Jacob’s Room

By Virginia Woolf

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JACOB’S ROOM, Virginia Woolf’s third novel, marks her first foray into Modernist experimentation. The narrative traces Jacob’s childhood in Cornwall and his education at Cambridge, culminating in an evocative portrait of his adult life in London and abroad. Jacob is romantically torn between the artistic Florinda, the upper-middle-class Clara Durrant and the beautiful, but married, Sandra Wentworth Williams. This tissue of romance, though, is torn apart by the cataclysmic events of the First World War. Woolf poignantly depicts the life of Jacob through a sequence of alternating perspectives that combine letters, fragments of dialogue and the ephemeral impressions of those nearest to him. Jacob’s voice becomes the absent centre of one of Modernism’s first great novels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: May 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9780007516971

Virginia Woolf

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando.

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JACOB’S ROOM

Virginia Woolf

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Copyright

Harper Press

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This Harper Press paperback edition published 2013

Virginia Woolf asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Fran Fabriczki asserts her moral right as author of the Life & Times section

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from

Collins English Dictionary

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Source ISBN: 9780007925520

Ebook Edition © May 2013 ISBN: 9780007516971

Version: 2023-05-10

History of Collins

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

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HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Life & Times

In an early critical essay, Virginia Woolf muses on the possibility of finding future classics among her contemporaries: ‘Here, if we could recognize it, lies some poem, or novel, or history which will stand up and speak with other ages about our age.’ The modern reader can’t help but smile at the dramatic irony, for it would be Woolf herself, decades on, who would become embedded in the canon of English literature, giving testament to her times. Woolf was born at the precipice of a tumultuous age: her life would come to encompass the end of the Victorian era, the suffragette movement and two world wars. Her writing traces the arc of these seismic changes, ranging from early realist novels that tied her to her literary predecessors, to polemical works on the rights of women and war, to the increasing unconventionality of her later works.

Early Years

Her eventual ascent to literary fame is perhaps less surprising when taken in the context of her upbringing. Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent Victorian biographer, whose literary connections included icons such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry James and Thomas Hardy. Her mother, Julia Prinsep, was a renowned beauty who was photographed and painted by important contemporary artists. Stephen and Prinsep married in 1878, both bringing children from earlier marriages, one and three respectively, and eventually having four more children together. Their family home in Hyde Park bustled with activity, as did their house in Cornwall, which would later become the inspiration for the setting of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). While Woolf’s brothers went to school, she and her sister Vanessa were mostly educated at home (although Woolf later attended classes at King’s College London), where their father’s tastes had a significant influence on their learning. The Stephen children were a precocious bunch with a variety of intellectual and artistic interests. Notably, Vanessa would become a famous artist in her own right, and their younger brother, Adrian, a psychoanalyst. As children they produced a weekly newspaper for their parents, and no doubt imbibed much of the intellectual milieu they grew up in. However, Woolf’s happy childhood was marred by the abuse her elder half-siblings inflicted upon her, of which she writes in her later autobiographical works. Woolf suffered further mental strain when her mother, by her accounts the epicentre of their family life, passed away in 1895 when Virginia was only thirteen. After their mother’s death, their father became a tyrannical figure in the life of the family; nonetheless, when he passed away in 1904, Woolf suffered a second mental breakdown.

New Beginnings in Bloomsbury

Although the death of her father deeply affected Woolf, it was also the last tether tying her to her childhood, and the family’s move to a new home in Bloomsbury brought with it a sense of liberation in many ways. In their new home the family were no longer burdened by the social codes of the previous generation and entertained a wide variety of guests in a casual manner. Woolf’s brother Thoby had gone to Cambridge, where he met the likes of Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes and Leonard Woolf (Virginia’s future husband), who became good friends of the siblings. At their new home Thoby hosted ‘Thursday Evenings’, a series of informal get-togethers where the attendees discussed the intellectual interests of the day. The group that formed in the rooms of 46 Gordon Square would become the stuff of literary legend, with many of them going on to achieve great acclaim in their respective fields and their ever-entangled personal lives continuing to provide fodder for gossip. Although in many ways this was a joyously liberating time for Woolf, it was not without its difficulties. Thoby died of typhoid in 1906 and Vanessa married Clive Bell the year after – thus the siblings’ close life together came to an end.

The Hogarth Press and Jacob’s Room

The following years were intellectually formative – Woolf took part in the suffragist movement, had close ties to the Post-Impressionist Exhibition that shocked London society, wrote reviews for the TLS and began to write what would later become The Voyage Out (1915). She continued to suffer from poor mental health, undergoing several weeks of ‘rest cure’ in the countryside.

In 1911, Leonard Woolf returned from Ceylon where he was in the Civil Service and renewed his friendship with Virginia’s circle. In 1912, Virginia and Leonard married, beginning a lifelong partnership that was as much intellectual as romantic. The couple moved to Richmond in 1915 and together founded the Hogarth Press. The small publishing house was not only a means of publishing their own work, but an introduction to many formative literary and intellectual figures, such as Katherine Mansfield, whose Prelude (1918) was published by the Hogarth Press, as well as Sigmund Freud, whose works they were the first to publish in English, and who had a great influence on the thinking of many in the Bloomsbury Group. Woolf herself, after having her first two novels published elsewhere, published all subsequent works through the Hogarth Press, thus retaining greater creative control over her work.

The first of her novels to be published through the Hogarth Press was Jacob’s Room in 1922. To Woolf herself this marked not only a departure from her old publisher, but a departure from the more traditional voice of her earlier two novels – indeed, many critics consider this to be her first truly modernist work. It is also the first of Woolf’s novels to address the Great War, which would become a recurring theme in her later works. The novel, unusually, centres around an absence, a sort of black hole that is Jacob himself – his life is mostly described by those who knew him, and of course there is the absence that he, and many others lost to the Great War, ultimately left behind. Yet it also showcases Woolf’s sense of humour; through the privileged figure of Jacob Flanders, she lightly satirizes the patriarchal bastion of classical education and hints at its inherent exclusionism. Although her contemporaries were mostly positive about the novel, it did receive some criticism for its lack of character depth – something she would resolutely defend in an essay titled ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ in 1924.

Artistic maturity

The 1920s was an incredibly prolific decade for Woolf, during which she published four of her major novels and a short story collection. These years partly overlapped with her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, an aristocratic writer whom she met through the Bloomsbury Group. Not only was it an important romantic relationship in Woolf’s life, but it was a mutually beneficial friendship, contributing to the fruitful writing careers of both women. Sackville-West published commercially successful novels such as The Edwardians with the Hogarth Press, while Woolf was inspired partly by their relationship to write Orlando (1928).

Her work became increasingly experimental during this decade. In ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ she famously claimed that ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’, thus creating a clear demarcation between herself and her literary predecessors. Indeed, it was her representation of ‘human character’ in the figure of Mrs Dalloway that has marked her out as one of the pre-eminent figures of the modernist literary movement. No doubt partly influenced by her understanding of psychoanalysis; Woolf wanted to present the internal life of her characters in more depth. Today Mrs Dalloway continues to be one of Woolf’s most loved and discussed novels, even as her later works of the twenties, such as To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando, also built and expanded on its daring formal invention. The latter was a thoroughly modern exploration of gender norms, expressed through the means of a mock-biography, which showcased Woolf’s ever-present concern with questions of feminism.

Woolf continued to blend fact and fiction in her exploration of gender, publishing her essay A Room of One’s Own in 1929. In this polemic on the roles and opportunities of women in the literary world, Woolf puts forth several important arguments on the intersection of materialism, patriarchy and creative work. It continues to be a crucial feminist text and a springboard for feminist literary criticism to this day.

Turbulent times

After several years of prolific literary output, in the turbulent decade leading up to the Second World War, Woolf became increasingly politically involved, taking part in several anti-fascist committees, and supporting her husband’s work with the Labour Party. It was during this time that she wrote her polemical work Three Guineas (1938). In a way her writing returned to the roots of her paternal education, as she began to write works of biography, such as Flush (1933) and Roger Fry (1940).

As the Second World War began, the Woolfs were living in Holborn, where Woolf was working on her memoirs, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, and her final novel Between the Acts (1941). On 28 March 1941, after decades of struggle with her mental health, Woolf committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse.

Although in popular culture Woolf is often remembered for the tragic end to her life, as well as the entangled love lives of the Bloomsbury Group, it is her sustained intellectual engagement with the movements of her time, her formally inventive writing and her contributions to the canon of feminist writing that continue to engage her readers, cementing her place among the greats of English literature.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

History of Collins

Life & Times

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

So of course, wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, there was nothing for it but to leave.

Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor’s little yacht was bending like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular; the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.

… nothing for it but to leave, she read.

Well, if Jacob doesn’t want to play (the shadow of Archer, her eldest son, fell across the notepaper and looked blue on the sand, and she felt chilly—it was the third of September already), if Jacob doesn’t want to play—what a horrid blot! It must be getting late.

Where IS that tiresome little boy? she said. I don’t see him. Run and find him. Tell him to come at once. … but mercifully, she scribbled, ignoring the full stop, everything seems satisfactorily arranged, packed though we are like herrings in a barrel, and forced to stand the perambulator which the landlady quite naturally won’t allow. …

Such were Betty Flanders’s letters to Captain Barfoot—many-paged, tear-stained. Scarborough is seven hundred miles from Cornwall: Captain Barfoot is in Scarborough: Seabrook is dead. Tears made all the dahlias in her garden undulate in red waves and flashed the glass house in her eyes, and spangled the kitchen with bright knives, and made Mrs. Jarvis, the rector’s wife, think at church, while the hymn-tune played and Mrs. Flanders bent low over her little boys’ heads, that marriage is a fortress and widows stray solitary in the open fields, picking up stones, gleaning a few golden straws, lonely, unprotected, poor creatures. Mrs. Flanders had been a widow for these two years.

Ja—cob! Ja—cob! Archer shouted.

Scarborough, Mrs. Flanders wrote on the envelope, and dashed a bold line beneath; it was her native town; the hub of the universe. But a stamp? She ferreted in her bag; then held it up mouth downwards; then fumbled in her lap, all so vigorously that Charles Steele in the Panama hat suspended his paint-brush.

Like the antennae of some irritable insect it positively trembled. Here was that woman moving—actually going to get up—confound her! He struck the canvas a hasty violet-black dab. For the landscape needed it. It was too pale—greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull suspended just so—too pale as usual. The critics would say it was too pale, for he was an unknown man exhibiting obscurely, a favourite with his landladies’ children, wearing a cross on his watch chain, and much gratified if his landladies liked his pictures—which they often did.

Ja—cob! Ja—cob! Archer shouted.

Exasperated by the noise, yet loving children, Steele picked nervously at the dark little coils on his palette.

I saw your brother—I saw your brother, he said, nodding his head, as Archer lagged past him, trailing his spade, and scowling at the old gentleman in spectacles.

Over there—by the rock, Steele muttered, with his brush between his teeth, squeezing out raw sienna, and keeping his eyes fixed on Betty Flanders’s back.

Ja—cob! Ja—cob! shouted Archer, lagging on after a second.

The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded.

Steele frowned; but was pleased by the effect of the black—it was just THAT note which brought the rest together. Ah, one may learn to paint at fifty! There’s Titian … and so, having found the right tint, up he looked and saw to his horror a cloud over the bay.

Mrs. Flanders rose, slapped her coat this side and that to get the sand off, and picked up her black parasol.

The rock was one of those tremendously solid brown, or rather black, rocks which emerge from the sand like something primitive. Rough with crinkled limpet shells and sparsely strewn with locks of dry seaweed, a small boy has to stretch his legs far apart, and indeed to feel rather heroic, before he gets to the top.

But there, on the very top, is a hollow full of water, with a sandy bottom; with a blob of jelly stuck to the side, and some mussels. A fish darts across. The fringe of yellow-brown seaweed flutters, and out pushes an opal-shelled crab—

Oh, a huge crab, Jacob murmured—and begins his journey on weakly legs on the sandy bottom. Now! Jacob plunged his hand. The crab was cool and very light. But the water was thick with sand, and so, scrambling down, Jacob was about to jump, holding his bucket in front of him, when he saw, stretched entirely rigid, side by side, their faces very red, an enormous man and woman.

An enormous man and woman (it was early-closing day) were stretched motionless, with their heads on pocket-handkerchiefs, side by side, within a few feet of the sea, while two or three gulls gracefully skirted the incoming waves, and settled near their boots.

The large red faces lying on the bandanna handkerchiefs stared up at Jacob. Jacob stared down at them. Holding his bucket very carefully, Jacob then jumped deliberately and trotted away very nonchalantly at first, but faster and faster as the waves came creaming up to him and he had to swerve to avoid them, and the gulls rose in front of him and floated out and settled again a little farther on. A large black woman was sitting on the sand. He ran towards her.

Nanny! Nanny! he cried, sobbing the words out on the crest of each gasping breath.

The waves came round her. She was a rock. She was covered with the seaweed which pops when it is pressed. He was lost.

There he stood. His face composed itself. He was about to roar when, lying among the black sticks and straw under the cliff, he saw a whole skull—perhaps a cow’s skull, a skull, perhaps, with the teeth in it. Sobbing, but absent-mindedly, he ran farther and farther away until he held the skull in his arms.

There he is! cried Mrs. Flanders, coming round the rock and covering the whole space of the beach in a few seconds. What has he got hold of? Put it down, Jacob! Drop it this moment! Something horrid, I know. Why didn’t you stay with us? Naughty little boy! Now put it down. Now come along both of you, and she swept round, holding Archer by one hand and fumbling for Jacob’s arm with the other. But he ducked down and picked up the sheep’s jaw, which was loose.

Swinging her bag, clutching her parasol, holding Archer’s hand, and telling the story of the gunpowder explosion in which poor Mr. Curnow had lost his eye, Mrs. Flanders hurried up the steep lane, aware all the time in the depths of her mind of some buried discomfort.

There on the sand not far from the lovers lay the old sheep’s skull without its jaw. Clean, white, wind-swept, sand-rubbed, a more unpolluted piece of bone existed nowhere on the coast of Cornwall. The sea holly would grow through the eye-sockets; it would turn to powder, or some golfer, hitting his ball one fine day, would disperse a little dust—No, but not in lodgings, thought Mrs. Flanders. It’s a great experiment coming so far with young children. There’s no man to help with the perambulator. And Jacob is such a handful; so obstinate already.

Throw it away, dear, do, she said, as they got into the road; but Jacob squirmed away from her; and the wind rising, she took out her bonnet-pin, looked at the sea, and stuck it in afresh. The wind was rising. The waves showed that uneasiness, like something alive, restive, expecting the whip, of waves before a storm. The fishing-boats were leaning to the water’s brim. A pale yellow light shot across the purple sea; and shut. The lighthouse was lit. Come along, said

Reviews for Jacob’s Room

[kristykay22 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this one in college, but that was over 20 years ago so I didn't retain much beyond a generally positive feeling. Reading it now in the context of my very serious Virginia Woolf bookclub (reading everything she published in chronological order) really highlights how Woolf expands into herself with this novel. It has some of the Britishness and relationship stuff of Night and Day, the experimentation of Kew Gardens, the travelogue nature of the Voyage Out, and the playfulness with authorial perspective that weaves in and out of Monday or Tuesday. Jacob is an unknowable cipher, even though we stick with him till the end. But, in trying to know him, we end up knowing a lot about everything else. Which is kind of the way life works. Which is why I love Virginia Woolf.

[ofstoneandice · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Although I understand that the style is experimental, I found it too rough. The constant leaps from one POV to another is bewildering and much of the information we receive consists of useless filler material. The true bulk of the content lies in the loosely strung together metaphors, some of which appear almost as half-finished thoughts.

[dmsteyn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel, published in 1922, the same year as Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land, is acknowledged as a landmark Modernist text. Having previously read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway during my undergraduate years, and having enjoyed those novels, I came to Jacob’s Room with certain expectations. For one, I expected it to be challenging, and challenging it was. But it is also very short (around a 120 pages) and therefore more manageable than Joyce’s magnum opus. It also illustrates some of the problems I have with Modernist fiction in general, and Woolf specifically.More on that later. First, let me expound on the technique of the book. Whereas Woolf’s first two novels were, according to what I have read, fairly straightforward, in this novel, Woolf takes a much more impressionistic approach to novel-writing. Jacob’s Room has barely any plot. Ostensibly being about the life of Jacob Flanders (supposedly based on Woolf's brother, Thoby), the book presents snatches from many different points of view on Jacob, and, sometimes, from Jacob’s point of view. Despite being presented in chronological order, these impressions are disjointed, and it often takes some effort to make sense of what is going on. This creates a collage effect, very different from most novels that one might encounter.I liked Woolf’s attention to detail and her way of turning a phrase. She creates an intense emotional portrait of Jacob, even though he is not really the protagonist of the novel; no-one is. To get an idea of what Woolf is endeavouring to do, here is a short passage from the novel:It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. They say that the novelists never catch it; that it goes hurtling through their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons. This, they say, is what we live by – this unseizable force.Although Woolf displays some scepticism in this extract – all those ‘they say’s – it is still evident throughout the quasi-novel of Jacob’s Room that it is exactly this ‘unseizable force’ that she is trying to grasp. It is the ineffable quality of life that Woolf tries to represent, precisely by going against the supposed realism of the Realist writers, such as Arnold Bennett.Her characterisation is fluid to the point of flowing down the drain, at least at times. That is one problem I had with her writing. Despite beautifully lyrical and elegiac passages, the book sometimes felt insubstantial – ‘flimsy’, maybe. Perhaps this is because of its lack of plot and other anchoring points, such as relatable characters and substantial events. Woolf sacrifices these on purposes, but it sometimes felt like the book was an experiment that either went too far, or did not go far enough. To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway seemed comparably more successful attempts at marrying traditional novelistic techniques to Modernist experiments in narration. Ulysses, which uses similar techniques, also seems more successful, as it goes the whole hog in rejecting Realism. That said, I read Jacob’s Room without any guide, so I might have missed out on some of Woolf’s intentions with the novel.On the whole, an interesting, if flawed, attempt at presenting a life as it is really experienced, and not as it is usually channelised into easily digested fiction.

[elizajane_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Virginia Woolf is an author I've always felt I should have read so I was thrilled when this novella showed up in the mail as part of the book club I belong too. The synapses didn't sound exactly thrilling but I was certainly game to reading this. The book started out great for me a we got to know Betty Flanders, and through her, her little boy, the middle son, Jacob. Then suddenly we are transported to Jacob at college and the story became very heavy for me as Jacob, his friend and professors rambled through academia. Oh my, I wanted to use my 50-page rule and DNF this book around this point but I decided to persevere because 1) the purpose of my belonging to this book club is to widen my range of "classic" authors and 2) it wouldn't take me that long to read it. So I gave myself 50 pages a day to read and finished in 4 days. As I started each day it was a hard slog but as I got into it about 25 pages I was enjoying the experience and pleased with my read at the end of my daily "section". There really isn't any plot here, I found Woolf's writing very vivid and expressive but sometimes was not sure what the point was. I enjoyed the parts where the women were the main focus and we learned of Jacob through their eyes, though we never really know Jacob at all. The parts where Jacob is the main focus or that are all men were really boring for me; I felt like Jacob needed a woman's touch to be interesting. I've heard Woolf's style of writing, "stream of consciousness" talked about so often that I was rather disappointed that I didn't really see what the big deal was. The narration does flow in a distracted sort of way with themes and topics popping up here and there as they come to mind but that didn't bother me; the only thing that annoyed me with the writing was that the omniscient, unknown narrator of this story would occasionally refer to themselves in the first person (*I* this, *I* that). Who are they and why do I care what they think? This suddenly feels like the author popping in and reminding me that I'm just reading her story. I'm glad I read this; I didn't dislike it; I wasn't entertained but I did find it interesting. I would, and do want to read Woolf's two famous books "To the Lighthouse" and "Mrs. Dalloway", just to say I have, and now at least I know what to expect and am not so daunted in picking them up.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I suspect that I chose the wrong Virginia Woolf book for my first read. Jacob’s Room was beautifully written, full of descriptive passages, original in both outlook and style but for most of the book I had not clue as to what was happening. The author after giving us glimpses and hints, leaves it up to her reader to put the pieces together. The words “stream of consciousness” come to mind and I admit I was put off by the disjointedness and lack of plot.Jacob’s Room appears to be the life story of a young man and it unfolds in a series of scenes from his childhood, his time at Cambridge, his love affairs, his travels and on to his apparent death in World War I. The author’s intention in showing fragments of his life and leaving the whole picture elusive and incomplete is perhaps her way of making Jacob a symbol for an entire generation. This was a poetic, layered, confusing and intriguing read. For much of the book I felt the author was immersed in her own nostalgia and sadness, but I was never totally drawn in and didn’t feel any sense of connection to the story. I fully intend to read more of Virginia Woolf’s writing and perhaps I can learn to appreciate an author who makes her readers work to understand the whys and wherefores of her writing.

[p_s_patrick · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This short novel was my first experience of Virginia Woolf's writings. It is quickly read and not difficult at all to enjoy, like a walk through a park on a sunny day with interesting companions and only the weight of a picnic on your shoulders. Though there is not much plot to this, it doesn't seem to matter; it is a literary novel.What we do not learn about the characters is compensated by what we learn about how the world is variously perceived, or can be perceived. This is a novel of impressions of the world, recorded for their aesthetic qualities and largely indifferent to their moral or practical consequences for the characters. Hence it provides relief from the heavy novel. What it did more than anything was inspire me to get up and just experience the world outside, anything, just to receive impressions of things for their own sake. This was perhaps not solely due to aesthetic stimulation, but also due to the ennui that seems contagious among the characters.I would recommend this work and will read more Woolf in the future.

[chris_v_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The first of Virginia Woolf's novels that sought a new way of writing fiction tells the story of a young man who is to be killed on the battlefields of WWI. This edition includes a forward by her nephew Quentin Bell.

[posthumose · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jacob's Room was an experimental book for Woolf in 1922 but it certainly stands the test of time for good literature, and is generally an easy read. I lost my way once or twice about who was speaking or how much time has passed but not as much as I thought I might and quickly picked up the thread again. The story follows a young man through his life in the early part of the twentieth century leading up to the first World War. I enjoyed it and though the ending seemed abrupt, I believe that was the point about life in general. I can certainly recommend it . I have enjoyed Woolf's non fiction, essays, and A Room of One's Own tremendously but never got around to her fiction, except for Orlando, which is very interesting. I will be reading more of Woolf's fiction very soon.

[myhi_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Seemed boring to me; maybe it was just a bad chosen moment to read it. Or maybe... I just don't really like VW's books focusing on men ?!Worth reading again, sometime.

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How Should One Read a Book? is an essay by Virginia Woolf that, every time I read it, I seem to learn more about myself as a reader, both good and bad. The rating is for the essay itself, I refuse to mark the book down because of just so-so afterword and a decent introduction.The wonderful thing about an essay, especially one that was originally, in a slightly altered form, a speech, is that it can be read as speaking to us now without much concern for placing it within the speaker's life and it can be read with an emphasis on what and who might have been behind some of the commentary. In exceptional essays such as this both readings are rewarding.I don't want my initial comments about the introduction and afterword to be taken as harshly as they likely sound. I found the introduction to be fine, nothing particularly special but probably helpful for those with no knowledge of Woolf. The afterword I just found uninteresting. It did not speak to me and I found the tone to be off-putting. Which means nothing more than it didn't appeal to me or add anything to my reading of Woolf. You results may vary.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[alanteder · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This chapbook edition of a Virginia Woolf lecture was a bonus included in the first package of this year's inaugural edition of the Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company's Year of Reading subscription series. The subscription provides 12 books (chosen by the store) over the course of the year in 3 mailings with assorted bookbags, poems typed by the store's "tumbleweeds," bookmarks & posters (based on my 1st package).I was enormously pleased with the first package which included Exit West (signed edition), Her Body and Other Parties, In the Restaurant: Society in Four Courses and The Territory Is Not the Map as well as the Woolf chapbook bonus.The essay itself makes for a pleasant read with an uplifting, though perhaps somewhat smug, ending. The edition although beautifully presented in its 16 page chapbook format is not the easiest of reading for the eye however. It uses red ink and a rather tiny font (the dies of which were recreated based on samples of the originals which had been thrown into the Thames (based on the historical footnote provided). Of historical interest yes, but not necessarily a favour for the reader.

[.monkey.-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I didn't really care for this. Not surprisingly, the writing is good, there were a few lines I especially liked; but the (very loose) story... just not for me. I didn't mind the odd style of telling it, I don't think, though it's hard to say so clearly when you're not very fond of what's being told. But, the kind of vaguely sad, ambling, not much plot... I just didn't care much for it. And for me I think it's less the plotless/ambling aspect than the fact that I'm just really not keen on the kind of, sad look back on life sort of thing. The "feel" (so to speak) of the novel is just not the kind of thing I enjoy. I'd put it in the same kind of class as Age of Innocence or Brideshead Revisited, Crome Yellow perhaps. It's just not my thing. But it was a short quick read, so eh.I am curious to read other Woolf and see what I think of the more hyped titles.

[ursula_2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf - I approached it with no trepidation at all, because I read Mrs. Dalloway a number of years ago and really enjoyed it, even with the page-long sentences. With that, and the fact that this is really a novella, I settled in for a quick read. How wrong I was on all counts. I had not thought about the fact that Woolf was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and envelope-pusher in literature until I got about 30 pages into this book and I really had no idea what was going on.My impressions of this impressionistic book: There's Jacob, and he's a kid and he's up on a giant rock by the ocean. I think he's going to fall off. Oh, I guess not. Okay now we're at a dinner party and Jacob's in college. He hates dinner parties. In fact, as we find out from the seemingly endless dinner parties we'll have to attend with him, he's like the Holden Caulfield of the 1920s and really doesn't think much of society. Now he's on a boat with a friend and they're talking endlessly about the Greeks and is this friend in love with him or what? Now we're in Italy and Jacob's on his way to Greece and talking philosophy and he doesn't like French women and oh dear god how many more pages of this are left? Oh good, I'm done.Then I went and read up a bit on the book to see if I missed something grand (it's been known to happen) and the answer is: well, if you like experimental literature and important milestones in postmodernism and books without a real protagonist or any plot to speak of, this book's for you. Otherwise, read Mrs. Dalloway.

[janetf8 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How have I missed this before? Could it have been something as trivial as not liking the previous copies I've started, which were scruffy hardbacks? I mean, I've read The years and The waves, for goodness sake!Anyway this is superb. Woolf at her finest. Great descriptions of London and nature and scenery. Hinting at characters, capturing the sense of life as I experience it, puzzling me and then revealing more to satisfy and keep me alert. I want to re-read it at once - but of course I won't as there is too much else waiting to be read. But I will come back to this. The personal associations (connections with her brother Thoby), her femininism, her revelations of what life was like at that time are all fascinating.