Today I share a Facebook post from the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain:
“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.
