Jacob's Room

Jacob's Room is the third novel by the English writer Virginia Woolf, first published in October 1922.

It is the book in which Woolf's method becomes unmistakable. The central character is described at a distance, mostly through the perceptions of others: Clara Durrant, whose upbringing has taught her to want what she will not say; Florinda, an art student with whom Jacob has an affair; his mother, writing from Scarborough; and the conventional men he meets at Cambridge and in London. Whole scenes happen to other people. The narrative moves in fragments and jumps across years, and the absence at the centre is deliberate, since the novel is as much about what cannot be recovered from a life as about the life itself. Clara and Florinda are given pages of their own, and the reader learns what they make of Jacob without ever learning what he makes of them. Woolf was reading widely and writing essays about the novel at the same time, and this book is where her impatience with the established nineteenth-century form turns into practice. It was published by the Hogarth Press, the press she ran with her husband.