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Jacob's Room
by Virginia Woolf
Category: Classic Literature
Description: Brief impressions and conversations, internal monologues, and letters convey the stream-of-consciousness story of a lonely young man unable to reconcile his classical ideals with the reality of World War I society. Sensitive exploration of character, existence. The tale of Jacob Flanders, a lonely young man unable to reconcile his love of classical culture with the chaotic reality of World War I society, unfolds in a series of brief impressions and conversations, internal monologues, and letters. A sensitive examination of character development and the meaning of life, this 1922 novel features first-rate examples of Woolf's influential techniques.
eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com/Fictionwise Classic, 1922
eBookwise Release Date: August 2004
 
20 Reader Ratings:
Available eBook Formats: OEBFF Format (IMP) [248 KB]
Words: 54474
Reading time: 155-217 min.
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
CHAPTER ONE "So of course," wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, "there was nothing for it but to leave." Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor's little yacht was bending like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular; the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread. "...nothing for it but to leave," she read. "Well, if Jacob doesn't want to play" (the shadow of Archer, her eldest son, fell across the notepaper and looked blue on the sand, and she felt chilly--it was the third of September already), "if Jacob doesn't want to play"--what a horrid blot! It must be getting late. "Where IS that tiresome little boy?" she said. "I don't see him. Run and find him. Tell him to come at once." "...but mercifully," she scribbled, ignoring the full stop, "everything seems satisfactorily arranged, packed though we are like herrings in a barrel, and forced to stand the perambulator which the landlady quite naturally won't allow...." Such were Betty Flanders's letters to Captain Barfoot--many-paged, tear-stained. Scarborough is seven hundred miles from Cornwall: Captain Barfoot is in Scarborough: Seabrook is dead. Tears made all the dahlias in her garden undulate in red waves and flashed the glass house in her eyes, and spangled the kitchen with bright knives, and made Mrs. Jarvis, the rector's wife, think at church, while the hymn-tune played and Mrs. Flanders bent low over her little boys' heads, that marriage is a fortress and widows stray solitary in the open fields, picking up stones, gleaning a few golden straws, lonely, unprotected, poor creatures. Mrs. Flanders had been a widow for these two years. "Ja--cob! Ja--cob!" Archer shouted. "Scarborough," Mrs. Flanders wrote on the envelope, and dashed a bold line beneath; it was her native town; the hub of the universe. But a stamp? She ferreted in her bag; then held it up mouth downwards; then fumbled in her lap, all so vigorously that Charles Steele in the Panama hat suspended his paint-brush. Like the antennae of some irritable insect it positively trembled. Here was that woman moving--actually going to get up--confound her! He struck the canvas a hasty violet-black dab. For the landscape needed it. It was too pale--greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull suspended just so--too pale as usual. The critics would say it was too pale, for he was an unknown man exhibiting obscurely, a favourite with his landladies' children, wearing a cross on his watch chain, and much gratified if his landladies liked his pictures--which they often did. "Ja--cob! Ja--cob!" Archer shouted.
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