Jacob’s Room / Night and Day – 9781840226805

Virginia Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day (1919), portrays the gradual changes in a society,the patterns and conventions of which are slowly disintegrating; where therepresentatives of the younger generation struggle to forge their own way, for ‘… life has to be faced: to be rejected; then accepted on new terms with rapture’.  Woolf begins to experiment with the novelform while demonstrating her affection for the literature of the past.  Jacob’s Room (1922), Woolf’s third novel, marks the bold affirmationof her own voice and search for a new form to express her view that ‘the humansoul …  orientates itself afresh everynow & then.

It is doing so now. No one can see it whole therefore.’  Jacob’s life is presented in subtle, delicateand tantalising glimpses, the novel’s gaps and silences are as replete withmeaning as the wicker armchair creaking in the empty room.