Jacob's Room

P>'Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks, though no one sits there . . .' Set in the halcyon days of pre-war innocence, Virginia Woolf's third novel, Jacob's Room, follows the progress of a young man as he passes from adolescence to adulthood in a hazy rite of passage. Wandering through the windswept shores of Cornwall to the sunscorched landscape of Greece, his character is revealed in a stream of loosely related incidents, thoughts and impressions. Imparted in a poetic prose style reflecting her experiments with time and reality, Jacob's Room signals Woolf's bold departure from the traditional methods of the English novel.