Book description
WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY LAWRENCE NORFOLK AND ELISABETH BRONFEN
Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly experimental
novel. It is a portrait of a young man, tracing his life from
childhood, to Cambridge University, and to his early adult life in
artistic London. Jacob always yearns for something greater, and
embarks on a voyage to the Mediterranean before the war begins and his
fate is forever altered. Impressionistic in style, the narrative is as
inspired now as it was when it first appeared.
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir
Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography.
After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa
Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of 'The Bloomsbury
Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers which included
Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early
twentieth-century British culture.
In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social
reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was
published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922).
These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf's
distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this time
that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the
publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917,
hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey.
Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded
as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the
poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also
maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction,
journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive
Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a
passionate feminist essay. This intense creative productivity was
often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had
suffered since her mother's death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few
months before the publication of her final novel, Between the
Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
