Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly
experimental novel. It is a portrait of a young man, who
is both representative and victim of the social values
which led Edwardian society into war. Jacob's life is
traced from the time he is a small boy playing on the
beach, through his years in Cambridge, then in artistic
London, and finally making a trip to Greece, but this is
no orthodox Bildungsroman. Jacob is presented in
glimpses, in fragments, as Woolf breaks down traditional
ways of representing character and experience. The
novel's composition coincided with the consolidation of
Woolf's interest in feminism, and she criticizes the
privileged thoughtless smugness of patriarchy, 'the
other side', 'the men in clubs and Cabinets'. Her
stylistic innovations are conscious attempts to realize
and develop women's writing and the novel dramatizes her
interest in the ways both language and social
environments shape differently the lives of men and
women. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford
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