Virginia Woolf Jacob's Room

About Jacob's Room

Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922) is her first fully experimental novel — a portrait of Jacob Flanders assembled from fragments: other people's observations, rooms he has inhabited, letters he has written. We never see Jacob from the inside; the novel is a meditation on how little we can know another person, and on the gap between the life lived and the life reconstructed after death in the First World War. The laboratory in which Woolf developed the method she perfected in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.