Jacob's Room

Jacob’s Room was the first of Virginia Woolf’s novels to be published by the Hogarth Press, founded with her husband, Leonard Woolf, in their home at Hogarth House in Richmond in 1917. It is an episodic tale that attempts to evoke the inner life of Jacob Flanders and his social milieu during the first decade and a half of the 20th century. This novel was hailed by friends such as T.S. Eliot, and it represents Virginia Woolf’s first move towards experimentation, for which she was later recognized. "Jacob's Room comes as a tremendous surprise... The coherence of the book is even more amazing than its beauty. In the stream of glittering similes, unfinished sentences, hectic catalogues, unanchored proper names, we seem to be going nowhere. Yet the goal comes, the method and the matter prove to have been one, and looking back from the pathos of the closing scene we see for a moment the airy drifting atoms piled into a colonnade. The break with Night and Day and even with The Voyage Out is complete. A new type of fiction has swum into view..."E.M. Forster