Jacob's Room

[9780199536580]

Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly experimental novel. It is a portrait of a young man, who is both representative and victim of the social values which led Edwardian society into war. Jacob's life is traced from the time he is a small boy playing on the beach, through his years in Cambridge, then in artistic London, and finally making a trip to Greece, but this is no orthodox biography. Jacob is presented in glimpses, in fragments, as Woolf breaks down traditional ways of representing character and experience. Her stylistic innovations are also conscious attempts to realize and develop women's writing, and the novel dramatizes Woolf's interest in the ways both language and social environments shape differently the lives of women and men.