematics.
