Jacob's Room

The novel opens with a mother writing a letter on a beach in Cornwall, her tears blurring the bay, while her small son Jacob wanders off and finds a sheep's jaw in the sand. We follow Jacob Flanders through boyhood, Cambridge, love affairs in London and a journey to Greece, but always from the outside, in brief glimpses and the impressions he leaves on others, as if the narrator can never quite reach him.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) published the novel in 1922 through the Hogarth Press, which she ran with her husband Leonard, and it was her first truly experimental book. Jacob was partly inspired by her brother Thoby, who died young, and the last pages quietly reveal the shadow of the First World War. It leads straight to Mrs Dalloway; see her life.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was the daughter of the critic Leslie Stephen and grew up in a London house full of books. With her sister and friends she formed the circle of artists and writers known as the Bloomsbury Group, and with her husband Leonard she founded the Hogarth Press, which published her own books and those of T. S. Eliot.

Her novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando changed the way fiction follows the mind, and her essay A Room of One's Own argued that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write. She suffered all her life from depression, and drowned herself in 1941.