Jacob’s Room (Collins Classics)

Anyhow, this was Jacob Flanders, aged nineteen. It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.

Virginia Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room was her first foray into Modernist literature. Jacob Flander’s childhood in Cornwall, his education at Cambridge and his adult life, including the cataclysmic event of World War I, are poignantly told through a series of alternating perspectives from the women who knew him. An experimental collage of art, music and literature, Jacob’s Room has been revered as one of the great Modernist novels, demonstrating Woolf’s astute powers of observation and originality.