Jacob's Room

By Virginia Woolf

He left everything just as it was.... Did he think he would come back?

Jacob's Room was the first book in Virginia Woolf's unique, experimental style, making it an important text of early Modernism. Ostensibly, the story is about the life of Jacob Flanders, the title character, who is evoked purely by other characters' perceptions and memories of him. Jacob remains an absence throughout. Elegiac in tone, the work beautifully memorializes the longing and pain of a generation that lost so many of its most promising young men to World War I.

Upon it's release E.M. Forster remarked, "amazing.... a new type of fiction has swum into view."

The Art of The Novella Series

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781612192352

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, the youngest daughter of the Victorian writer Leslie Stephen. After her father's death, Virginia moved with her sister Vanessa (later Vanessa Bell) and two of her brothers, to 46 Gordon Square, which was to be the first meeting place of the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia married Leonard Woolf in 1912, and together they established the Hogarth Press. Virginia also published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1912, and she subsequently wrote eight more, several of which are considered classics, as well as two books of seminal feminist thought. Woolf suffered from mental illness throughout her life and committed suicide in 1941.