Jacob's Room

"Sheer poetry ... it may be dubbed a lyrical novel", The New York Times, of Jacob's Room.

"No plainer manifestation of the modernist trend in contemporary English fiction may be found than in Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room." The New York Times.

Jacob's Room was Virginia Woolf's first modernist novel. It centers on the character of Jacob Flanders, a lonely young man who struggles to reconcile his love of classical culture with the chaotic reality of contemporary society, particularly the turbulence of World War I, and ends with an oblique reference to his death. Nevertheless, the reader leaves with a fine realization of the intrinsic beauty of life and a sense that Jacob has been victorious in his brief wrestling with life.

Virginia Woolf was of course a great novelist, but she has influenced literature in many ways. She and her husband Leonard Woolf set up and ran the Hogarth Press, which published works by key modernist writers as well as important works in translation. In their first five years, they published Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Sigmund Freud, but also rejected James Joyce's Ulysses. She reviewed extensively and wrote on the art of writing and on the form of the novel. Through her stylistic innovations, such as the stream of consciousness, Virginia Woolf, like James Joyce, changed the course of literature.