Jacob's Room

Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's experimental third novel, set in England as the country moves inex- orably toward the outbreak of World War I. The text reprinted in this Norton Critical Edition is the first British edition produced by the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press, with the original layout and paragraph spacing.
A generous Contexts section provides extracts from Woolf's diaries and letters as well as comments on the novel from her fellow writers and friends, among them E. M. Forster and T. S. Eliot. Three of Woolf's short stories - "The Mark on the Wall," "Kew Gardens," and "An Unwritten Novel" - are included, allowing readers to trace Woolf's experimentation with the new narrative method she used in Jacob's Room. A fourth short story, "A Woman's College from Outside," was originally intended by Woolf to be Chapter 10 of Jacob's Room and is therefore also reprinted in this volume. Finally, Woolf's classic essay "Modern Novels" provides insight into her literary aesthetic and technique.
"Criticism" is divided into two sections. The first, "Contemporary Reception and Reviews," collects personal responses to Jacob's Room from Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forster as well as eleven reviews from contemporary periodicals. The second, "Critical Essays," offers insightful interpretations by Judy Little, Alex Zwerdling, Kate Flint, Kathleen Wall, and Edward L. Bishop. A Selected Bibliography is also included.