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Adaptations are tricky things: the more changes you make, the more you risk upsetting an audience of devotees. , a new film that takes certain liberties with its source material, may therefore dishearten some. Not having read the original, I can’t speak to whether the film will please fans, but I can say I found it a bold reimagining, thanks to its expanded focus on women in astronomy in the early 20th century. 

As in Woolf’s book, our hero is Katharine Hilbery (Hayley Bennett), a member of a literary family who finds herself pressured to marry. But in Tina Gharavi’s film, Katharine’s interest in astronomy and mathematics is her guiding light, so much so that she is considering applying to the University of Cambridge to pursue her research despite restrictions on women’s participation. Caught between her bullish father Terence (Timothy Spall) and her passion for the celestial, Katharine debates a marriage of convenience to her childhood friend William Rodney (Jack Whitehall), an amateur poet and prize idiot.

Katharine may bring to mind Henrietta Swann Leavitt, the US astronomer who, in 1908, discovered the relationship between the luminosity and pulsation period of variable stars, giving us our first means of measuring distance across the cosmos. Indeed, her story, and those of the countless unsung women who have contributed to science with scant recognition over the centuries, pervade this forthright adaptation. From the moment Katherine, disguised as a man, sees fellow scientist Lady Margaret Huggins (Frances Barber) denied entrance to a vote on women’s membership of astronomical societies, she is determined to claim her space in a world that doesn’t want her.

The radicalism doesn’t end there, either – Gharavi has taken the bones of Woolf’s novel and reset them in fascinating ways, suffused with the unsaid things roiling beneath the surface of Edwardian Britain. Mary Datchet (Lily Allen), Woolf’s suffragette, is stripped of her unfortunate romantic plot in favour of more scenes of feminist organising. And we eventually learn that Cyril (Misia Butler), Katharine’s cousin and confidante, is living life semi-openly as a gay man at a time when this was highly dangerous. All this serves a tender purpose in Gharavi’s hands: to show that pursuing a fairer, less bigoted society is part and parcel of seeing the world more clearly, whether scientifically or socially.

While Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day can tip into didacticism at times, on the whole, it is a delicate, deeply felt work. I happened to watch it on the day of the recent solar eclipse, which was an excellent way to cap off a viewing – if you can arrange it…