Jacob's Room

“Jacobs Room . . . comes as a tremendous surprise. The impossible has occurred . . . A new type of fiction has swum into view.” --E. M. Forster

This landmark novel tells the story of the all-too-brief life of Jacob Flanders, from his childhood in Scarborough through his student years at Cambridge and his bachelor days in London to his death while still a young man during World War I. Though he is an object of love and desire for many of the characters in the novel, Jacob remains curiously unknowable during his short life, as remote and mysterious as the classical landscapes and Greek ruins to which he is drawn. His room, the focus of so much longing and wondering over the course of the novel, is opened to those who care about him only after his death.  This haunting elegy marks Woolfs assumption of her full powers as a Modernist novelist. 

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, transformed the art of the novel. The author of numerous novels, collections of letters, journals, and short stories, she was an admired literary critic and a master of the essay form.

Mark Hussey, general editor of Harcourt's annotated Woolf series, is professor of English at Pace University in New York City and editor of the Woolf Studies Annual.

Vara Neverow is professor of English and women's studies at Southern Connecticut State University. She is the managing editor of Virginia Woolf Miscellany and a past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society.

List of Illustrations vii

Preface: Virginia Woolf xi

Chronology xxi

Introduction xxxvii

Jacobs Room 1

Notes to Jacobs Room 189

Suggestions for Further Reading: 315

Virginia Woolf

Suggestions for Further Reading: 319

Jacobs Room

Illustration Credits 325