''Jacob's Room'' is the third novel by
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
Woolf was born i ...
, first published on 26 October 1922.
The novel centres, in a very ambiguous way, around the life story of the protagonist Jacob Flanders and is presented almost entirely through the impressions other characters have of Jacob. Thus, although it could be said that the book is primarily a character study and has little in the way of plot or background, the narrative is constructed with a void in place of the central character if, indeed, the novel can be said to have a 'protagonist' in conventional terms.
Motifs of emptiness and absence haunt the novel and establish its
elegiac The adjective ''elegiac'' has two possible meanings. First, it can refer to something of, relating to, or involving, an elegy or something that expresses similar mournfulness or sorrow. Second, it can refer more specifically to poetry composed in ...
feel. Jacob is described to us, but in such indirect terms that it would seem better to view him as an amalgam of the different perceptions of the characters and narrator. He does not exist as a concrete reality, but rather as a collection of memories and sensations.
Plot summary
Set in pre-war England, the novel begins in Jacob's childhood and follows him through college at
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a College town, university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cam ...
and into
adulthood
An adult is a human or other animal that has reached full growth. In human context, the term ''adult'' has meanings associated with social and legal concepts. In contrast to a " minor", a legal adult is a person who has attained the age of majo ...
. The story is told mainly through the perspectives of the women in Jacob's life, including the repressed
upper-middle-class
In sociology, the upper middle class is the social group constituted by higher status members of the middle class. This is in contrast to the term ''lower middle class'', which is used for the group at the opposite end of the middle-class strat ...
Clara Durrant and the uninhibited young art student Florinda, with whom he has an affair. His time in
London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
forms a large part of the story, though towards the end of the novel he travels to Italy and then
Greece
Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders ...
.
Literary significance
The novel is a departure from Woolf's earlier two novels, ''
The Voyage Out
''The Voyage Out'' is the first novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1915 by Duckworth.
Development and first draft
Woolf began work on ''The Voyage Out'' by 1910 (perhaps as early as 1907) and had finished an early draft by 1912. The novel ...
'' (1915) and ''
Night and Day'' (1919), which are more
conventional in form and narration. The work is seen as an important
modernist
Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...
text; its experimental form is viewed as a progression of the innovative writing style Woolf presented in her earlier collection of short fiction titled ''
Monday or Tuesday'' (1919).
Further reading
* Ane Martine Lönneker: ''"What Can This Sorrow Be?" Elegiac Affectivity in Virginia Woolf's ′Jacob's Room′'', in: ''Structures of Feeling. Affectivity and the Study of Culture'', edited by Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup, de Gruyter, 2015, p. 169–177,
External links
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Review from ''The Guardian''
{{Authority control
1922 British novels
Novels by Virginia Woolf
Novels set in University of Cambridge
Hogarth Press books