Adapting Woolf's Night and Day: A Guest Post from Justine Waddell

Virginia Woolf's Night and Day is the basis for the 2026 movie – out now – starring Haley Bennett, Timothy Spall, Jennifer Saunders, Jack Whitehall, Sally Phillips, Lily Allen, and Elyas M'Barek. Read on for an exclusive essay on adapting the novel for the screen from actor, producer and screenwriter, Justine Waddell.

I have been an avid Woolf reader my entire life. But I only discovered Night & Day a decade ago, in my late 30s. I stumbled across it at the beautiful Daunt bookshop in Marylebone, London. I immediately felt it belonged on screen. At the heart of the novel is this astonishing heroine, Katharine Hilbery. She is someone who through her mathematics and astronomy sees the world in a radically different way. That vision, that being at odds with the world, is the construct Woolf uses to explore questions every woman, indeed every man faces. What makes a fulfilled life—love, marriage, children, career? Adapting the novel became a way for me to interrogate those questions. And then of course, in the way of all adaptations, it took a little longer than expected, and those questions kept me company in my 40s too. Now I am 50 and the movie is coming out. Phewee.

Besides that, I was totally charmed by the humour of the novel. Funny Virginia Woolf. That’s an oxymoron. No one expects that. We all know Virginia Woolf as the tremendously serious novelist behind modernist masterpieces such as Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. We do not think of her as a writer with a sense of humour. Never mind laugh out loud jokes and silliness. But that is what is there in Night & Day. And I loved it. I wanted to share that.

Plus… and I’ll be honest here. This is my screenwriting debut and I would be terrified to take on one of her classics. Imagine trying to adapt To the Lighthouse? Sadly Woolf more or less disowned Night & Day, and I felt that gave me permission to go in and mess with it. To take risks. To be radical with the adaptation in a way that ironically, Woolf, who wrote a fabulous and funny essay on the cinema, would hopefully have approved of. As she herself said in that essay, there is nothing worse than watching the Anna and Vronsky you have been imagining in your mind, rolling around on a sofa, being put up on a screen in a literal and unimaginative way.

Because that’s the thing. I feel like Night & Day is Woolf’s ‘teen’ novel. As the novel she wrote while working towards her later style as a high modernist, it has gangly arms and legs, and too much energy. Like any teenager. And what is so beautiful about the film, and Haley Bennett’s gorgeous performance as Katharine Hilbery in it, is that it carries over that teen Woolf energy. I talked a lot with the film’s director about classic John Hughes movies from the 1980s, films like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles, as the tonal inspirations for what the film could be. That teen energy is what gives the film, this fresh, reckless and surprising feel. I hope you will agree.

Book your ticket to see the film here. Check out the trailer here.