“No plainer manifestation of the modernist trend in contemporary English fiction may be found than in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room”-The New York Times “I have seldom read a cleverer book…it is exquisitely written, but the characters do not vitally survive in the mind because the author has been obsessed by details of originality and cleverness.”-Arnold Bennett Virginia Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), is a penetrating look at one man’s life from childhood until his untimely death in the first World War. On the surface, this could be considered an anti-war novel, yet it is a wildly inventive experimental work that dispels traditional forms of narration. The nebulous central character, Jacob Flanders, is strangely is absent from the novel, yet the spaces he traversed are not. In telling the story of Jacob through the perspective of the characters he encountered through his short life, Woolf has created an exceptional contemplation of memory, time, and identity. Subverting the
