“On this day in 1922 Virginia Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room, was first published by the Hogarth Press. Approximately 1,200 copies were printed, priced at 7s 6d.
It was the first of Woolf’s novels to be published by her own company; from then on, all her works were published under its imprint. The printer was R. & R. Clark of Edinburgh.
Woolf’s Diary entry of Monday 26 January 1920 – the day after her 38th birthday – reveals her first thoughts about ‘a new form for a new novel’:
Suppose one thing should open out of another – as in An Unwritten Novel – only not for 10 pages but 200 or so – doesn’t that give the looseness & lightness I want: doesnt that get closer & yet keep form & speed, & enclose everything, everything? . . . I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist. . . . conceive mark on the wall, K. G. & unwritten novel taking hands & dancing in unity. – Virginia Woolf, Diary 2, pp. 13–14. B. J. Kirkpatrick and Stuart N. Clarke, A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf, 4th edition, 1997, pp. 27–8.
Peter Jones, fellow of King’s College, and Karina Jakubowicz
Add another celebration of the centenary of the publication of Jacob’s Room (1922) to the list. This time, it is Literature Cambridge’s new Virginia Woolf Podcast.
Join Karina Jakubowicz as she visits King’s College, Cambridge and speaks with Susan Sellers, Woolf scholar and novelist, and Peter Jones, King’s College Fellow, for the first episode of season two of the Virginia Woolf Podcast.
In the podcast, we get a sense of where some of the Bloomsbury members lived in Cambridge, and we explore the novel’s relationship with death, memory, and the Great War.
Two free events will celebrate the centenary of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) this week. And organizers Rachel Crossland and Alice Wood invite readers to join them online in marking 100 years since its first publication.
Free online seminar
What: Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room: Centenary Reflections When: Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2:30–4:30 p.m. BST, 9:30-11:30 a.m. ESTfree online seminar Who: Charlotte Taylor Suppé (independent scholar): “Women Must Weep: Betty Flanders and the Perils of Nationalistic Mothering;” Chris Wells (University of Sheffield): “Sexology, Bisexuality and Experimentation in Jacob’s Room;” and Vara Neverow (Southern Connecticut State University): “Tracing Patterns in the Critical Reception of Jacob’s Room from 1922 to 2022″ More information:Get abstracts and speaker biographies. Registration: Register by noon BST on Oct. 26 to receive a link to join the seminar.
A readathon
What: Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room: Centenary Readathon When: Thursday, Oct. 27 How: Follow and tweet to @VWoolf100 on Twitter. Hasthag: #JacobsRoom100
One hundred years to the day from the novel’s first publication, Rachel Crossland and Alice Wood invite readers of Jacob’s Room to join in a collective reappraisal of this text. Woolf’s Jacob’s Room is one of the key works of modernism’s annus mirabilis of 1922, but still attracts much less attention than T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Whether reading the novel for the first time or returning to it, organizers encourage students, scholars, and, in Woolf’s phrase, “common readers” to dive into this short book (or a portion of it) on Oct. 27, then tweet thoughts and reflections to @VWoolf100 with the hashtag #JacobsRoom100.
What fresh light can today’s world shed on Jacob’s Room and how can this novel speak to us today, organizers ask.
100 years & 2 days ago #VirginiaWoolf wrote to Garnett: ‘But how far can one convey character without realism? That is my problem – one of them at least.’ 2 days later she wrote to Roger Fry: *Jacob’s Room* ‘has *some* merit, but its too much of an experiment.’ #JacobsRoom100https://t.co/PLjlrTn2sQ
Virginia Woolf published Jacob’s Room 100 years ago. And since then, many readers have wandered down Lamb’s Conduit Street in London, speculating about where Jacob lived and what he would have seen.
Pillar box at the corner of Lamb’s Conduit Street and Great Ormond Street, outside Ryman Stationery in London.
I, myself, have done just that, taking particular notice — and photos — of the classic red pillar box on the corner and stopping at The Lamb pub, which existed in Jacob’s time, for a meal.
Woolf puts London at the novel’s heart
In a piece posted on the London Fictions website, Robert Todd, member of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, explores, in detail, the way Woolf puts London at the heart of her novel after Jacob reaches the age of 22 in 1909.
Woolf’s eight chapters that cover the years from 1909 on “display, amongst so much else, a vivid picture of London and Jacob’s relation to it,” according to Todd.
The London of Jacob’s Room was a young man’s world of hopes, dreams and pleasure, before responsibility is assumed. It was also a young woman’s world, Virginia Woolf’s, after she moved to Bloomsbury in 1904. – Robert Todd
Walking with Jacob Flanders
For that reason, Todd’s March 2020 article includes a Jacob’s Room walk, beginning with Jacob’s lodging-house on Lamb’s Conduit Street in Bloomsbury.
Persephone Books at 59 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London, in 2019. The shop moved to Bath in 2021.
He puts the location of Jacob’s two-room first floor flat at #59, the former site of Persephone Books, known for reprinting neglected fiction and non-fiction by mid-20th century (mostly) women writers.
With a sitting room that overlooked the street, Jacob had a view of a confectioner’s shop and the famous letter-box pictured above.
Todd’s journeys with Jacob take us beyond Bloomsbury, however. With him, we travel to Covent Garden, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Piccadilly, Hyde Park, and Parliament Hill Fields.
Woolf herself lived nearby
Plaque at 38 Brunswick Square
Todd goes on to share how Woolf’s experiences while living nearby at 38 Brunswick Square influenced the sights and the action in Jacob’s Room. The University of London School of Pharmacy has stood on the site of that address since around 1936, according to Jean Moorcroft Wilson in Virginia Woolf: Life and London (1987, 2011).
Todd also speculates about how Woolf’s visits to the two rooms of friend Saxon Sydney-Turner may have influenced her descriptions of Jacob’s rooms.
A protest against war in her own voice
Jacob’s Room, of course, is not just a novel about location. As Julia Briggs notes in her biography Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (2005), Woolf’s third novel was a protest against World War I and the “shocking impersonality of its killing machine” (84).
Jacob was just one of the nearly one million British and Commonwealth soldiers who perished in that conflict. But the enormity of that loss prompted Woolf to focus on the fate of just one individual in order to make some sense of the tragic conflict, according to Briggs.
Already a pacifist, in a Jan. 23, 1916, letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davis, Woolf claimed she had become “steadily more feminist'” due to “the preposterous masculine fiction” of wartime propaganda in mainstream media (L2, 76).
Three months before the novel was published, Woolf wrote in a July 26, 1922, diary entry that she had “found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice” (D2, 186).
Publishing record and reviews
Jacob’s Room was published on Oct. 27, 1922, in an edition of 1,200 copies. Wrapped in a dust jacket designed by Vanessa Bell, it sold for seven shillings and sixpence.
An additional 1,000 copies were printed soon thereafter, but by the end of 1923, fewer than 1,500 copies had been sold. The novel did, however, turn a small profit.
Woolf’s novel received mixed reviews. It was described as experimental, impressionist, and adventurous. It was criticized for its form and its lack of realism. It was also compared to the work of James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson.
In a diary entry dated Nov. 12, 1922, Woolf herself described it as “the starting point for fresh adventures” (D2, 214).
In good company
It’s no wonder that the work was compared to James Joyce’s, for Woolf’s 1922 novel was in the good company of that work and others.
James Joyce’s Ulysses, was published the same year, along with T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned.
The Clare Hall Cambridge Literary Talks on Virginia Woolf are cancelled for 2016-17. A new series of Woolf talks is planned at another Cambridge venue early in 2017. Details will be available soon. Please contact trudi.tate@gmail.com for further information.
Jacob’s Room Study Day date changed
The new date is Saturday, 11 March 2017, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m., at the Oriental Club First Floor, 11 Stratford Place, London W1C IES
The day will include Dr. Sue Roe, Sarah Phillips and Lindsay Martin. Tickets: £48 for VWSGB members/£50 for non-members and include lunch and refreshments. To book, send cheque made payable to the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain to: Lindsay Martin, 12 Elm Park Road, London N21 2HN and include your address, telephone number and email address for confirmation.
For further details, phone Lindsay Martin on 020 8245 3580 or email lindsay@lindsaycmartin.co.uk
