Jacob's Room

Virginia Woolf's third novel, Jacob's Room, marked a radical, new departure in her style: the most experimental of all her novels, it enacts the 'smashing and crashing' of form that Woolf called for in the modernist movement. Set in pre-war England, the novel tells the life story of Jacob Flanders.

Through the collective memories of those who knew him, we follow his childhood, through to his time at Cambridge, and then into adulthood. Jacob's Room is evocative and poignant in regards to human relationships, and Woolf describes scenes and characters with a beauty unsurpassed.

She combines language in a majestic manner as she meditates on the multiple people we encounter who vanish into the inexorable flux of life and provides a kind of elegiac stream found in her best-known work such as To the Lighthouse.