No plainer manifestation of the modernist trend in contemporary English fiction may be found than in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room -The New York Times
I have seldom read a cleverer book…it is exquisitely written, but the characters do not vitally survive in the mind because the author has been obsessed by details of originality and cleverness. -Arnold Bennett
Virginia Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), is a penetrating look at one man’s life from childhood until his untimely death in the first World War. On the surface, this could be considered an anti-war novel, yet it is a wildly inventive experimental work that dispels traditional forms of narration. The nebulous central character, Jacob Flanders, is strangely is absent from the novel, yet the spaces he traversed are not. In telling the story of Jacob through the perspective of the characters he encountered through his short life, Woolf has created an exceptional contemplation of memory, time, and identity. Subverting the bildungsroman genre, Jacob’s Room recounts a short and unsettled life through related incidents, fleeting impression, and delirious stream-of-conscience passages.
Through an almost cinematic lens, glimpses of Jacob’s early life are recollected through his mother; the idyllic time spent with her children and her uneasy experiences living a widower’s life. Through other voices, Jacob arrives at Cambridge, where he is able to socially integrate despite his humble upbringings. After graduating, he leaves for London, where he interacts with a wide range of individuals, both impoverished and from the wealthy class; yet he never fully connects to a meaningful human relationship. Jacob, questioning whether he is a failure, decides to leave London and travels to Greece. Fortunes abroad turn precarious, and he returns to London only to be sent off to the war, where he is killed in action. As E.M. Forester remarked at the publication of Jacob’s Room, A new type of fiction has swum into view. Woolf has created a transformative reading experience conveying the emptiness of one individual’s life by leaving out the traditional elements of plot and character, yet she manages to question the ways we fail to see each other as we actually are.
With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Jacob’s Room is both modern and readable.
