Jacob's Room

'What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages -- oh, here is 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.

Urmila Seshagiri is Lindsay Young Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination (Cornell) and is the editor of an upcoming first scholarly edition of Virginia Woolf's memoir Sketch of the Past (Cornell) as well as an edition of Woolf's To the Lighthouse (WW Norton & Co) She is also the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and has published extensively on modernism, feminism, and contemporary literature.