Jacob's Room

This pioneering novel explores a young man’s journey from boyhood to the warfront by the author of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.

Jacob Flanders is a young man typical of his generation—like so many who would go on to face death in the battlefields of the Great War. In this probing, elegiac book, his life is recounted through the private memories and sentiments of those who knew him. We meet Jacob as the boy who preoccupies his mother’s thoughts; the young man at Cambridge as he was known to his schoolmates; and the bachelor about London as seen through the eyes of those he loved.

From boyhood to college, from London to the Continent, and from peacetime to war, Jacob’s is a life composed of impressions. First published in 1922, Jacob’s Room represents a stylistic departure from Virginia Woolf’s previous novels and a watershed in the development of modernist literature.