Jacob's Room feels like the troubled adolescent of Virginia Woolf's work, a feeling that is appropriate given the novel's subject matter. It is famously Woolf's first attempt at the stream-of-consciousness style she would perfect in her later works, a brief but interesting book that teases and alludes until the very end but nevertheless feels ultimately satisfying.

The novel, as its title implies, tells the life of Jacob Flanders, who starts as a young boy preparing to leave for school and, eventually, to the world beyond. Although Jacob is a speaking character in the novel, and is present in most scenes, Woolf resists describing him in within the scene, choosing instead to have the other characters who interact with him offer their insight into his personality. The result is a character study of a young man who seems simultaneously in the middle and at the edge of the action.

In terms of the novel's larger goals, the form matches the function in a surprisingly sophisticated way. To continue with my somewhat pained adolescence analogy, we never really get a very good sense of Jacob outside of what others think--we see him as a quiet, brooding young man, but never quite know what causes him to remain so quiet. It feels as if Woolf wants us to understand that, no matter how many people know a character, that character will always be enigmatic. It's a telling statement, and one that resonates throughout the text.

Nevertheless, a novel is far more than its mere construction, and the beauty of the language is what gives Jacob's Room its forward progression. Within seemingly simple scenes of vacations and affairs with young women, Woolf drops wonderful sentiments and ideas that resonate outside of the plot. The reader gets the sense throughout that Woolf is concerned not only with the truth of the story she is creating, but with the truth of humanity, and that adds to the feeling of nostalgia that permeates the text.

In the end, the novel resembles its closing scene: a collection of fine moments and meaningful exchanges that add up to a varied but interesting portrait of the fictional Jacob Flanders. But, like the eponymous room, something is missing. Perhaps that's what Woolf intended, but something--like, perhaps, a touch more elucidation--feels missing. Despite its imperfections, though, Jacob's Room is a well-wrought and entertaining read, and deserves to be thought of as more than just a precursor to Mrs. Dalloway and the brilliance that would follow it.

Seemed boring to me; maybe it was just a bad chosen moment to read it. Or maybe... I just don't really like VW's books focusing on men ?!
Worth reading again, sometime. ( )

Jacob's Room was an experimental book for Woolf in 1922 but it certainly stands the test of time for good literature, and is generally an easy read. I lost my way once or twice about who was speaking or how much time has passed but not as much as I thought I might and quickly picked up the thread again. The story follows a young man through his life in the early part of the twentieth century leading up to the first World War. I enjoyed it and though the ending seemed abrupt, I believe that was the point about life in general. I can certainly recommend it . I have enjoyed Woolf's non fiction, essays, and A Room of One's Own tremendously but never got around to her fiction, except for Orlando, which is very interesting. I will be reading more of Woolf's fiction very soon. ( )

The first of Virginia Woolf's novels that sought a new way of writing fiction tells the story of a young man who is to be killed on the battlefields of WWI. This edition includes a forward by her nephew Quentin Bell. ( )

Jacob’s Room may be my favorite of Virginia Woolf’s works. I immediately feel the need to qualify that because so much of what she’s written impresses me so highly – but this book is personal.

In Jacob’s Room I see the result of Woolf’s exploration of a dimension of human relationship that is always present but rarely alluded to – the silent dimension, it could be called. She began pointing towards it in her first novel, The Voyage Out, as her hero’s projected novel is to be about our silences, silences that can express so much. Yet I can’t say that’s what Jacob’s Room is actually about. Perhaps she, as the explorer, formed an opinion of what she was going to see before she got there and then, on seeing the actual terrain, modified her reportage accordingly. From the map Jacob’s Room provides, it might better be called the reflected dimension; the impressions unrelated or scarcely related others form of us in brief encounters, the sum of these going to form the whole of what might be called a character. She may also be saying that a picture of a society and of a culture is more descriptive of a person than a picture of their ear or of their nose, or a catalog of their acts. She was very interested in the theory of biography, and discussed it with her friends at great length; Jacob’s Room is a statement in that discourse, a medical practice, as it were, upon a corpse, before daring the procedure with one who lives.

It’s common to point out that the character of Jacob is based upon that of Woolf’s brother Thoby, with whom she was close and who died untimely; those who say so always seem to think the book is then “really” about Thoby. If what I’ve said is right, it isn’t; it is about biography, about capturing a real, moving, changing life in a rather ephemeral, verbal granite. It’s worth adding that when Woolf came to do a real biography, after the death of her good friend Roger Fry, she indulged in no such theoretical gymnastics; that work is absolutely conventional. Cold though she was, still she was trapped in the amber of existing relationships.

I suppose it’s no great spoiler to admit here that he dies in the end; Jacob does; World War I takes his life, and (perhaps only for that reason) the book is commonly called an anti-war book, although if he had died of the flu it would hardly be called an anti-flu book. Woolf’s diaries are remarkably free of thoughts on World War I, and I doubt she had any real opinions on it at all, although I’m sure her letters express socially acceptable sentiments to her friends from time to time. In all of recorded and unrecorded history there may never have been a less sentimental person than Woolf, and for her to jump ahead in time and tell us, a quarter of the way through Jacob’s Room, that one of the more sympathetic and better-known characters of the book now happens to be “feeding crows in Flanders” illustrates her occasionally icy humor pretty well, and perhaps also her real thoughts on war at that time. Crow-feeder, I thought, reading it for the first time; there’s an interesting occupation. Ah… no.

Half the book is actually fairly dull. I did not discover this until my second reading, due to the lingering spell the first half of the book places one under. Wikipedia refers to Woolf first as “one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century,” and later as “arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language;” no doubt Shakespeare was then in the top rank of 16th century English dramatists, and Einstein a talented Swiss physicist. But lyricism describes very well one of her primary powers (whether in essay, biography, diary, criticism, A Room of One’s Own, or the writing of novels, short stories or letters): description. Her descriptions of what we all can see shed such painterly light on the scene, and at the same time such clear and accurate light, as to make us wonder what we are using for eyes, that we missed for so long what she showed us; or perhaps what she was using. No doubt a hundred years from now, some enterprising young scientist will dig up her bones and discover that the shape of her eye sockets gives evidence of an extra two or three sets of optic nerves, beyond the usual allotment.

One of the most trenchant criticisms of the book is to ask what it is really about. It is entirely possible to, and intelligent friends of hers did, come away from the book praising her lyricism the the skies but believing she actually had nothing to say. It was often maintained, while she lived, that she had no notion of plot or character, as though her unconventional approach was really incapacity. But I feel certain her life and life’s work show clearly that having seen what other writers had to offer, towards plot and character, she felt those particular aspects of the novel needed rethinking and a new approach; of which Jacob’s Room was her first (and, with apologies to To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, possibly her best) essay.