Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf [100 Great Books]

The experiment and the novel

““I am what I am, and intend to be it,” for which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself.”

Room. A word that can mean four walls and a door, but also an opportunity: room to think, room to work, room to become someone. Virginia Woolf’s life involved the struggle to secure all three. She grew up in a house full of books, while her brothers went to Cambridge and she was educated mainly at home. Later, she helped make a Bloomsbury drawing room a gathering place for writers and artists, and a dining room in Richmond a printing workshop.

Rooms recur in her titles, too. A Room of One’s Own makes private space a condition of creative freedom. But an earlier novel gives us a room with someone’s name attached and makes us wonder how much that name tells us.

Today’s review is of Jacob’s Room, published in 1922. It follows Jacob Flanders from a Cornish beach to Cambridge, London and Greece, and on to his death in the First World War. Woolf keeps him at the edge of every scene. We meet him through the people who notice him, the rooms he leaves untidy and the things he carries.

There is barely a plot and almost no access to Jacob’s mind. The reader builds a life from loosely stitched scenes and passing impressions, and it is hard going at first. Jacob himself is dull company, and some chapters drift. The book endures because the drift is deliberate. It shows a life the way the people around it see one, and it marks Woolf’s move from the neat, well-made novel to something messier and closer to real experience.

Before the reviews appeared, Woolf wrote in her diary, “Neither of us knows what the public will think. There is no doubt in my mind that I have found how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; & that interests me so that I can go ahead without praise.”