Jacob's Room

Description

Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf's third novel, is short compared with its predecessor Night and Day. She said herself that she learnt what to leave out by putting it all in. Jacob's Room may be read as the simple story of a young man's life from childhood until his death in the First World War, but it is much more than that: it subtly indicts a society that instils obedience and celebrates militarism. Consequently, Jacob's death seems random yet inevitable. Extensive explanatory notes clarify the myriad passing allusions, which should lead to a reassessment of Jacob's Room as one of the great modernist masterpieces, taking its place with Ulysses and The Waste Land in the iconic year of 1922. The substantial introduction includes a detailed account of the novel's composition, publication, and early critical reception, together with chronologies of composition and of Woolf's life.

Stuart N. Clarke has transcribed and edited Virginia Woolf's Orlando: The Original Holograph Draft (1993), was co-compiler with B. J. Kirkpatrick of the 4th edition of A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf (1997), and edited Translations from the Russian (2006), by Virginia Woolf and S. S. Koteliansky, and Volumes 5 and 6 of the complete Essays of Virginia Woolf (2009 and 2011). With David Bradshaw, he edited A Room of One's Own (Wiley Blackwell, 2015). He is a founding member of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and has edited its journal, the Virginia Woolf Bulletin, since its inception in 1999. David Bradshaw (1955-2016) was Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of Worcester College. He was editor of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Selected Essays and The Waves for the Oxford World's Classics Series, and of The Years (with Ian Blyth) and A Room of One's Own (with Stuart N. Clarke) for the Shakespeare Head Press. David also edited and contributed to The Cambridge Companion to E.M. Forster, A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, and Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in England, 1850 to the Present Day. He edited Aldous Huxley's Brave New World for Vintage Classics and was a founder of the Evelyn Waugh project to publish the first Complete Works of Waugh's writing.

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