Jacob’s Room

Set in pre-war England, Jacob’s Room traces the development of Jacob Flanders from childhood to adulthood. In this pathbreaking experimental novel, Jacob’s character and the events of his life are revealed primarily through the letters, conversations, and thoughts of the people in his life who love him. Their impressions and memories surround the lacuna at the center of the story, which is Jacob himself, whose inner life is only fleetingly glimpsed. Elegiac, probing, and poignant, Jacob’s Room is an important modernist text by a literary virtuoso coming into her own. 

The text of this edition of Jacob’s Room is based on the original British edition published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at Hogarth Press in 1922. Every effort has been made to preserve Woolf’s original punctuation, spelling, and intentionally varied spacing between paragraphs.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) ranks among the major literary figures of all time. With her novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, she reinvented the art of storytelling and shaped modern culture’s self-understanding to the present day. In landmark essays, letters, and diaries, Woolf insisted on a woman’s right to tell her story on her own terms.

Kristina K. Groover is Professor of English at Appalachian State University, where she teaches twentieth-century British and American literature. Her books include Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf and Things of the Spirit: Women Writers Constructing Spirituality.