Jacob’s Room

Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf’s third novel, was first published in 1922. Here we find her beginning to part company with the traditional methods of the English novel, and her experiments with the stream of consciousnesss and the sequence of time were first steps in the direction of such masterpieces such as and The Waves.

The limped impression she creates of a young man’s progress from the mental purity of pre-war university life to the squalid truths of reality is heightened by the poetry of her style, and Jacob’s Room offers an affecting tribute to the generation which was decimated in the First World War. As Rebecca Wesr observed in the New Statesman: ‘It is authentic poetry, cognizant of the soul.’