Jacob's Room

Who is Jacob Flanders?

Virginia Woolf's third novel, published in 1922 alongside James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, follows this elusive title character from a sunlit childhood on the Cornwall coast to adventures in Cambridge, London, and Athens. Women fall in love with Jacob; young men desire his company and conversation. But Woolf keeps her scornful, charming protagonist at a distance, enveloping Jacob in mystery as he enters adulthood and the Great War thunders across Europe. A daring work that reimagines every element of the traditional novel, Jacob's Room tells a new story for a new century.

In 1922

Lytton Strachey pronounced Jacob's Room "a most wonderful achievement—more like poetry, it seems to me, than anything else, and as such I prophesy immortal." One hundred years after its publication, Woolf's first full-length work of experimental fiction pulls us into the inexhaustible mysteries of intimacy and mortality.