Just Sleep - Bedtime Stories for Adults · Bedtime Stories with Taesha Glasgow

Night and Day: William Rodney

·42 min·4 clips

Rodney confesses he's half a poet and can't pretend not to feel what he does for Catherine.

The episode opens with host Tayshia welcoming listeners to the Just Sleep Podcast, explaining the show reads classic stories to help adults unwind and drift off. She notes that ads, if any, appear only in the introduction and never during or after the story itself, and directs listeners to justsleeppodcast.com for an ad-free premium tier. Tonight she continues the serialized reading of Virginia Woolf's Night and Day, picking up with Chapter 5. The chapter opens on Ralph Denham, who follows Catherine Hilbury and William Rodney through London almost involuntarily after a social gathering, accompanied by his friend Sands, a barrister who engages him in philosophical conversation about a colleague having abandoned his theory of truth. Denham keeps one strand of attention on the couple ahead while engaging with Sands, noting how the lamplight and city shadows make Catherine and Rodney appear larger and more significant than ordinary pedestrians. Catherine and Rodney walk to the Thames embankment, where Rodney stops her to look at the moonlit river, then declares that he is half a poet and cannot pretend not to feel what he feels — an indirect marriage proposal. Catherine deflects with brisk practicality, and the two argue lightly about convention and propriety before Rodney insists on calling her a cab despite her wish to walk home alone. Rodney parts from her in a private fit of indignation, delivering an internal soliloquy declaring he would sooner marry his landlady's daughter than Catherine. He encounters Denham walking in the opposite direction, and the two men retire to Rodney's book-lined rooms for whiskey and conversation. Rodney's rooms are rendered in careful Woolfian detail: orderly bookshelves with shabbier volumes hidden behind presentable ones, a Venetian mirror above the fireplace, a jar of tulips, and the open score of Don Giovanni on the piano. Denham picks up a copy of Sir Thomas Browne and reads in silence; before leaving he borrows Rodney's play manuscript, and receives in the mail two days later the very Browne volume as an unsolicited gift — an expression of Rodney's habit of giving away whatever his friends genuinely admire. Chapter 6 introduces Mary Datchett in her morning routine, walking from her flat across Lincoln's Inn Fields to her suffrage society office in Russell Square. Woolf renders her inner life with precision: Mary savors the fifteen-minute walk, imagines herself indistinguishable from the city's workers, and mentally drafts economies involving notepaper and foolscap. At the office she works alongside the frugal Mr. Clacton and the perpetually flushed Mrs. Seal, whose philanthropic enthusiasm exceeds her organizational competence. Mary has taken on the task of organizing a series of fundraising entertainments for the suffrage society and privately imagines herself becoming a great organiser. After lunch at a red-plush restaurant, she detours through the British Museum, where the Elgin Marbles prompt an unwilling acknowledgment that she may be in love with Ralph Denham — a feeling she debates and retreats from before returning to the street. The afternoon at the office is spent fighting distraction, watching birds and making drawings on her blotting paper rather than working. Tayshia closes the reading without fanfare, ending simply with the final word of Chapter 6.

As heard by us

A quiet Woolf chapter, where a still London night and careful prose carry the mood.

Virginia Woolf's Night and Day settles into a still London night, with Rodney's small rooms, a moonlit walk, and the arrival of Denham and Harry Sands. Its power lies less in movement than in atmosphere.

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Why you'd press play

You want Woolf's moonlit London and a reading that settles you down.

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