'What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages -- oh, here is Jacob's room.'
Who is Jacob Flanders? Virginia Woolf's third novel follows this elusive title character from a sunlit childhood on the Cornwall coast and student days in Cambridge to adventures in London and a magnificent tour of Athens. Women fall in love with Jacob; young men desire his company and conversation.
But Woolf keeps him at a distance, breaking down traditional ways of representing character, and concealing Jacob's motives and emotions. Killed in the Great War at the novel's end, Jacob emblematizes an entire generation of Englishmen whose lives ended with shocking abruptness, every promise
unfulfilled.
In 1922, Lytton Strachey pronounced Jacob's Room 'a most wonderful achievement - more like poetry, it seems to me, than anything else, and as such I prophesy immortal.' One hundred years after its publication, Woolf's first full-length work of experimental fiction pulls us into the inexhaustible
mysteries of intimacy and mortality.
