Jacob's Room (1922)

Jacob’s Room

Richmond, London: Published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press, 1922

Jacob’s Room is an elegy for Woolf’s brother, Thoby; To the Lighthouse (1927), for her parents; The Waves (1931), for her siblings and childhood. Each of these books also represents a development in Woolf’s style, in particular her commitment to stream-of-consciousness narration and crystallizing her characters’ innermost thoughts. These books are meditations on time passing, interiority, and change. Voids and empty spaces—in both physical settings and in interior lives—dominate, and the rhythm of the sea is never far away.

Now acknowledged as one of the most important modernist writers of the twentieth century, Woolf was at times confident, at other times unsure of herself: “is it nonsense, is it brilliance?” she wondered while drafting her masterpiece, To the Lighthouse.