Jacob's Room

Summary

Jacob's Room, published in 1922, was Virginia Woolf's first fully experimental novel, in which she broke from the conventional realism of her earlier books. It tells the life of Jacob Flanders from childhood to his death in the First World War, but it does so through fragments: brief scenes, glimpses through windows, letters, the impressions of other people and the narrator's own uncertain reflections. Jacob is never fully seen from within; as the narrator remarks, it is no use trying to sum people up. As a boy he lives with his widowed mother, Betty Flanders, and his brothers in Scarborough, collecting butterflies and a sheep's jaw on the beach. He goes to Cambridge, where he reads Greek, argues with friends such as the clever Richard Bonamy, and attends lunches and services. In London he takes rooms, reads in the British Museum, and has relationships with several women: the simple Florinda, the artist's model Fanny Elmer who loves him, and Clara Durrant, a gentle girl from a wealthy family who loves him silently. He travels to France, Italy and Greece, where he falls in love with Sandra Wentworth Williams, a married Englishwoman, at the Acropolis. Throughout, Woolf shows how others see him, desire him or misunderstand him, while the narrator reflects on the impossibility of knowing another person. The approach of war is hinted at in the background. In the final chapter, Jacob has been killed, and Bonamy and Mrs. Flanders stand in his empty room, where letters lie about and a wicker chair creaks; Betty holds out a pair of his old shoes and asks what she should do with them. The novel is an elegy for a generation of young men lost in the war, and for Woolf's brother Thoby, who died young in 1906. Its fragmentary style makes it challenging, and it suits advanced students interested in modernism.

Top Lessons

• Knowing another person

  Woolf suggests we can never fully know anyone.

• Elegy

  The novel mourns a generation lost in war.

• Modernist form

  Woolf breaks the rules of the traditional novel.

Verified Quotes