This paper aims to rethink the aesthetic value of Virginia Woolf`s second novel, Night and Day (1919), one of the most neglected among her novels, largely as a result of its seemingly conventional style and form echoing those of the nineteenth century English novel. Night and Day, in fact, makes perceptible lots of influences of her literary predecessors by revealing the patterns of the marriage plot, which Jane Austen and many others had adopted for writing a fiction. This paper, however, argues that Night and Day signals Woolf`s ambition as a modernist whose aesthetic style breaks apart from that of the realists, called by Woolf materialists in her 1921 essay “Modern Fiction.” Night and Day distances itself from the traditional form of novel in a way to embody two kinds of realms preoccupied with self-consciousness of taste. As an attempt to disturb the old frame engaged by the realists, Night and Day unmasks the oppressiveness of a territory governed by good tastes, an imagined concept produced and possessed by the cultural elites who use tastes to make their distinction discernable. The other realm entering the narrative is a space that plays to signify the terrain of a modern artist: in it young artist figures no longer idolize what others identify as good tastes, and displace the emphasis from the possession of taste to the pleasure that stems from sharing and dispersing their own taste. Taking the qualities of each terrain into consideration, this paper explores the ways in which Night and Day celebrates a new mode of aesthetics in challenge of the rigid form construed to restrain the freedom of an artist in the early twentieth century.