Jacob's Room

Shortly before starting the book, Virginia said she was after "a new form for a new novel ... " The book is a "fictional biography" of Woolf's brother, Thoby Stephen, who had died in 1906 of typhoid, and it was Woolf's first experiment with the style by which she would soon become famous. When she was done, Woolf felt sure of her direction, though not of her achievement: one diary entry expresses confidence "that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice"In a letter that Christmas she reaffirms that her fragmentary, impressionistic, questioning style is right for her The critics gave the book qualified praise, though some sided with John Middleton Murry's judgment that her abandonment of conventional story-telling had "brought the novel to an impasse," and that Jacob's Room, like Eliot's The Waste Land, as was Joyce's Ulysses, would be forgotten in ten or fifty years' time.. Steve King Edited by Paul Hessel and Francesca Mazzucato with an appendix of vintage covers and images