Jacob's Room - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451526651 ISBN 13: 9780451526656

Publisher: Penguin, 1998

Synopsis

Jacob's Room is the third novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 26 October 1922. The novel centres, in a very ambiguous way, around the life story of the protagonist Jacob Flanders, and is presented entirely by the impressions other characters have of Jacob (except for those times when we do indeed get Jacob's perspective). Thus, although it could be said that the book is primarily a character study and has little in the way of plot or background, the narrative is constructed as a void in place of the central character, if indeed the novel can be said to have a 'protagonist' in conventional terms. Motifs of emptiness and absence haunt the novel and establish its elegiac feel. Jacob is described to us, but in such indirect terms that it would seem better to view him as an amalgamation of the different perceptions of the characters and narrator. He does not exist as a concrete reality, but rather as a collection of memories and sensations. Set in pre-war England, the novel begins in Jacob's childhood and follows him through college at Cambridge, and then into adulthood. The story is told mainly through the perspectives of the women in Jacob's life, including the repressed upper-middle-class Clara Durrant and the uninhibited young art student Florinda, with whom he has an affair. His time in London forms a large part of the story, though towards the end of the novel he travels to Italy, then Greece. We then learn that he has been killed in World War I. The novel is a departure from Woolf's earlier two novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), which are more conventional in form and narration. The work is seen as an important modernist text; its experimental form is viewed as a progression of the innovative writing style Woolf presented in her earlier collection of short fiction titled Monday or Tuesday (1919).

About this title

Review

"amazing.... a new type of fiction has swum into view." -- E. M Forster

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."
--Ron Rosenbaum, "The New York Observer"
"Small wonders."
--"Time Out London"
"""[F]irst-rate...astutely selected and attractively packaged...indisputably great works."
--Adam Begley, "The New York Observer"
"I've always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it's the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher's fine 'Art of the Novella' series."
--"The New Yorker"
"The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed--tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are."
--KQED (NPR San Francisco)
"Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... eleg

From the Publisher

With introductions by Lawrence Norfolk and Elisabeth Bronfen

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0451526651
• ISBN 13: 9780451526656
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 224