Virginia Woolf , Edited by Stuart N

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-84674-5 — Jacob's Room Virginia Woolf , Edited by Stuart N. Clarke , David Bradshaw Frontmatter More Information

the cambridge edition of the works of Virginia Woolf

v JACOB’S ROOM v

© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-84674-5 — Jacob's Room Virginia Woolf , Edited by Stuart N. Clarke , David Bradshaw Frontmatter More Information

the cambridge edition of the works of Virginia Woolf

GENERAL EDITORS Jane Goldman University of Glasgow Susan Sellers University of St Andrews Bryony Randall University of Glasgow

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Stephen Barkway independent scholar Gillian Beer University of Cambridge Ian Blyth University of the Highlands and Islands Rachel Bowlby University College London Stuart N. Clarke independent scholar Michael Herbert University of St Andrews Mark Hussey Pace University, New York

SERIES LIST The Voyage Out edited by Emma Sutton Night and Day edited by Michael H. Whitworth Jacob’s Room edited by Stuart N. Clarke and David Bradshaw Mrs. Dalloway edited by Anne E. Fernald To the Lighthouse edited by Jane Goldman Orlando: A Biography edited by Suzanne Raitt and Ian Blyth The Waves edited by Michael Herbert and Susan Sellers Flush: A Biography edited by Linden Peach, Derek Ryan and Jane Goldman The Years edited by Anna Snaith Between the Acts edited by Mark Hussey A Room of One’s Own edited by Judith Allen and Jane Goldman Collected Short Fiction edited by Bryony Randall and Laura Marcus

Vanessa Bell, dust jacket for the ﬁrst Hogarth Press edition of Jacob’s Room © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett

Virginia Woolf

v JACOB’ SROOM v

Edited by stuart n. clarke and david bradshaw

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www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521846745 doi: 10.1017/9780511842719 Text published in the United States of America under licence from Harcourt, Inc. Introduction and notes © Cambridge University Press 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. The Cambridge Edition, ﬁrst published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-0-521-84674-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf is dedicated to the memory of Professor David Bradshaw (1955–2016)

Contents

List of Illustrations page x General Editors’ Preface xi Notes on the Edition xx Acknowledgements xxii Chronology of Virginia Woolf’s Life and Work xxv List of Abbreviations xxx List of Archival Sources for Manuscript, Typescript and Proof Material Relating to Jacob’s Room xxxv List of Editorial Symbols xxxvi Introduction xxxvii Stuart N. Clarke and Susan Sellers Composition History xliv Publication History lvii Early Critical Reception lxii Editing Jacob’s Room lxxxi Addendum: From the R. & R. Clark Archive lxxxvi Chronology of the Composition of Jacob’s Room xcvii Maps ciii Stuart N. Clarke and Bryony Randall

jacob’s room 3

Explanatory Notes 291 Stuart N. Clarke and Jane Goldman Textual Apparatus 724 Textual Notes 731 Appendix I: Hogarth Press Advertisements 744 Appendix II: Holograph Draft of ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’ 757 Bibliography 763 ix

Illustrations

Frontispiece Vanessa Bell, dust jacket for the ﬁrst Hogarth Press edition of Jacob’s Room page iv 1 Map of Great Britain and Ireland c. 1910 civ 2 Map of Greater London c. 1910 cv 3 Map of Central London c. 1910 cvi 4 Map of Greece in 1914 cviii 5 Map of Flanders cix 6 Title page of the ﬁrst British edition of Jacob’s Room 5

General Editors’ Preface

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. virginia woolf, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’1 How should we read the writings of Virginia Woolf? This is not so much a question of interpretation as of practice. How are we to read this writer for whom reading is an activity that requires almost the same talents and energies as the activity of writing itself? For Woolf responds to the question, ‘How should one read a book?’, as a person of immense, virtuosic skill and experience in both activities. She understands the reader to be the ‘fellow-worker and accomplice’ (E5 573) of the writer. The ‘quickest way to understand [. . .] what a novelist is doing is not to read’, she suggests, ‘but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difﬁculties of words’ (E5 574); and ‘the time to read poetry’, she recognises, is ‘when we are almost able to write it’ (E5 577). Not only has Woolf left a richly rewarding oeuvre, but she has also left ample documentation of her meticulous processes of composition and of her detailed involvement in the production and publishing of many of her works, all of which her active and conscientious reader will wish to negotiate. If we are going to read Woolf creatively and critically, if we are to follow our own instincts, use our own reason and come to our own conclusions, as she herself advises, we need to read her works in a form that provides us with the fullest means possible to exercise these powers, one that gives us as much unmediated access as possible to the record of these processes. This Cambridge edition of Woolf’s writings

1 VW, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ (1926), E5 573. Subsequent references to this and other works by VW appear in the text. For full bibliographical details see this volume’s List of Abbreviations and Bibliography.

GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE consequently aims to provide readers and scholars, Woolf’s fellow-workers and accomplices, with an extensively researched, fully explicated and col- lated text.

reading woolf What does it mean to be the ‘fellow-worker and accomplice’ of Virginia Woolf? She published ten novels, as well as numerous short stories, essays and works of biography and criticism. Her posthumously published volumes of letters, diaries and memoirs are testimony to a life of constant writing, private as well as public. An erudite writer with an apparently encyclopedic knowledge of English letters, Woolf also knew Greek, Latin, German, French and Russian. She was denied the formal education afforded her brothers, yet was able to hold her own in intellectual exchange with them and their fellow Cambridge graduates. She did not attend school but received a thoroughgoing education at home, the beneficiary of personal tuition from her father, the esteemed literary critic, Leslie Stephen, and she enjoyed the free run of his considerable library. However, Woolf undertook a serious programme of studies at King’s College Ladies’ Department (at 13 Kensington Square) ‘for five years between 1897 and 1901, between the ages of 15 and 19’, as Christine Kenyon Jones and Anna Snaith have shown: ‘She was not only registered for courses in a range of subjects, but reached degree-level standard in some of her studies, and also took examinations. The archives also show that Vanessa Stephen was also registered for classes at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London between 1898 and 1900 and that the sisters studied Latin together there’ (Kenyon Jones and Snaith 4). Virginia Stephen, according to the records, enjoyed ‘sustained enrollment in a range of subjects at the Ladies’ Department, including History (Continental and English), Greek (Intermediate and Advanced), Latin and German’ (Kenyon Jones and Snaith 6–7). She was tutored in Classics by Dr G. C. W. Warr, by Clara Pater, sister of the essayist and critic, Walter Pater, and by Janet Case, one of the first graduates of Girton College, Cambridge and a committed feminist. All too aware of the historical and continuing hypocrisies and inequi- ties of most formal academic education, in its exclusions along lines of gender, class and race, Woolf was notoriously ambivalent in her dealings with scholars and academic critics, and she pointedly refused a number of

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general editors’ preface honorary degrees from distinguished universities. She nevertheless did engage in some aspects of academic life, and not only as a student. She taught for a spell at Morley College, an evening institute for working people in South London, and during her career as a writer she gave several lectures and papers both to university students and to the Workers’ Educational Association. A number of these lectures and papers consti- tuted the first drafts of some of her most significant and influential contributions to literary criticism, including her founding work on feminist aesthetics, A Room of One’s Own, and her great modernist manifestos, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ [Character in Fiction], ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’ [Poetry, Fiction and the Future] and ‘The Leaning Tower’. Actively engaged in feminist, socialist, pacifist and anti-fascist politics, she probed in all her writings the complex relations between art and the real world. Woolf scholarship has flourished in tandem with the rise of modern feminism and under the impetus of its intellectual transforma- tions of the academy. Woolf’swritingshavebeenstudied,withincreasing attention, in universities since their first publication; and it is testimony to the revisionary force of many of her works that they are now studied in universities by the very outsiders to such institutions that she first cham- pioned, even if her egalitarian vision for school and university entrance still remains far from realised: ‘Money is no longer going to do our thinking for us. Wealth will no longer decide who shall be taught and whonot.Infutureitiswewhoshalldecidewhomtosendtopublic schools and universities; how they shall be taught; and whether what they write justifies their exemption from other work.’2 But Woolf’s readers have always been, and remain, equally numerous outside the academy too. Even her most experimental works sold well to the general public from the start, and she has never been out of print. One of her best-selling novels was Flush, her spoof biography of a dog, which academic studies tended to overlook until very recently. Woolf understands literature as common ground open to all: ‘Let us trespass at once. Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves’ (E6 278). She was scornful too of institutionalised academic literary authority: ‘To admit authorities, however heavily furred

2 VW, ‘The Leaning Tower’ (1940), E6 277.

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GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none’ (E5 573). In setting out her ‘philosophy’ in a late memoir, Woolf went so far as to declare the redun- dancy, if not the death, of the author: ‘the whole world is a work of art; [. . .] we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.’3 Following Dr Johnson she famously ‘rejoice[d] to concur with the common reader’;4 and she was proud of her own independent, professional status as a writer. She was, from youth, a prolific reviewer of literature, for various organs, including the Times Literary Supplement. In tandem with her career as a professional novelist, short-story writer and essayist, Woolf also became an influential independent publisher. The Hogarth Press, which was launched by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1917, was not only a vehicle for putting their own work into the public realm, but it was also responsible for publishing works by numerous important modern writers and thinkers, including John Maynard Keynes, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Sigmund Freud. ‘The powerful intellectual developments that made modernism a pan-European phenomenon’,as Michael Whitworth observes, ‘were sustained at a local level by material institutions like the Hogarth Press’ (Whitworth 2000: 150). In short, Woolf as writer, critic, reviewer, lecturer and publisher was a consummate public intellectual.

editing woolf So, how should we edit the writings of Virginia Woolf? Already the danger and difﬁculties of words are upon us. ‘We’ as editors cannot forget that we are already committed and diverse readers of Woolf. Asking ourselves questions about how to edit Woolf, ‘we’, as general editors of this Cambridge edition (and also as editors of individual volumes in the

3 VW, ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1939–40), MB 72. 4 VW, ‘The Common Reader’ (1925), E419.

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general editors’ preface edition), very soon recognised the need to respond as ‘we’,threeactiveand different readers of Woolf. Yet, whatever our own often very different instincts, reasonings and conclusions, we nevertheless share a recognition of the intense attention to the text that Woolf’s writing demands of all her readers. This is the case in respect of its textual genesis, structure and variants,aswellasinitspossible– and its manifest – cultural and historical referencing, and regardless of our own individual interpretations. In our role as editors we conceive of ourselves as readers in need of access to a transparent record of textual process, rather than as readers who arrive at interpretative conclusions. OnechallengetoeditorsofWoolfisthedifferencebetweenBritishand American first editions of her major novels, and most subsequent editions have fallen on one or other side of this first fissure. Ever since Woolf sent differently corrected proofs across the Atlantic, American readers have not been reading the same text as British readers. The American copyright resides with Harcourt, so American readers and scholars, in the several decades since Woolf’s death, have not had ready access to the editions published by Woolf’s own press, the Hogarth Press (and vice versa). There are other editions published in Woolf’s lifetime that also merit attention, such as the first British editions of the first two novels by the Duckworth Press, the Hogarth Uniform edition and editions by publish- erssuchasDent. Methods for addressing the notorious transatlantic differences have varied in practice, either by plumping for the American or British first editions (following the copyright), or by claiming that the ‘authentic’ or ‘authoritative’ text resides in one particular set of extant proofs (or even in holograph or typescript). In attempting to gain access to an unpolluted record of textual variance and genesis, readers must then negotiate the sometimes unhelpful biases of editorial argument and often idiosyncratic and silent textual impositions, derived from a less- than-intact legacy of evidence of the processes of composition and publication. Debate rages on how a more democratic and transparent methodology might work. A parallel edition of the British and American editions of To the Lighthouse has been suggested, for example, and the digital age certainly makes such hybrids possible in electronic form. But such solutions sacrifice important material ele- ments of signification in Woolf’s texts. It is vital that attention is given to her quite specifically designed and designated spacing and

GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE typography. It is also important not to lose sight, in the inevitably compromised pursuit of ‘authenticity’ and ‘authority’,ofthehistorical, material text as it was first published. The Cambridge edition, therefore, has invited editors of the novels normally to map out published and proof variants from the first British edition as copy text, with minimal interference on the page where possible, and with no silent emendation. The Textual Apparatus and the Textual Notes allow for a transparent account of process and variance. The extant draft material has been consulted by editors and is systematically listed and referenced in each volume.5 The Textual Notes alert the reader to significant points of departure and interest, and in some volumes there are appendices reproducing key (extracts of) draft material. The surviving draft material for Woolf’s novels, however, is so copious that no edition could accommodate its reproduction in entirety in the formal Textual Apparatus. Separate holograph editions are necessary.6 Woolf’s non- fiction, essays, short stories and autobiographical works present further editorial challenges. The Cambridge edition aims to give readers access to variants in all extant proofs and in all editions published in Woolf’s lifetime and, in the case of unpublished works, to establish the text as accurately as possible from all extant sources. Our aim, therefore, in preparing this edition of Woolf’swritingsisto provide scholars and readers with a fully researched text. This Cambridge edition recognises that no emendation of spelling, syntax, punctuation, hyphenation, paragraphing or spacing should occur silently. It affords gener- ous exploration of and reference to archival material, holograph work, drafts and proofs. In annotation we aim to be more thorough than in any previous edition, with regard to historical, factual, cultural and literary allusions, in long overdue homage to the remarkable density and breadth of reference in Woolf’s work. Each volume includes a substantial introduction mapping the text’s composition and publishing history, and explores its critical reception during Woolf’s lifetime, except where the text was published posthumously. However, we would be foolish to ignore the fact that the act of editing is always and already bound up with reading precisely as an interpretative act.

5 In the case of VW’s final novel, Between the Acts, which was posthumously published and seen through the press by LW, the typescripts she left behind are necessarily more prominent, forming as they do the basis for the first British edition. 6 Much of VW’s archive of draft material has been made available on microfilm, and transcriptions have been published in basic holograph editions of some of the novels.

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general editors’ preface Cherishing our differences as critics, we also cherish the opportunity to engage as closely with the processes of Woolf’s writing as any active reader could wish, and to make these processes available to fellow readers as fully and transparently as possible. Transparency, not fur and gowns, is our editorial ideal, and we are guided, as Woolf has been, by King Lear: ‘Through tattered clothes great vices do appear: / Robes and furred gowns hide all’ (Lear 4.5.156–7).

annotating woolf We have been guided too by Woolf’s own recorded thoughts on editorial achievements. For example, reviewing as a lay reader a new scholarly edition of Walpole’sletters,she‘assert[s], though not with entire con- ﬁdence, that books after all exist to be read—even the most learned of editors would to some extent at least agree with that’.7 And as editors, we do indeed agree with that. We cannot ignore Woolf’sinclusionofthe common reader as part of a true scholarly community: ‘Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Virgil, and Dante [. . .] if they could speak—and after all they can—would say, “Don’t leave me to the wigged and gowned. Read me, read me for yourselves”’ (E6277). Woolf worries that the weighty apparatus of scholarly editions hampers readers:

But how, the question immediately arises, can we read this magniﬁcent instalment [. . .] of our old friend Horace Walpole’s letters? Ought not the presses to have issued in a supplementary pocket a supplementary pair of eyes? Then, with the usual pair ﬁxed upon the text, the additional pair could range the notes, thus sweeping together into one haul not only what Horace is saying to Cole and what Cole is saying to Horace, but a multitude of minor men and matters . . . (E6171) In Night and Day, Mr Hilbery is preparing an edition of Shelley that ‘scrupulously observe[s] the poet’s system of punctuation’ (ND 108–9). Her novelist’s sensitivity to the comedy of this undertaking does not wholly undermine his endeavour: Mr Hilbery, the narrator tells us, ‘saw the humour of these researches, but that did not prevent him from carrying them out with the utmost scrupulosity’ (ND 109).

7 VW, ‘Two Antiquaries; Walpole and Cole’ (1939), E6 171.

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GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE In preparing this scholarly edition of Woolf’s writings, we share her concerns for the readability of books. Resisting the temptation to issue ‘in a supplementary pocket a supplementary pair of eyes’, we have devised ways of alerting the reader, on the page, to the relevant parts of the Textual Apparatus. But if Woolf worries about ‘how great a strain the new method of editing lays upon the eye’, she does come to acknowledge that ‘if the brain is at first inclined to jib at such perpetual solicitations, and to beg to be allowed to read the text in peace, it adjusts itself by degrees; grudgingly admits that many of these little facts are to the point; and finally becomes not merely a convert but a suppliant—asks not for less but for more and more and more’ (E6 172). As editors, we also respond to this spur to feed the insatiable wants of the enquiring reader, once roused. Sharing Woolf’s own readerly desire for ‘more and more and more’, and recognising the same urgency in our fellow readers, we have made this refrain one of our guiding principles. But, we know too that while the scholarly scope afforded by a Cambridge edition can certainly give more, no edition can ever give all. The concept of such a totality is meaningless. The work of the editor is to engage the reader in a process of informed exploration and interpretation that continues beyond the edition. We understand our readers, then, to be accomplices in a process that can impose no finite interpretation on Woolf’s writings. It is our hope that our work enables and enriches the continuing process of readerly collaboration. Another refrain taken from Woolf has also frequently sounded to us, particularly during the preparation of Explanatory Notes: ‘nothing [is] simply one thing’ (TL 286). We would emphasise the open-endedness of all such annotation, and we have conceived ours in dialogue with the work of past and present readers and scholars of Woolf, with the hope of enabling and continuing the dialogues of the future. It is nevertheless worth comparing the extreme attention now extended by critics to every minor detail of Woolf’s writing, including street and shop names, as David Bradshaw urges (Bradshaw 2002: 109), with some earlier critical approaches that tended to assume her other-worldliness as a writer remote from the fabric of things in the real world and possessed of a vague, visionary aesthetics considered factually inaccurate and even delib- erately careless. The attribution of factual indifference and ‘essential feminineness of [. . .] mind’ (J. Bennett 79) initially deflected interest from the fine detail and precision of Woolf’s cultural and intellectual referencing that scholars now investigate with considerable care. It was

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general editors’ preface not so long ago that critics felt able to presume Woolf’s lack of classical scholarship, rather than acknowledge her satirical characterisation, in her account of Mrs Dalloway’s mistaken assignation, in TheVoyageOut,of Clytemnestra to Antigone. (Woolf’sowntranslationoftheAgamemnon, languishing in the archives, points clearly to her knowledge of the classical play in which Clytemnestra is to be found.) Explanatory Notes must also address the inevitable receding of Woolf’ssocialandpoliticalreferences into a historical period and cultural context now becoming distant enough from many of today’s readers to require elucidation. The research undertaken for the Explanatory Notes draws on the new wealth of scholarly work engaged in the detailed exploration of the myriad and sparklingly allusive surfaces of Woolf’s texts as well as their deeper layering of cultural referencing and valences. We would also emphasise that where critical works are cited in the Explanatory Notes it is to point out the information they yield on Woolf’s rich weave of literary, cultural, historical and other allusions, rather than with regard to how these allusions and references are interpreted in those works. Reading is a sacred and infectious pleasure for Woolf, and an end in itself. So much so that she celebrates its power even to dispense with the mythic Day of Judgement itself: ‘the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading”’ (E5 582). A declared atheist, Woolf resisted all notions of ﬁnal judgement, religious, literary or political. We understand this Cambridge edition of Woolf’s writings as continuing, and not capping, the ongoing processes of reading and rereading her work. We hope our fellow readers will recognise, in making use of it, the shifting processes and conditions that are implicit in following instincts, using reason and coming to conclusions about Woolf’s work. For ‘who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are ﬁnal? And is not this among them?’ (E5 582).

jane goldman susan sellers bryony randall University of Glasgow University of St Andrews University of Glasgow

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Notes on the Edition

Woolf ’s Spelling and Punctuation In quoting from her letters, diaries and from the drafts of her published work Virginia Woolf’s sometimes idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation have been retained. Unless otherwise indicated [by use of editorial square brackets], all emphases, ellipses, etc. are in the original texts cited.

The Text The Textual Apparatus normally records all extant states of the text from proof and includes every edition published in Woolf’s lifetime. Each volume maps out published and proof variants from the ﬁrst British edition as copy text, with minimal interference on the page where possible, and with no silent emendation. The Textual Apparatus and the Textual Notes allow for the most transparent possible account of process and variance. All extant draft material has been consulted by editors and is systematically listed and referenced in each volume.

Introduction As well as an account of the editorial challenges presented by Woolf’s text, the Introduction in each volume includes a composition history, a publication history and an account of the early critical reception normally concluding at Woolf’s death in 1941.

notes on the edition Explanatory Notes Each volume provides extensive and thorough annotation of Woolf’s cultural and historical allusions and literary intertexts and attempts to do justice to her modernist playfulness with the multivalences of particular references. The fabric of life in the late nineteenth century and the ﬁrst part of the twentieth century is often elliptically documented by Woolf in ﬂeeting fragments. Close editorial attention is therefore paid to every character’s name, shop name and place name, however passing.

jg, ss and br

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Acknowledgements

David Bradshaw was asked to edit this edition of Jacob’s Room for Cambridge University Press. In 2014, he invited me to join him. Sadly, early the following year he was diagnosed with what turned out to be a terminal illness, and he died on 14 September 2016. Consequently, David’s contribution was very much less than he envisaged and intended. We both felt that Jacob’s Room was underrated, often seen as a transitional work between Woolf’s more conventional first two novels and the modernist masterpieces that followed. We might adapt Woolf’s comment about Hope Mirrlees’s modernist poem Paris (published by the Hogarth Press in 1920), and describe Jacob’s Room as ‘very allusive, indecent and brilliant’ (L2 385). We occasionally felt that Woolf, like James Joyce in Ulysses, had ‘put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what [she] meant’ (quoted in Ellmann 535). David wrote that ‘a reader of Jacob’s Room who is not asking questions from the beginning of the novel is not really reading Jacob’s Room’, and he concluded: ‘There is plenty to observe, much to admire, bits to baffle over, missing pieces to infuriate, and no chance of ever being satisfied, for long, by any single solution. All the fun, in fact, of a first-rate “puzzle”’ (Bradshaw 2003: 7, 28). We hope, however, that our extensive annotations will go some way to illuminating its myriad allusions and lead to a reassessment of Jacob’s Room as one of the great modernist masterpieces, taking its place with Ulysses and The Waste Land in the iconic year of 1922. I am grateful for the constructive comments of the Editorial Advisory Board that were co-ordinated and passed to me by Bryony Randall, and also for the individual comments that I received from Rachel Bowlby and Stephen Barkway.

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acknowledgements The General Editors have made substantial improvements to my draft: Susan Sellers was an invaluable co-author on the Introduction; Bryony Randall read all the notes and indicated revisions; and Jane Goldman has contributed notable additions to the Explanatory Notes. I thank the following individuals for help with this edition: Stephen Barkway, Michael Black, Helen Collins, James J. Coulton, David Cox (cartographer of the maps), Emily Dalgarno, Jennifer Dunne, John Enfield, the late Henrietta Garnett, André Gerard, Sarah M. Hall, Cheryl Hindrichs, Danell Jones, Edwin King, Emily Kopley, Sylvain Louis, Vara Neverow, Claire Nicholson, Paul Rabbitts, Sue Roe, Martin Ferguson Smith, Carmen Königsreuther Socknat (Victoria University Libraries, Toronto), Emma Sutton, Tomaz Tadeu, Harish Trivedi, Michael H. Whitworth and Sheila M. Wilkinson. For permission to quote in the Introduction from unpublished letters to Virginia Woolf, held by The Keep in Brighton, I thank: Adrian M. Goodman on behalf of the Estates of Ottoline Morrell and Philip Morrell; Philip Trevelyan on behalf of the Estate of Robert Calverley Trevelyan; and the London Library on behalf of the Estate of Logan Pearsall Smith. I also acknowledge the help of the following institutions and their staff: the Bodleian Libraries, the British Library (where much of my research has been undertaken), The Keep in Brighton (containing the special collections of the University of Sussex), the National Library of Scotland, the Society of Authors, the University of Reading Archives. When the Don no longer flowed quiet and the wind blew up the waves, I was very fortunate to have the support and help of my partner, Brian Evans, as the river raced beneath us, and we had to lean all our weight on the tiller to keep on course. Finally, I am very grateful to copy-editor Deborah Hey, who flagged up a few errors. This was deeply reassuring, for she had checked the cross-references as well as the references to the Bibliography. Thankfully, I did not need to undertake this extremely onerous task yet one more time. SNC

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The General Editors also thank the following people who have contributed to the making of this volume: Stephen Barkway, Gillian Beer, Michael Black, Emma Collison, John Coyle, Trevor Grifﬁths, J. C. Holbrook, Robert Howie, Iain Mackenzie, Gus McLean, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Joshua Phillips, Gill Plain, Maartje Scheltens, Anna Snaith, Jane Stabler, Sarah Starkey, Helen Stoddart, Emma Sutton, Mhairi Taylor, Jeremy Thurlow and the late Cecil Woolf. We thank Stuart Clarke for his commitment to Jacob’s Room following the untimely loss of David Bradshaw, who is nevertheless a continuing presence in this volume. We remain profoundly grateful for the steadfast commitment to the Woolf edition of our publisher, and in particular for the ongoing support of Ray Ryan. JG, SCS, BR

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Chronology of Virginia Woolf’s Life and Work

1878 Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth (née Jackson) marry (26 March). 1879 Vanessa Stephen born (30 May). 1880 Thoby Stephen born (8 September). 1882 Adeline Virginia Stephen born at 22 Hyde Park Gate, London (25 January). Stephen family spend the ﬁrst of their summers at Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall (to 1894). Leslie Stephen begins working on the Dictionary of National Biography. 1883 Adrian Stephen born (27 October). 1887 First extant dated VW letter (to James Russell Lowell, 22 February). 1891 Along with Vanessa and Thoby, begins writing the family newspaper, Hyde Park Gate News (January–February). Leslie Stephen resigns from the DNB. 1892 Writes, with Thoby, ‘A Cockney’s Farming Experiences’ (22 August– 26 September) and ‘The Experiences of a Paterfamilias’ (10 October– 19 December) for Hyde Park Gate News. 1893 Meets Rupert Brooke (summer). 1894 Stephen family spend their last summer at Talland House. 1895 Julia Stephen dies (5 May). 1896 Keeps a diary for a short period of time. Travels to France (November). 1897 Begins her ﬁrst extant diary (3 January). Half-sister Stella Duckworth marries Jack Hills (10 April), but dies soon afterwards (19 July). Begins classes in Greek and History at King’s College London (November). 1898 Begins studying Latin with Clara Pater (October). 1899 Takes up German in the autumn, achieving ‘class II’ in ‘German (Elementary)’ examination at King’s College. Thoby goes up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he meets Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Leonard Woolf (3 October).

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CHRONOLOGY OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’SLIFEANDWORK 1901 Achieves ‘class II’ in ‘German Grammar and Reading’ examination at King’s College. Takes up bookbinding (October). 1902 Begins studying Greek with Janet Case (early January). Writes ‘Friendships Gallery’ (August–September). 1904 Leslie Stephen dies (22 February). Travels to Wales, Italy and France (27 February–9 May). Moves, with Thoby, Vanessa and Adrian, to 46 Gordon Square (autumn). First publication appears (‘The Son of Royal Langbrith’, The Guardian, 14 December). 1905 Begins teaching at Morley College, London (6 January). Start of Thoby’s ‘Thursday Evenings’, with Saxon Sydney-Turner as the only guest on the first evening (16 February). Publishes first review for the Times Literary Supplement (‘Literary Geography’, 10 March). Travels to Spain and Portugal, via France (29 March–24 April). Start of Vanessa’s ‘Friday Club’ (October). 1906 Writes ‘[Phyllis and Rosamund]’ (20–3 June), ‘The Mysterious Case of Miss V.’ (summer) and ‘[The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn]’ (August). Travels to Greece and Turkey, via France and Italy (8 September–29 October). Thoby Stephen dies (20 November). 1907 Vanessa marries Clive Bell (7 February). Travels to France (28 March– 10 April). Moves, with Adrian, to 29 Fitzroy Square (10 April). Begins writing ‘Melymbrosia’, later published as The Voyage Out (summer). Writes ‘Reminiscences’ (August). 1908 Julian Bell born (4 February). Travels to Wales, Italy and France (18 August–30 September). 1909 Engaged, fleetingly, to Lytton Strachey (17 February). Meets Lady Ottoline Morrell (30 March). Travels to Italy (23 April–9 May) and Germany, where attends the Bayreuth Festival (5 August–3 September). Writes ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’ (rejected by Cornhill, 10 November). 1910 Takes part in the ‘Dreadnought Hoax’ (7 February). First Post- Impressionist Exhibition opens (8 November). Claudian [Quentin] Bell born (19 August). Does voluntary work for the women’s suffrage campaign (January and November–December). 1911 Rents Little Talland House in Firle, Sussex. Travels to Turkey (22–9 April). Negotiates rental of Asheham House in Beddingham, Sussex (October). Moves to 38 Brunswick Square with Adrian, Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes (20 November). LW moves in with them (4 December). 1912 Marries LW (10 August). Travels to France, Spain and Italy (18 August–3 October). Moves to 13 Clifford’s Inn, London (late October).

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chronology of virginia woolf’s life and work 1913 Delivers manuscript of The Voyage Out to Duckworth (9 March); accepted for publication (12 April). 1914 House-hunting in London, first at 65 St Margaret’s Road, Twickenham (9 October), then 17 The Green, Richmond, Surrey (17 October). 1915 Begins first diary after marriage (January–February). Resolves to buy printing press and Hogarth House, Richmond (25 January). The Voyage Out published (26 March). 1916 Nellie Boxall and Lottie Hope begin working for the Woolfs (1 February). Begins writing Night and Day (reaches Chapter 12 by October). Meets Katherine Mansfield (early November?). 1917 First printing press delivered (24 April). Hogarth Press publishes Two Stories:VW’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and LW’s ‘Three Jews’ (July). Begins keeping a diary again (3 August). 1918 Hogarth Press publishes Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude (10 July). Meets T. S. Eliot (15 November). Angelica Bell born (25 December). 1919 Hogarth Press publishes Kew Gardens (12 May). Buys Monks House, Rodmell (1 July), moves in (1 September). Duckworth publishes Night and Day (20 October). 1920 First meeting of the ‘Memoir Club’ (4 March). Begins writing Jacob’s Room (16 April). LW publishes Empire and Commerce in Africa. 1921 Hogarth Press publishes Monday or Tuesday (7 or 8 March) – all VW’s subsequent major publications are with the Hogarth Press. 1922 Resumes correspondence with Jacques Raverat (25 August). Publishes Jacob’s Room (27 October). Meets Vita Sackville-West (14 December). 1923 Katherine Mansfield dies (9 January). LW becomes literary editor of the Nation and the Athenæum (23 March). Travels to France and Spain (27 March–6 May). Assists S. S. Koteliansky in translations of Tolstoi’s Love Letters and Goldenveizer’s Talks with Tolstoi. Begins writing first version of Freshwater, and ‘The Hours’, later published as Mrs. Dalloway (August–September). Hogarth Press publishes Jane Harrison’s Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. 1924 Buys lease for 52 Tavistock Square (9 January), moves in (13–15 March). Publishes ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (30 October). 1925 Jacques Raverat dies (7 March). Travels to France (26 March–7 April). Publishes The Common Reader (23 April) and Mrs. Dalloway (14 May). Begins working on ‘Phases of Fiction’ (December). 1926 Begins writing To the Lighthouse (8 January). Keeps diary of the General Strike (May). Meets Thomas Hardy (23 July).

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CHRONOLOGY OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’SLIFEANDWORK 1927 Travels to France and Italy (30 March–28 April). Publishes To the Lighthouse (5 May). Travels to Yorkshire to witness the ﬁrst total eclipse of the sun to be visible from Britain in several hundred years (29 June). Begins writing Orlando (5 October). 1928 Publishes ‘The Sun and the Fish’ in Time and Tide (February). Travels to France (26 March–16 April). Jane Harrison dies (15 April). Awarded Prix Femina Etranger for To the Lighthouse (April). Travels to Burgundy with Vita Sackville-West (24 September–1 October). Petitions against the banning of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Publishes Orlando (11 October). Lectures on ‘Women and Fiction’ at Girton and Newnham Colleges, Cambridge (October). 1929 Travels to Germany (1–21 January) and France (4–14 June). Publishes A Room of One’s Own (24 October). Begins writing ‘The Moths’, later published as The Waves (2 July). LW resigns from the Nation and Athenæum (31 December). 1930 Meets Ethel Smyth (20 February). Meets (for ﬁrst time?) W. B. Yeats (7 November). 1931 Meets John Lehmann (12 January). The Hogarth Press publishes Life As We Have Known It by Co-Operative Working Women, with an Introduction by VW (5 March). Travels to France (16–30 April). Sits for the sculptor Stephen Tomlin (May). Begins writing Flush (August). Publishes The Waves (8 October). 1932 Lytton Strachey dies (21 January). Turns down invitation to give Clark lectures at Cambridge (February). Dora Carrington dies (11 March). Travels to Greece (15 April–12 May). Publishes A Letter to a Young Poet (1 July) and The Common Reader: Second Series (13 October). Begins writing ‘The Pargiters’, later published as The Years (October). 1933 Refuses honorary degree from Manchester University (3 March). Travels to Italy, via France (5–27 May). Turns down invitation to give Leslie Stephen lecture at Cambridge (early September). Publishes Flush (5 October). Meets Walter Sickert (15 December). 1934 Nellie Boxall leaves (28 March). Travels to Ireland (26 April–9 May). Roger Fry dies (9 September). Discusses W with W. B. Yeats (25 October). 1935 First performance of Freshwater (18 January). Travels to Holland, Germany, Austria, Italy and France (1–31 May). Serves on the committee organising the British delegation to the International Congress of Writers in Paris and assists in establishing the British Section of the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture (IAWDC) (June). Attends pilot meeting of For Intellectual Liberty (FIL) (December).

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chronology of virginia woolf’s life and work 1936 Signs FIL letter to The Times in support of Spanish Government after Franco’s rebellion. Resigns from IAWDC (July). Begins working on Roger Fry (autumn). Begins writing Three Guineas (November). 1937 Publishes The Years (15 March). Julian Bell killed in Spain (18 July). 1938 Lehmann buys VW’s share in Hogarth Press (1 March). Lady Ottoline Morrell dies (21 April). Travels to Scotland (16 June–2 July). Publishes Three Guineas (2 June). Begins working on ‘Pointz Hall’, later published as Between the Acts (April). 1939 Meets Sigmund Freud (28 January). Refuses honorary degree from Liverpool University (3 March). Begins writing ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (18 April). Travels to France (5–19 June). Moves to 37 Mecklenburgh Square (17 August), but spends most of her time at Monks House. 1940 Publishes Roger Fry (25 July). Writes ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ (August). Begins writing ‘Reading at Random’ (18 September). Mecklenburgh Square bombed (10 September). Hogarth Press moves to Letchworth, Hertfordshire (23 September). 1941 Finishes ﬁnal typescript of Between the Acts (26 February). Drowns herself in the River Ouse (28 March). Between the Acts published posthumously (17 July).

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Abbreviations

people

LW Leonard Woolf (1880–1969) VW Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

archive locations

Berg The Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (see also Berg below) NLS R & R Clark Archive, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh MS 2750 Archives of the Hogarth Press 1917–1955, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, University of Reading SxMs-13 Leonard Woolf Papers, University of Sussex (located at The Keep, Woollards Way, Brighton BN19BP) SxMs-18 House Papers, University of Sussex (located at The Keep, Woollards Way, Brighton BN19BP)

works by virginia woolf (See also Bibliography pp. 810–16 for mainly shorter works not listed here) AG ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’ in Atalanta’s Garland: Being the Book of the Edinburgh University Women’s Union, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1926, 11–16 AROO A Room of One’s Own, London: Hogarth, 1929

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list of abbreviations AROO 2015 A Room of One’s Own, ed. David Bradshaw and Stuart N. Clarke, Chichester, W. Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, The Shakespeare Head Press Edition, 2015 BA Between the Acts, ed. Leonard Woolf, London: Hogarth, 1941 BA 2011 Between the Acts, ed. Mark Hussey, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 Berg The Virginia Woolf Manuscripts from the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, microﬁlm, 21 reels, Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications International, 1993 CH Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches, ed. David Bradshaw, London: Hesperus Press, 2003 CSF The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick, 2nd edn, London: Hogarth, 1989 D1–5 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols., London: Hogarth, 1977–84 E1–6 The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., vols. i–iv ed. Andrew McNeillie; vols. v–vi ed. Stuart N. Clarke, London: Hogarth, 1986–2011 F Flush: A Biography, London: Hogarth, 1933 FR Freshwater: A Comedy, ed. Lucio P. Ruotolo, London: Hogarth, 1976 HPGN Hyde Park Gate News: The Stephen Family Newspaper,by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell with Thoby Stephen, ed. Gill Lowe, London: Hesperus, 2005 JR Jacob’s Room, Richmond: Hogarth, 1922 JR Roe Jacob’s Room, ed. Sue Roe, London: Penguin Books, 1992 JR Bishop Jacob’s Room, ed. Edward L. Bishop, Malden, MA: Blackwell for the Shakespeare Head Press, 2004 JR Raitt Jacob’s Room [Norton Critical Edition], ed. Suzanne Raitt, New York: W. W. Norton, 2007 JR Neverow Jacob’s Room, ed. Vara Neverow, Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 2008 JR Haberer La Chambre de Jacob, trans. and ed. Adolphe Haberer, [Paris]: Gallimard, 2012 L1–6 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols., London: Hogarth, 1975–80 MB Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd edn, London: Hogarth, 1985

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS MD Mrs. Dalloway, London: Hogarth, 1925 MD 2015 Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Anne E. Fernald, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 MT Monday or Tuesday, Richmond: Hogarth, 1921 ND Night and Day, London: Duckworth, 1919 ND 2018 Night and Day, ed. Michael Whitworth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018 O Orlando: A Biography, London: Hogarth, 1928 O 2018 Orlando: A Biography, ed. Suzanne Raitt and Ian Blyth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018 P The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of ‘The Years’, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska, London: Hogarth 1978 PA A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska, London: Hogarth, 1990 RF Roger Fry: A Biography, London: Hogarth, 1940 RN Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks, ed. Brenda R. Silver, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983 TG Three Guineas, London: Hogarth, 1938 TL To the Lighthouse, London: Hogarth, 1927 TL 2006 To the Lighthouse, ed. David Bradshaw, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 VO The Voyage Out, London: Duckworth, 1915 W The Waves, London: Hogarth, 1931 W 2011 The Waves, ed. Michael Herbert and Susan Sellers, with research by Ian Blyth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 W&F Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of ‘A Room of One’s Own’, transcribed and ed. S. P. Rosenbaum, Oxford: Blackwell, for The Shakespeare Head Press, 1992 Y The Years, London: Hogarth, 1937 Y 2012 The Years, ed. Anna Snaith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012

texts of jacob’s room in chronological order

Berg M18 ‘Reﬂections upon beginning a work of ﬁction to be called, perhaps, Jacob’s Room’. Holograph, unsigned, Vol. i dated 15 April 1920, Vol. ii dated 26 November 1920, Vol. iii dated 12 March 1922 in Berg, reel 6 Berg D17-1922 ‘Jacobs Room’. Holograph, unnumbered, unsigned, dated 7 and 12 October 1921 (part of ch. XIII) in Berg, reel 2

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list of abbreviations SxMs-18/2/B/12 Typescript (8 pages, part of ch. III and V) with VW’sms corrections, unsigned, undated Berg M88 ‘Jacob’s Room’. Typescript (6 pages numbered 47–52, ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’) with VW’s ms corrections, unsigned, undated, in Berg, reel 11 JRHD Virginia Woolf’s ‘Jacob’s Room’: The Holograph Draft, transcribed and ed. Edward L. Bishop, New York: Pace University Press, 1998 JRHD13 ‘Chapter XIII of the Holograph Draft of Jacob’s Room’, transcribed and ed. Stuart N. Clarke, Virginia Woolf Bulletin, 55 (May 2017), 5–25 B1 Jacob’s Room, Richmond: Hogarth, [October] 1922 B2 Jacob’s Room [2nd impression], Richmond: Hogarth, [November] 1922 A1 Jacob’s Room, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923 BU1 Jacob’s Room [3rd impression], Uniform Edition, London: Hogarth, 1929 BU2 Jacob’s Room [4th impression], Uniform Edition, London: Hogarth, 1935

shakespeare works cited in this volume

C. Coriolanus, ed. Lee Bliss, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 Cym. Cymbeline, ed. Martin Butler, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 Ham. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed. Philip Edwards, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 Lear King Lear, ed. Jay L. Halio, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 Mac. Macbeth, ed. A. R. Braunmuller, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 Oth. Othello, ed. Norman Sanders, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 Son. The Sonnets, updated edn, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006 TGV The Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. Kurt Schlueter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 TN Twelfth Night or What You Will, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS V&A Venus and Adonis in The Poems, ed. John Roe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992

reference works

DB Domesday Book DNB Dictionary of National Biography (www.oxforddnb.com) LE The London Encyclopaedia, 3rd edn, ed. Ben Weinreb, Christopher Hibbert, Julia Keay and John Keay, London: Macmillan, 2008 M&M Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975 OBEV The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1900, ed. Arthur Quiller- Couch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900 OCCL The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, 2nd edn, ed. M. C. Howatson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (www.oxforddnb.com) OED Oxford English Dictionary (http://dictionary.oed.com) ONC The Oxford Names Companion, by Patrick Hanks, Flavia Hodges, A. D. Mills and Adrian Room, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 TLS Times Literary Supplement WL A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to London and its Environs, London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1910 WSU The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short-title Catalog,by Julia King and Laila Miletic-Vejzovic, Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 2003; http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu/masc/ onlinebooks/woolﬂibrary/woolﬂibraryonline.htm

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Archival Sources for Manuscript, Typescript and Proof Material Relating to Jacob’s Room

Berg D17-1922 ‘Jacobs Room’. Holograph, unsigned, dated 7 and 12 October 1921 (part of ch. XIII) [Berg] Berg M18 ‘Reﬂections upon beginning a work of ﬁction to be called, perhaps, Jacob’s Room’. Holograph, unsigned, Vol. i, dated 15 April 1920, Vol. ii, dated 26 November 1920, Vol. iii, dated 12 March 1922 [Berg] Berg M88 ‘Jacob’s Room’. Typescript (6 pages numbered 47–52, ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’) with VW’s ms corrections, unsigned, undated [Berg] NLS Dep. 229.51 ‘R & R Clark invoice journal (1921–3)’ [NLS] NLS Dep. 229.52 ‘R & R Clark invoice journal (1923–5)’ [NLS] NLS Dep. 229.53 ‘R & R Clark invoice journal (1925–7)’ [NLS] NLS Dep. 229.54 ‘R & R Clark invoice journal (1927–9)’ [NLS] Reading MS 2750.546 ‘Woolf, Virginia. General; Uniform Edition &c’ [MS 2750] Reading MS 2750.558 ‘Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room’ [MS 2750] Reading MS 2750.559 ‘Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room; A room of one’s own’ [MS 2750] SxMs-13/4/14/2/1 Account book: January 1922–January 1926 [SxMs-13] SxMs-18/2/B/12 Typescript (8 pages, part of ch. III and V of Jacob’s Room) with VW’s ms corrections, unsigned, undated [SxMs-18]

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Editorial Symbols

EN Explanatory Notes Om. Omitted TA Textual Apparatus TN Textual Notes ~ Substitution for word(s) in recording a punctuation variant <-> Ambiguous hyphen in a word at the end of a line Third-party editorial interpolation in quotations / New paragraph: inset ﬁrst line // New line: centred text \ New line: not inset § Blank line % Blank half-line word(s) Deleted text + + Added text [word?] Uncertain reading in transcriptions [word(s)] Editorial interpolation [. . .] Editorial ellipsis | New line in quotations (poetry, inscriptions, etc.) « » Marginalia {} Cancelled passage

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Introduction Stuart N. Clarke and Susan Sellers

‘[M]y own favourite, the only one I can sometimes read a page of without disgust’ (L6212) is how Virginia Woolf described Jacob’s Room in a letter to Philip Morrell in 1938, almost sixteen years after it appeared, expressing delight at his liking the novel that is still regarded as her first full foray into the breathtakingly innovative new form of fiction writing which made her name.1 This is the novel in which Woolf can be seen to turn definitively from the restrictive and outmoded templates of Edwardian realism she had dismissed so brilliantly in ‘Modern Novels’ (1919), written the year before she began drafting Jacob’s Room in April 1920 (E330–7).2 Jacob’s Room is her third novel, following TheVoyageOut(1915), completed before the First World War but delayed in publication, and Night and Day (1919), written in wartime and published in the first year of the peace yet set prior to and eliding the hostilities. In preceding Mrs Dalloway (1925)andTo the Lighthouse (1927), it is also the first of what may be viewed as Woolf’s triptych of war elegies, each one nevertheless addressing the Great War aslant. It was only while composing To the Lighthouse that Woolf recognised her emergent form of fiction as ‘But what? Elegy?’ (D334, 27 June 1925); yet Jacob’s Room clearly marks her departure into an experimental, avant-garde elegiacs that arguably continue to mutate in The Waves (1931), The Years (1937)andBetween the Acts (1941). Not entirely unconnected to the radical liberties it takes with form, Jacob’s Room also stands as the first of Woolf’s novels to be published by her own press, the Hogarth Press, in October 1922. Woolf was aware of the daring nature of her new undertaking, which she saw drawing on the formal and stylistic inventions she had already pioneered in her short fiction ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1917), ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919)and ‘An Unwritten Novel’ (1920). In her diary for 26 January 1920,thedayafter her thirty-eighth birthday, she records starting to conceive Jacob’s Room:

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INTRODUCTION this afternoon [I] arrived at some idea of 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? My doubt is how far it will include enclose the human heart—Am I sufficiently mistress of my dialogue to net it there? For 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. Then I’ll find room for so much—a gaiety—an inconsequence—a light spirited stepping at my sweet will. Whether I’m sufficiently mistress of things—thats the doubt; but conceive mark on the wall, K. G. [‘Kew Gardens’] & unwritten novel taking hands & dancing in unity. What the unity shall be I have yet to discover [. . .] I suppose the danger is the damned egotistical self; which ruins Joyce & [Dorothy] Richardson, narrowing & restricting? (D213–14) It is interesting that as she moves towards transplanting the experimental techniques that already marked out her published short stories in order to create ‘a new form for a new novel’, she envisages a return to the structure of ‘An Unwritten Novel’ (1920). This piece, first published in the London Mercury and soon to be one of eight collected for publication by the Hogarth Press in Monday or Tuesday (1921), indeed performs narrative arabesques whereby ‘one thing [. . .] open[s] out of another’.Itbeginswith ‘an expression of unhappiness’ (MT 39, CSF 112) on the face of a random stranger in a railway carriage, before spinning off into the narrator’smyriad and fragmentary reflections on the journey and attempt to puzzle out this woman seated opposite – only to realise when at last the woman alights that all such conjectures have fallen wide of the mark. This revelation then spurs the further pursuit of chance glimpses of strangers in urban modernity: ‘Wherever I go, mysterious figures, I see you, turning the corner, mothers and sons; you, you, you. I hasten, I follow’ (MT 57, CSF 121). The reader is left wondering what is the unwritten of ‘An Unwritten Novel’ and whether it might actually prove un-writable. In planning to extend this technique – ‘only not for 10 pages but 200 or so’ in pursuit of ‘the looseness & lightness I want’, while preserving ‘form & speed, & enclos[ing] everything’–Woolf seems to conceive Jacob’s Room as the novel promised yet withheld by ‘An Unwritten Novel’, now to be achieved through the sustained, fast yet loose accretion of narrative fragments. (Her doubts here as to whether she was ‘sufficiently mistress of my dialogue to net it there’ typically troubled her in the early stages of many projects.) The anticipated ‘entirely different’ approach of ‘no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen’, if understood as

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introduction the abolition of the usual apparatus of a novel, such as the ‘scaffolding’ of formal chapters, is not however entirely met by Jacob’s Room,whichhas fourteen numbered chapters. Yet the look of the page is unconventional, and there is perhaps something of the desired ‘crepuscular’ and misty effects in the apparently random scattering of unexplained blank spaces of varying size that further divide the text, which have not always been honoured in later editions.3 And as in ‘An Unwritten Novel’ it is mood and emotion (‘the heart, the passion, humour’) rather than plot that shape the writing of this novel, which opens self-reﬂexively with a tearful mother writing with a welling nib. Woolf maintains her commitment to breaking with convention throughout its composition, repeatedly referring to Jacob’s Room as an ‘experiment’ in her diary entries and letters from its inception in January 1920 and even after its publication on 27 October 1922 (D214, 178; L2546, 573, 581, 588, 591). The year 1922 was a landmark for avant-garde literary works in the Anglophone world, with the publication in February of James Joyce’s Ulysses, incendiary extracts of which Woolf had been reading in the London magazine the Egoist and writing about in ‘Modern Novels’,4 and which the Hogarth Press had declined to publish (see Publication History below); Katherine Mansﬁeld’s The Garden Party and Other Stories also in February; and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in the same month as Jacob’s Room, October.5 For Dorothy Richardson meanwhile – that other modern writer whose work, in Woolf’s estimation at the time of embarking on Jacob’s Room, was blighted along with Joyce’sby‘the damned egotistical self’ – 1922 was a fallow year, since Deadlock, the sixth volume of her great experimental work, Pilgrimage, appeared in 1921 (the preceding volume Interim had been serialised in the American Little Review, along with Ulysses), while the seventh, Revolving Lights, would be published in 1923. All four writers featured among the abundant reading Woolf undertook as a professional reviewer and for her own pleasure during the period in which she drafted Jacob’s Room.6 Woolf read as a publisher too, and typeset Hope Mirrlees’s avant-garde Paris: A Poem, which the Hogarth Press printed and published in 1920 (albeit misdated 1919 on the title page), an astonishing work of concrete poetics comparable with the calligrammes of Apollinaire. The revolutionary deployment of italics, capitals, bars of music, blank spaces and one line running vertically down the page in Mirrlees’s poem, as Julia Briggs has documented, fuelled Woolf’s own radical typographical decision to separate different sections of text with varying numbers of blank lines in Jacob’s Room (Briggs 2007: 264; see also Bishop 2004).

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INTRODUCTION While it is doubtful that T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land played a significant role in the composition of Jacob’s Room, since Woolf only heard him read it as late as 18 June 1922 (D2178), conversations with Eliot himself proved fruitful. During one such talk in September 1920, Woolf charged her friend ‘with wilfully concealing his transitions’, and noted his reply in her diary: ‘He said that explanation is unnecessary. If you put it in, you dilute the facts. You should feel these without explanation’ (D267–8).7 Discussions with Katherine Mansfield were similarly productive, despite – or perhaps because of – Woolf’s residual fear that Mansfield might prove to be the better writer.8 In a letter to Mansfield in February 1921, Woolf confided that in Jacob’s Room she ‘didn’t want just all realism any more—only thoughts and feelings—no cups and tables’. It was this attempt to ‘change the consciousness, and so to break up the awful stodge’, she explained, that led to her ‘always chopping and changing from one level to another’ (Congenial Spirits 128). One of many echoes it is possible to trace between Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’, ‘Kew Gardens’ and ‘An Unwritten Novel’ and Jacob’s Room lies in the treatment of the human subject. Unlike Woolf’s first two novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day, in which characters materialise through the familiar medium of omniscient third-person narration, the presentation of the eponymous Jacob is fragmentary, oscillating and ultimately elusive. The richly enigmatic railway carriage and platform encounters with those fugitive ‘Mysterious figures!’ experienced by the narrator of ‘An Unwritten Novel’ (MT 57, CSF 121), to take Woolf’s first point of reference, anticipate in scene and sentiment Woolf’sportrayalinJacob’s Room of Mrs Norman as she tries to fathom Jacob on his train journey to Cambridge, before concluding ‘Nobody sees any one as he is [. . .] They see a whole—they see all sorts of things—they see themselves’ (46:20–3). Her novel also takes up the surreal, parallactic, narrative focalisation that dramatically shifts between elusive human spheres of relation and the sharply observed minutiae of the object world in ‘Kew Gardens’ and ‘TheMarkontheWall’. The snails that feature in both these pieces, for example, anticipate ‘the opal-shelled crab’ that ‘slowly circled’ the bottom of Jacob’s childhood bucket (19:19–21) while ‘Jacob lay asleep, fast asleep, profoundly unconscious’ (19:12–13). As numerous early reviewers of the novel were to comment on – not always favourably – Jacob is unlike the figures of conventional fiction in that he evades the reader.9 This is aided by the ‘chopping and changing’ Woolf described in her letter to Mansfield, whereby no one incident or vision is sustained, as well as by her subdivision of her material into separate textual

introduction units of which the longest are rarely more than two to three pages. It is also enabled by the mobile stance of the elusive narrator, who at times exhibits a privileged, all-knowing intimacy with the ﬁctional world and its characters, but who also repeatedly and self-consciously positions herself apart and even proclaims ignorance.10 This not only disrupts continuity and certainty but also precludes close empathy, requiring the reader to remain perpetually vigilant. It prevents Jacob from featuring as the standard hero of a stock masculine Bildungsroman, and complicates any straightforward reclamation of him as representative of the lost generation of young men killed in the Great War. The memory of Thoby Stephen (1880–1906), Woolf’s adored older brother who died from typhoid after a visit to Greece in 1906 at the age of 26, and thus already lost to that lost generation, imbues the elegiacs of Jacob’s Room (see EN passim), to the extent that in July 1922 Woolf evidently seriously contemplated dedicating the novel to him. Preparing for her Common Reader essays as she completed Jacob’s Room, she cancelled the following epigraph set out in her reading notebook (see EN 64:21):

Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. Julian Thoby Stephen (1881–1906) Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. Woolf’s framing double citation of the famous closing line of the Roman poet Catullus’s elegy to his brother (poem 101) –‘And forever, brother, hail and farewell’–is in keeping with the turn to classical sources as a means of universalising personal and local loss, adopted in many national and international commemorations of the Great War dead,11 yet it is attached, in this deleted dedication, to the name of a young man who did not live to face the decision of whether to become a combatant in that war. Even without this dedication, a number of Woolf’s family and friends identiﬁed her brother Thoby as a model for Jacob: ‘Of course I see something of Thoby in him [Jacob], as I suppose was intended’, wrote Lytton Strachey (L. Strachey 2005: 523); ‘She has given so much of him in Jacob’s Room’, wrote his sister over thirty years later (V. Bell 1997: 57). Nevertheless, the novel’s clear contiguity with the war cannot be overlooked. The shadow of the First World War looms from the opening page, where it would have been instantly conjured in the minds of Woolf’s readers by the realisation that Jacob’s family name is Flanders. Flanders is the

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INTRODUCTION populous northern region of Belgium that borders France, the site of notoriously prolonged and bloody battles (Ypres and Passchendaele), and very soon a synonym for the war dead, immortalised, for example, in the popular poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ (EN 7:1).12 The sound of warfare in Flanders was audible even to those living near the south-east coast of Britain, including the Woolfs, as Leonard Woolf reminds us: ‘Often if one went for a walk on the downs above Asham one could hear the incessant pounding of the guns on the Flanders front’ (L. Woolf 1964: 197). In this sense, Jacob Flanders may be the novel’s self-consciously fictive name for the universal ‘Unknown Warrior’ of post-war public commem- oration. His first name, on the other hand, is noticeably Jewish (EN 7:16), possibly invoking the war bereavement arguably closest to Woolf herself – the loss of her husband’s brother, Cecil Woolf (1887–1917), formerly a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who was killed by the same shell that wounded their brother Philip (1889–1962) during the Battle of Cambrai, in the trenches of Bourlon Wood, Flanders (EN 140:12). On Monday, 3 December 1917, Woolf’s diary starkly records: ‘On Sunday we heard of Cecil’s death, & Philip’s wounds’ (D183). She helped the con- valescing Philip to set ‘in our old type’ (D1 123) the slim volume of Cecil Woolf’s Poems (1918), privately printed, but constituting the Hogarth Press’s second publication (after Two Stories by Virginia and Leonard Woolf). Tellingly, it was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement as the work of one of four young modern poets who have ‘placed another rung in a Jacob’s ladder that may some day lead to unimagined heavens of poetic beauty’ ([Child] 40; see EN 140:12). Jacob, it transpires, also bears a family resemblance to Leonard Woolf (EN 7:16), who unlike Jacob did not join up, as he suffered a lifelong tremor that made even his pursuit of the conscientious objection that characterised Bloomsbury’spacifism unnecessary. The group’sconscien- tious objectors include Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey.13 ‘Like some others who went through the fighting of the 1914 war in France and Flanders, Philip’, Leonard later recalled, ‘very rarely spoke about his experiences, but he did once describe to me what happened to them in Bourlon Wood’ (L. Woolf 1964: 182), though it cannot now be known whether the details he goes on to relate were passed on to Woolf herself. As Karen Levenback has observed, Woolf only had ‘limited contact’ with ‘returning soldiers’, ‘until she visited Philip Woolf in 1917 at Fishmonger’s Hall where he had been sent to recover’ (Levenback

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introduction 1999: 32). Woolf subsequently visited himfrequentlyuntilhisreturn to the front (see EN 157:4–6). When his ‘notice to go to the front’ came in July 1918,shewroteof‘having a good deal of sympathy with my mother in law, not only in this parting but in her general attitude to life. [. . .] We walked up & down a narrow lane between beds of Herbert’s vegetables; & she cried; & laughed; & then gave me 2 large eggs; & ran about among all her children [. . .] But to give this effect I should need a chapter, & rather hope one of these days to take one’ (D1167). ‘Our generation is daily scourged by the bloody war’ (D251), Woolf wrote in June 1920. Jacob’s Room, however, is written by a committed pacifist,attheheartofagroupnotoriousforitspublicdefiance of war- mongering and whose pacifism did not subside at the Armistice. During the First World War, Vanessa and Clive Bell’sCharleston Farm14 and Philip and Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington Manor, along with their Bloomsbury residence in Bedford Square, were welcome havens for conscientious objectors and pacifists.15 While depictions of the fighting are abstracted in Jacob’s Room to the quasi-mechanical operations of ‘tin soldiers’ (254:20), the war nevertheless intrudes repeatedly. Edward Bishop has suggested that Woolf’srestrainedman- ner of alluding to the war enabled her to extend her frame of reference and transform the novel into ‘a meditation on mortality itself’ (JR Bishop:xxxii).Itisarestraintthatservedalsotoforestallresuscitation of the powerful emotions the war continued to arouse, along with the tendency, in the early 1920s, to sentimentalise those who had died and to fuel what David Bradshaw has termed ‘the necrolatry of the state’ (Bradshaw 2002: 107). Such idealisation of the war dead would have worked against Woolf’s persistent critique of her protagonist’strajec- tory, all the stages of which – from Jacob’s education at Cambridge University, affairs with women and European tour to the glimpses of his future had he lived – are inherently patriarchal. Recent scholarship has confirmed Woolf’s detailed understanding of the power-brokering and complex geopolitical alignments that created the conditions for war and sabotaged its ‘peace’, inviting us to read Jacob’s Room not only as a pivotal text in its literary inventiveness, but also as a decisive interrogation of what Kathleen Wall has termed ‘the epistemological crisis of authority’ (Wall 310) that informed so many of the avant- garde experimental literary works of its era.16

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INTRODUCTION composition history In addition to the many letters and diary entries in which Woolf recorded her thoughts as she worked on Jacob’s Room, three notebooks containing her holograph draft of the novel have survived. These are held by the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, together with a six-page typescript (Berg M88) containing the section from the draft (see Appendix II) that became ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’ (published 1926; CSF 145–8). There is also an eight-page fragment of the typescript made of the draft among the Monks House Papers at the University of Sussex (SxMs-18/2/B/12). No extant page proofs have been located. The notebooks are written on one side of the page only in black ink, with the verso page left empty for occasional notes. The first notebook runs from 15 April to 24 November 1920 and comprises scenes from Chapter I to Chapter VIII. It consists of 215 pages and 2 blank leaves. The second notebook covers the period from 26 November to May 1921 and continues Chapter VIII to the end of Chapter XII. It includes four short sketches (‘Romance’, ‘The Telephone’, ‘Written for a picture: a letter to a lady’ and ‘A death in the newspaper’) and a segment of the ending of ‘The String Quartet’ (MT 59–65, CSF 138–41). This second notebook has 273 pages and 10 blank leaves. Woolf then turned to a notebook that would later be used for her diary, and drafted Chapter XIII on 7 and 12 October 1921. The third notebook bears the title ‘Book of scraps of J’sR.&first version of The Hours’ and is dated March 12th 1922. It contains only 22 pages of material relating to Jacob’s Room – the closing scene, as well as additions to Chapters II, IV, X and XI – and has some pages torn out.17 Despite recording in her diary on 26 January 1920 that she had ‘this afternoon arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel’, it was not until 10 April that Woolf wrote: ‘I’m planning to begin Jacob’s Room next week with luck’ (D213, 28). Her social calendar for the early months of 1920 included the opening of Duncan Grant’s first solo exhibition at the Paterson-Carfax Gallery in Old Bond Street, London, on 9 February; hosting a talk for the Richmond Branch of the Women’s Co-operative Guild on 2 March; speaking at meetings of the 1917 Club and Memoir Club (Woolf regretted the ‘egotistical sentimental trash’ (D226) she read to the latter on 15 March); trips to concerts and the theatre; an exhibition of African sculpture at the Chelsea Book Club on 14 April; numerous lunch and supper parties where guests included the writers T. S. Eliot, E. M.

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introduction Forster and Aldous Huxley and the socialist reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb; meetings with her dressmaker Madame Gravé (a character with this name would appear in Jacob’s Room equipped with a Kodak camera; see 246:18); a troublesome tooth; and so many tea invitations that Woolf admitted ‘I grow wearied of “going out to tea”; & yet cant resist’ (D217). There were visits to Monks House in Rodmell, the Sussex home the Woolfs had purchased the previous year, including a week spent decorating and gardening at the end of February, and a fortnight’s stay from 25 March – the first half of which Woolf devoted to a review of The Letters of Henry James. This was printed as the leading article (unsigned) in the TLS on 8 April.18 In total, Woolf wrote six reviews for the TLS between January and early April 1920; the others were of the American poet Nicholas Lindsay’s General William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other Poems; Aldous Huxley’s Limbo; W. E. Norris’s The Triumphs of Sara; Léonie Villard’s La Femme anglaise au XIXe sie`cle et son e´volution d’apre`s le roman anglais contemporain (Nineteenth-Century English Woman’s Evolution according to the Contemporary English Novel) and J. D. Beresford’s An Imperfect Mother. She also published reviews of Logan Pearsall Smith’s A Treasury of English and Ernest Hartley Coleridge’s The Life of Thomas Coutts, Banker in the Athenæum; and a review of five memoirs (Lady Georgiana Peel, John A. Bridges, C. L. H. Dempster, Dorothea Conyers and John Porter), and a drama review of E. M. Young’s The Higher Court for the New Statesman (which appeared on 17 April). Woolf’s responsibilities with the Hogarth Press during this period included printing Hope Mirrlees’s radically experimental Paris: A Poem in February. Perhaps in response to these multiple undertakings – and possibly in reaction to The Times’ critic A. B. Walkley’s attack on her review of Henry James’s letters – she found herself prevented ‘from beginning Jacob’s room’. But by 15 April Woolf vowed: ‘My notion is to write this in chapters straight off; not beginning one unless I can count on so many days clear for finishing it’ (D230, 31). That same day she sketched out a tentative plan in what would become the first of three Jacob’s Room notebooks:

Reﬂections on beginning a work of ﬁction to be called, perhaps, Jacob’s Room: Thursday, April 15th 1920. ______I think the main point is that it should be free. Yet what about form? Let us suppose that the Room will hold it together.

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INTRODUCTION Intensity of life compared with immobility. Experiences. To change style at will. (Berg M18 1.1; JRHD 1) Woolf began writing on 16 April, beginning not with Betty Flanders penning her letter to Captain Barfoot, as in the final novel, but with Jacob ‘trotting’ along the beach. This difference in opening between the manuscript and printed version is unusual in the composition history of Jacob’s Room; for the most part, the two follow each other, the exception being the scene that Woolf later revised and published separately as ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’. Although Woolf was unable to clear her days for the rest of April and first half of May in the way she had hoped, working with S. S. Koteliansky on his translation of Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi on 5 May and on a review of Constance Hill’s Mary Russell Mitford and her Surroundings for the TLS for 6 May, she nevertheless logged on 20 May ‘I get on with Jacob—the most amusing novel writing I’ve done I think’ (D240). Woolf maintained her high journalistic output through the summer of 1920 with six reviews for the TLS (including Elizabeth Robins’s The Mills of the Gods on 17 June, Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue on 1 July, a new edition of the five-act farce Gammer Gurton’s Nedle (c. 1562)on15 July and George Moore’s Esther Waters on 29 July); three for the Athenæum (among them Rudyard Kipling’s Letters of Travel (1892–1913) on 16 July); three for the New Statesman (including William Thayer’s Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography on 5 June and a drama review of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard on 24 July); and one for the Daily Herald. Two exceptions to these reviews were the publication of ‘An Unwritten Novel’ in the July issue of the London Mercury and a response in the Woman’s Leader to H. W. Massingham, editor of the Nation, on the subject of ‘The Plumage Bill’, which aimed to restrict imports of exotic birds and feathers into Britain. In May 1920, Woolf read her economist friend John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), in which he exposed the power politics that resulted in the failure of the Treaty of Versailles and predicted another world war. Woolf called Keynes’s book ‘a work of morality’ following a diary entry in which she imagined pursuing her cousin the Liberal politician Herbert Fisher as he went about his business ‘ruling the Empire’, before dismissing his ‘exalted’ thoughts as ‘all bunkum’ (D233, 32). And yet, despite sporadic frustration with her slow progress –‘Three weeks I think

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introduction have passed without a word added to Jacob’ (D253; see also 57) – by 17 September she had ‘reached the party [at Mrs Durrant’s, Chapter VII] in Jacob & write with great pleasure’ (D267). Alongside her reviewing, Woolf’s reading during this initial period of composing Jacob’s Room was typically broad, ranging from Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1615)withitscastof‘deep, atmospheric, living people’ and its ‘loose, far scattered vitality of the great books’,toRose Macaulay’s newly published novel Potterism: A Tragi-Farcical Tract, which she labelled ‘adon’s book’ (D256, 57). Woolf also read Roger Fry’stranslationsofthepoetStéphane Mallarmé (which she later acknowledged on their publication in 1936 as a ‘masterpiece’ (L684)). In July, she asked David Garnett to send her a Greek grammar, and on 19 August reported reading Sophocles’ Trachiniae in the original Greek ‘with comparative ease’ (L2437, D259). Ten days earlier, on 9 August, she longed to ‘get Hume’sEssays&purgemyself’ (D256). The summer and early autumn of 1920 brought conversations with living writers too. On 2 June she lunched with Katherine Mansfield, acknowledging ‘2 hours priceless talk—pricelessinthesensethattonooneelsecanItalkinthe same disembodied way about writing’ (D245). When, on 23 August, Woolf returned to London from Rodmell to say goodbye to Mansfield, whose ailing health forced her to leave England for Italy, Woolf noted ‘the blankness of not having her to talk to’, adding: ‘A woman caring as I care for writing is rare enough I suppose to give me the queerest sense of echo’ (D261). On 18 September, T. S. Eliot came to stay at Monks House, where they discussed his verse dramas and the ‘living writers he admires’: Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and, above all, James Joyce and Ulysses, then still unpublished in full (D267). Woolf also wrote to her writer friend Mary ‘Molly’ MacCarthy, wondering ‘Why can’t somebody write a book I want to read? [. . .] Write a novel: then cut out all but the first and last sentences of every page’ (‘Some New Woolf Letters’ 180). Although Woolf reached Mrs Durrant’spartyinJacob’s Room by 17 September, there had been no repetition of the burst of writing in April and May that had led her to catalogue ‘11,000 [words] in six weeks’ (Berg M18 1.56; JRHD 34). Indeed her progress for the first three weeks of August was so slow that Woolf complained: ‘I’ve written only half a page of it since coming here’ (D258). As was usual, Woolf invested part of the summer at Monks House in domestic tasks such as baking, needlework, cleaning and distempering the dining room, painting the banisters and stairs and yellow washing the earth

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INTRODUCTION closet (D253, 59, 56). She went for long walks on the Sussex Downs during which she ‘made up Jacob incessantly’ (D269). As was also usual, the Woolfs received many guests, including Clive Bell – who advised Woolf to approach American publishers for her novels – and, on 28 and 29 August, Ralph Partridge and Dora Carrington. Their visit resulted in the appointment of Partridge as partner and Carrington as secretary of the Hogarth Press (D258, 62). On 17 August Woolf daringly turned down articles on Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and William Makepeace Thackeray, noting she felt ‘like a drunkard who has successfully resisted three invitations to drink’ (D258). On 8 September she went further: ‘I’vetakenthesuddenplungeofrefusingmybooks from the Times, & dictated conditions for the future—only leading articles, or those I suggest myself’ (D263). On 15 Septembershereturnedabookforreview to John Middleton Murry at the Athenæum (D266). Despite this new liberty – which on 15 September made her feel ‘like someone turned out into the open air’–by 26 September Woolf’s work on the party scene in Jacob’s Room had ‘come to a stop’ (D265–6, 68). Woolf’s own explanation for this was the visit from T. S. Eliot on 18–19 September, which caused her to compare herself negatively with James Joyce and to ‘wonder what it is that I am doing: to suspect [. . .] that I have not thought my plan out plainly enough—so to dwindle, niggle, hesitate—which means that one’s lost’ (D269). Another factor was the publication of a new collection of essays by Arnold Bennett entitled Our Women, in which he claimed men’s intellectual and creative superiority over women, to which Woolf immediately felt impelled to draft a response (D269). Yet another was the threat of a headache on 27 September which prevented her from reading and writing for ﬁve days (D270). The Woolfs left Rodmell on 1 OctobertoreturntoHogarthHousein Richmond for the winter. Woolf was kept busy during the following weeks with visits to and from the ‘usual people’,suchasVanessaBell and Duncan Grant, Clive Bell and Mary Hutchinson, Lytton Strachey, Katharine(néeCox)andherhusband Will Arnold-Forster, and S. S. Koteliansky (D271). There was increased work at the Hogarth Press, now that Ralph Partridge was in post with his ‘“hurricane” business’ plans, which Woolf listed on 18 October as comprising not only Leonard Woolf’s ‘Three Stories’ (published as Stories of the East in 1921)andher Monday or Tuesday, but the possibility of Koteliansky’stranslationsof Chekhov, books by T. S. Eliot and Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey’s essays, as well as a request from Mervyn Arnold-Forster, brother of Will, to print a

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introduction collection of his ‘rhymes’ for a fee (D272). The return to London brought new writing activities too. Woolf’s letters to the editor of the New Statesman, ‘The Intellectual Status of Women’,werepublishedon9 and 16 October, while her story ‘Solid Objects’ appeared in the Athenæum on 22 October. She reviewed biographies of Jane Austen and John Evelyn for the TLS on 28 October, and published a reply to a hostile critic of the latter on 11 November. She also presented a memoir (probably ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’, MB 164–77)attheMemoirClubon17 November. On 10 November she lamented ‘notawordsettoJacobyet’ (D273). There is no record of when Woolf finished the party scene in Jacob’s Room.On13 November, she recorded finishing Plato’s Symposium and assisting Leonard Woolf and S. S. Koteliansky with their translation of Maxim Gorky’s The Note-Books of Anton Tchekhov, Together with Reminiscences of Tchekhov (which the Hogarth Press published the following year), as well as a conversation with Ralph Partridge in which he related visiting a brothel. On 23 November Woolf complained ‘We see too many people for me to describe them’, and catalogued by way of explanation ‘printing till dark’, a quarrel with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, a weekend visit from Hope Mirrlees, a review of D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl, and a tea with the poet and translator R. C. Trevelyan at which they discussed ‘Poetic Drama’ (D274–6). On 24 November Woolf started Chapter VIII (Berg M18 1.211; JRHD 118) and continued with Betty Flanders’slettertoJacob,beginning notebook II on 26 November (Berg M18 2.3; JRHD 122). She attributed a ‘skip’ between 23 November and 5 December to reading Coleridge (D277). On 12 December she reflected that ‘everyone’sbook is out’–T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood,RogerFry’s Vision and Design, Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss, John Middleton Murry’s Aspects of Literature – and declared herself ‘happy’ to hear Mansfield ‘abused’ (D278). The Woolfs left Richmond for Rodmell on 22 December for Christmas until 2 January. On 3 January 1921, after completing Chapter VIII of Jacob’s Room, then numbered xv,19 Woolf drew up plans for three further chapters:

16 The Countess Hunting. ) Bohemian party ) Fanny Paris )

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INTRODUCTION 17. Fanny Greece. 18. London War (Berg M18 2.32; JRHD 137) She made good progress in the ensuing weeks, reaching Chapter IX on 21 January (Berg M18 2.65; JRHD 154). By 25 January she confessed herself ‘at a crisis in Jacob; want to finish in 20,000 words, written straight off in a frenzy’ (D286). On 5 February she was ‘beginning the last lap; & it is a sprint towards the end, difficult to keep up’ (D289). Despite devoting two and a half hours each day to learning Russian in an attempt to match Leonard’s ‘express train’ (D290), by 1 March she had reached the beginning of Chapter XI and was endeavouring to ‘think of Mrs Flanders in the orchard’ (D294) – a passage that never made it into the finished novel but appears from internal evidence to have been drafted only on 23 March (Berg M18 2.109; JRHD 180). On 13 March, Woolf noted that she was unable to ‘start Jacob’s travels to the East’ (D2100). This would appear to refer to his trip beginning in Paris, for a rewritten version of the visit to Versailles was only undertaken on 5 April (Berg M18 2.139; JRHD 199). Between 16 and 18 March she accompanied Leonard Woolf to Manchester, where he was to stand as Labour candidate for the Combined Universities. While in Manchester she visited the art gallery, the zoo and dined in the university refectory (L2458, D2102–3). Almost immediately afterwards the Woolfs went to Zennor in Cornwall, where they stayed in rented accommodation close to the Arnold-Forsters’ home, Eagle’sNest,from 23 to 30 March. At Zennor, thrilling coastal walks and Russian studies were interspersed with reading Voltaire’s Candide (1759)andEthelSmyth’snewly published Streaks of Life. Back in Richmond on 8 April, Woolf attributed her inability to make progress with Jacob’s Room to a review of Monday or Tuesday in the TLS, comparing the obscurely placed and ‘scrappy’ half-column to the much longer and far more complimentary review of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, which had appeared the previous day (D2106). Though Woolf acknowledged that her own review was ‘complimentary enough’,thefact that it failed ‘to see that I’m after something interesting’ upset her and caused her to doubt herself as a writer. ‘Private criticism’–which was ‘the real test’– followed, including lavish praise from Lytton Strachey for ‘The String Quartet’,whichWoolfgranted‘for a moment flood[ed] every nerve with

introduction pleasure’ (D2107, 109). By 17 April, after a day ‘reading Carlyle, & now Macaulay’, and amid speculation as to whether the Triple Industrial Alliance formed by the railway and transport workers and the miners would call a general strike, Woolf was rewriting the passage with Jacob on an Italian train in Chapter XII (D2110, 111;BergM18 2.149; JRHD 205). Despite her determination in the autumn of 1920 to be more selective in her journalistic assignments, Woolf continued to publish reviews throughout 1921, including, in the first six months, ‘George Eliot’ for the Daily Herald’s ‘Great Names’ series, a drama review of William Congreve’s Love for Love for the New Statesman and a review of Archibald Stalker’s TheIntimateLifeofWalterScottfor the TLS. On 18 April, Woolf lunched with her cousin Herbert Fisher, when they discussed the situation in Ireland (Herbert was a member of the Coalition Cabinet’s Irish Committee). Though a supporter of partition andHomeRuleforIreland,Fisherwasoneofthoseresponsiblefor sending in the Black and Tans in March 1920 and forming the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary, leading to an escalation in the violence (D2 112). Between 25 and 29 April Woolf spent her afternoons listening to Beethoven quartets as part of a week- long festival at the Æolian Hall (D2114). On 3 May she had again come to a ‘full stop in Jacob, owing partly to depression’ (D2 116). A factor in this was a review in the Daily Mail predicting that Leonard Woolf’sstory‘Pearls and Swine’ would ‘rank with the great stories of the world’, which caused Woolf to ‘immediately think myself a failure —imagine myself peculiarly lacking in the qualities L. has. I feel fine drawn, misty, attenuated, inhuman, bloodless & niggling out trifles that don’tmovepeople’. She goaded herself by concluding ‘But I must pull together & finish [Jacob’s Room]off’ (D2116). On 6 May, she had reached the section where Jacob arrives in Athens (Berg M18 2.189; JRHD 226), drafting the following, more elaborate description of this city as a preamble to the final two phrases which remain in the published version:

Athens, about which so much has been written, & so much felt that it is very +should be impossible+ difﬁcult to feel anything +new+ for oneself, Athens whose very dust has been passed through a sieve, whose graves have been scoured, s & temples scraped, & stones numbered, is nevertheless still quite capable of impressing a young man as the d oddest combination, the most incongruous assortment [. . .] (Berg M18 2.189; JRHD 226)

INTRODUCTION May 1921 continued with the usual mix of reviewing (including Coventry Patmore’s Courage in Politics and Other Essays for the TLS on 26 May), visiting and visitors. Woolf attended a lecture on prison reform on 9 May, viewed a painting exhibition organised by Roger Fry at the London Alpine Club mid-month, and hosted a dinner on 18 May for Desmond MacCarthy, literary editor of the New Statesman, at which Minna Green (Leonard Woolf’s former secretary) surreptitiously wrote down all he said in shorthand in an attempt to capture his brilliant conversation. As at the Memoir Club – which Desmond’s wife Molly had hoped might stimulate her husband into producing a great work – the attempt failed, since the transcription proved to be dull. A talk with John Maynard Keynes on 25 May, during which he insisted her strengths lay in memoir writing, pro- voked her admission that Night and Day was ‘dull [. . .] but don’t you see you must put it all in before you can leave out’ (D2 121). Another stalling factor in progress on Jacob’s Room was the first glimmerings of the ‘Reading book’ which would become The Common Reader (D2 120). Woolf also heard of the tragic deaths of two young Oxford undergraduates while bathing, reflecting ‘at the age of 21 it’s all over for both of them’ (D2 119). From 11 June to 8 August, Woolf was ill and did no writing, recording as she recovered ‘two whole months rubbed out’ (D2125). She read The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt (1850) as well as Thomas Hardy in preparation for a long-planned article. She also read Walter Scott’s ‘Waverley’ novels, D. H. Lawrence’snewlypublishedWomeninLove, and Henry James, confessing to Roger Fry that, though she was impressed by the latter, she was simultaneously ‘vaguely annoyed by the feeling that—well, that I am in a museum’ (L2478). Though visitors were few, they included T. S. Eliot, and James and Alix Strachey (née Sargant-Florence), who had recently returned from studying in Vienna with Sigmund Freud. In September, Woolf continued with Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, objecting to the ‘excessive’ ingenuity which not only drew too much attention to James himself, but prevented her from ‘feeling for the figure behind. Milly thus manipulated, disappears’ (D2136). She also worked on the garden at Rodmell, began ‘Lives of the Obscure’ and tackled Katherine Mansfield’s stories, which left her needing ‘to rinse my mind —in Dryden?’ (D2138). Her subsequent progress on Jacob’s Room is unclear. Notebook II ends with Chapter XII – the longest chapter in the novel – but there are also interpolated additions to Chapters X and XI (Berg M18 2.221, 223, 225, 27; JRHD 243–6) with numbers that probably

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introduction refer to the pages of a lost typescript. The last paragraph of notebook II is the passage that would become 262:14–26:

Now the agitation of the air uncovered a racing star; now it was dark. Now, one after another, lights were extinguished. Now Great towns were black as rock; Waterways might be distinguished perhaps[.] In England the trees were heavy in leaf. Here, perhaps, in some Southern wood, an old man lit his fire; & the birds were startled. The flowers in gardens swayed one towards the other. The sheep coughed in the meadows. The English sky is milkier, softer than the Eastern. Into its atmosphere has passed something gentle from the rounded hills, vaporous from the thick leaved woods. Often after midnight the sky is pearly, & mottled. (Berg M18 2.273; JRHD 269; transcription simplified) Woolf often turned to whatever was at hand when drafting her works, and she wrote the next section of her novel in what would become Diary XI, 3 January 1922–3 January 1923 (Berg D17-1922; JRHD13; and see D1 322), beginning Chapter XIII on 7 October 1921. The draft of Chapter XIII consists of 16 rectos and 2 versos, but is followed by 14 pages torn out of the book, leaving stubs with some writing still visible. Chapter XIII opens with Jacob sitting in Hyde Park after his return from Greece and Bonamy leaving him in a rage, Clara walking her Aberdeen terrier and bursting into tears at the runaway horse (a sight which also amuses Julia Eliot), pregnant Florinda laughing at Nick Bramham, Sandra comparing Jacob to Molière’s misanthropic Alceste, and Fanny tracing Jacob’s likeness in a statue of Ulysses at the British Museum as well as in the faces of billboard advertisements. The final third of the chapter – arguably the most challen- ging to interpret – has been torn out, with the draft breaking off after the procession passing down Whitehall. By 17 October Woolf was ‘add[ing] page upon page’ to Jacob’s Room (L2 485); then on 4 November she ‘wrote the last words of Jacob [. . .] allowing for 6 months interval due to Monday or Tuesday & illness, this makes about a year’ (D2 141–2). Though the first draft was now complete, Woolf was aware as she drew up work plans that she still had to ‘furbish up Jacob’ (D2 142). Her normal practice was to type up her longhand draft progressively, making changes as she did so, and it seems clear that this is how she proceeded with Jacob’s Room, for there are numbers in the manuscript that would appear to refer to a lost typescript: Berg M18 1.83, 2.187, 2.221, 2.225, 2.277; JRHD 49, 225, 243, 245, 277. Woolf’s other occupations for the remainder of 1921 involved reading Henry James’s ghost stories, Thomas Hardy and Anatole France.20 She stitched copies of Roger Fry’s woodcuts for the Hogarth

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INTRODUCTION Press and began taking the Westminster Gazette, for ‘some politics are beginning to interest me’ (D2 143). Reviewing included Turgenev’s Two Friends and Other Stories for the TLS on 8 December. She attended a performance of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House and on 2 December enjoyed a conversation with Bertrand Russell, pleased by ‘this mind on springs. I got as much out of him as I could carry’ (D2 147). For three days in the middle of the month an outbreak of German measles among the two women employed as servants by the Woolfs forced them to take over their domestic duties. On 15 December, Woolf dined with the artists Dorothy Brett and Mark Gertler at their studio, where ‘Gertler was the chief stimulant’ (D2 150). On 17 December the Woolfs hosted a dinner at which Roger Fry read aloud a passage from the philosopher Julien Benda – possibly his attack on Henri Bergson in his Le Bergsonisme ou une philosophie de la mobilite´ (Bergsonism or a Philosophy of Mobilization) (1912) – and discussed Marcel Proust, whom Woolf greatly admired.21 After a frustrating experience with the editor of the TLS,Bruce Richmond, who insisted she change the word ‘lewd’ in her Henry James article (published on 22 December) ‘to suit the mealy mouths of Belgravia’, Woolf began 1922 with a renewed resolve to do no more reviewing (D2155). On 5 Februaryshebecameillwithinfluenza and was forced to rest for six weeks. She received few visitors, though by mid- February was well enough to write ‘sitting up in bed’ (D2161). She was able to read again too, listing Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851); Madame de La Fayette’s La Princesse de Cle`ves (1678); Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury by his daughter Gwendolen Cecil (2 vols., 1922); Walter Scott’s Old Mortality (1816); Cecil Torr’s Small Talk at Wreyland (2 vols., 1918 and 1922); ‘with an occasional bite at the Life of Lord Tennyson, of Johnson; &anythingelseIfind handy’ (D2161). She read Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921) in preparation for a leading article in the TLS (published 20 July), as well as two novels by Thomas Peacock, comparing her response to the latter to her previous experience of ‘reading him in a railway carriage in Greece, sitting opposite Thoby’ (D2164). At that time, she remembered, ‘I wanted mystery, romance, psychology I suppose. And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. [. . .] And I enjoy satire more. I like the scepticism of his mind more. I enjoy intellectuality’ (D2 164). Aware that Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories would soon ‘burst upon the world in glory’,Woolfreflected ‘Ihavetohold over Jacob’s Room till October; & somehow I fear that by that time it will

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introduction appear to me sterile acrobatics’ (D2161). Reading on 17 February ‘amildly unfavourable’ review of Monday or Tuesday in The Dial initially depressed her, but led her to determine to ‘write what I like writing & there’sanend on it’ (D2166). Woolf started work on Jacob’s Room again on 6 March, though it is unclear which section she began first, since the first date in the third manuscript notebook is 12 March (D2 170). This third notebook consists mainly of draft articles interspersed with a few additions to Jacob’s Room, significantly the brief concluding Chapter XIV. It is possible to date these additions approximately during 1922:

12 March Additions to ch. IV, Berg M18 3.9–11; JRHD 271–2 11 June Begins draft of ‘On Re-reading Novels’ (published on 20 July), Berg M18 3.13–57 Addition to ch. XI and draft of ch. XIV, Berg M18 3.59–65; JRHD 273–6 Continues ‘On Re-reading Novels’, Berg M18 3.67–73 Begins draft of ‘Jane Austen Practising’ (which opens with ‘The summer of 1922’; published on 15 July), Berg M18 3.75–95 Additions to ch. II, X and XI, Berg M18 3.97–129; JRHD 277–93 6 October ‘Thoughts on beginning a book to be called, perhaps, At Home: or The Party’, Berg M18 3.131; ‘The Hours’ 411

This table shows how the draft chapters match up with the published versions: Chapters Manuscripts i I Berg M18 1.3–7; JRHD 2–5 ii II Berg M18 1.7–39, 3.97–103; JRHD 5–24, 277–80 iii–ix III Berg M18 1.41–83; JRHD 25–49 x ‘A Woman’s College Berg M18 1.85–91; JRHD 50–3 from Outside’ xi IV Berg M18 1.93–123, 207, 209, 3.9–11; JRHD 54–70, 115, 117, 271–2 xii V Berg M18 1.125–51; JRHD 71–85 xiii VI Berg M18 1.153–81; JRHD 86–100 xiv VII Berg M18 1.183–205; JRHD 102–14

INTRODUCTION

xv VIII Berg M18 1.211–15, 2.3–31; JRHD 118–20, 122–36 xvi IX Berg M18 2.33–51, 2.65–71; JRHD 138– 47, 154–7 xvii X Berg M18 2.73–83, 2.85–99, 2.101–3, 2.105–7, 2.221, 3.105–15; JRHD 158–64, 166–73, 175–6, 178–9, 243, 281–6 xviii XI Berg M18 2.104, 109–45, 223–7, 3.59, 117–29; JRHD 177, 180–202, 244–6, 273, 287–93 xix XII Berg M18 2.147–219, 229–73; JRHD 203–42, 247–69 XIII Berg D17-1922; JRHD13 xxx [sic] XIV Berg M18 3.61–5; JRHD 274–6

Two typescript drafts of Jacob’s Room have been discovered, both containing Woolf’s holograph corrections. The first consists of six pages (Berg M88) and contains what became ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’. Since it has the typed numbers 47–52, it seems likely that it is near-contemporaneous with the manuscript (Berg M18 1.85–91; JRHD 50–3), for the previous recto (Berg M18 1.83; JRHD 49) has the number 45 in the margin. There are significant differences between the manuscript and this typescript, though very few between the typescript and the published version. The second typescript consists of eight pages, undated and unnumbered (SxMs-18/2/B/ 12), and corresponds to parts of Chapters III and V (Berg M18 1.45–7, 127–35, 149–51; JRHD 27–8, 72–6, 84–5). This typescript follows the manuscript more closely, except that the typescript includes a holograph draft of the last section of Chapter V, which does not appear in the manuscript. Since no other typescripts have survived, it is difficult to track Woolf’s progress as she revised her manuscript. After the break at the beginning of 1922 owing to influenza, her work on Jacob’s Room probably involved retyp- ing the novel, as well as adding the two holograph pages to Chapter IV written on 12 March. Her misgivings about reviewing – present throughout the composition of Jacob’s Room – now intensified, and on 18 February she recorded ‘Reviews seem to me more & more frivolous. Criticism on the other hand absorbs me more & more’ (D2 169). She had already conceived of the idea for a ‘Reading’ book in May the previous year, and in March embarked on the first chapter of what would become The Common Reader

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introduction ‘with the usual fabulous zest’ (D2 172) that habitually accompanied new writing projects. She also assisted S. S. Koteliansky with the translation of F. M. Dostoevsky’s ‘Stavrogin’s Confession’ and ‘The Plan of the Life of a Great Sinner’ for publication by the Hogarth Press. Woolf nevertheless told Clive Bell on 2 April that Minna Green was collecting ‘the entire manuscript’ (L2 517)ofJacob’s Room. Given Woolf’s practice of paying for the ﬁnal version of her books to be retyped prior to printing, this almost certainly means she was preparing her own typescript version for Minna Green to retype professionally. On 11 June, Woolf recorded ‘copying out a page or two for Miss Green’ (D2 176). Similarly, on 23 June, Woolf noted ‘Working at copying Jacob after tea’ (this may refer to her typing up additions, including the draft of Chapter XIV), while the ﬁrst part of the book was being typed by Minna Green (D2 177–8). Of course, it is possible that Minna Green typed more than one version.

publication history Woolf’s first two novels had appeared with Duckworth and Company, the publishing house founded by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth in 1898. However – as Leonard Woolf later explained – the Woolfs’ decision taken in 1920 to publish Jacob’s Room themselves ‘filled [Woolf] with delight, for she would thus avoid the misery of submitting this highly experimental novel to the criticism of Gerald Duckworth and [his reader] Edward Garnett’ (L. Woolf 1967: 68). The Hogarth Press had already published two of Woolf’s texts: Two Stories in 1917 (which contained Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and Leonard Woolf’s ‘Three Jews’ and was the Hogarth Press’s first printed book); and Woolf’s Kew Gardens in 1919. As Leonard Woolf also later confirmed, this experience of self-publication had been a ‘pleasant’ one for Woolf, and presumably played a role in the request for Gerald Duckworth to relinquish his option on Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room (L. Woolf 1967: 68; D2 205 n.1). The limitations of the hand press the Woolfs had purchased in April 1917 and installed in the drawing room of Hogarth House soon became appar- ent. On 17 May 1918, Woolf wrote declining to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses, as its ‘length is an insuperable difficulty to us [. . .] a book of 300 pages would take at least 2 years to produce’ (L2 242).22 Approximately 170 copies of Kew Gardens were printed for publication on 12 May 1919, but when a favourable review appeared in the TLS later that month and the Woolfs

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INTRODUCTION found themselves inundated with more orders than they could manage, they arranged for a second edition of 500 copies to be printed by Richard Madley in London (L. Woolf 1964: 241; Kirkpatrick and Clarke 17). In early 1921, the Woolfs employed Mr McDermott, owner of the Richmond-based Prompt Press, for the printing of Monday or Tuesday (which included ‘Kew Gardens’), though the result, according to Leonard Woolf, was ‘one of the worst printed books ever published’ (L. Woolf 1964: 239).23 Even when the Woolfs bought their replacement Minerva treadle press in November 1921 (D2 141), they would have been unable to produce a full-size book. The first mention of R. & R. Clark Ltd., the Edinburgh-based printer the Woolfs employed for Jacob’s Room, occurs in March 1922 when Woolf informed Violet Dickinson that ‘we are probably entering into alliance with a real printer, who prints beautifully’ (L2 512).24 As Leonard Woolf later recorded, ‘Jacob’s Room was our first major work, a full-length novel’. Like Ulysses, it was too ambitious for the Woolfs to print themselves, and 1,200 copies were ordered from Clark, thus ‘beginning [. . .] our long connection with one of the biggest and best of British printers and with their remarkable managing director, William Maxwell’ (L. Woolf 1967: 73).25 Frustratingly, given its innovative typographical experiments, little evidence has emerged concerning the printing of Jacob’s Room. It would have been fascinating to have viewed Woolf’s instructions for the variable gaps separating different sections of the text, for example. In the light of Leonard Woolf’s praise of R. & R. Clark, it seems probable that the printers followed the Woolfs’ instructions (whatever these were) to the letter. There is no record of when the final typescript of the novel was sent to R. & R. Clark, though on 6 September Woolf described correcting her proofs as well as her despair on rereading: ‘My proofs come every other day, & I could depress myself adequately if I went into that. The thing now reads thin & pointless; the words scarcely dint the paper; & I expect to be told that I’ve written a graceful fantasy, without much bearing upon real life’ (D2199). None of the proofs of the novel have survived. Jacob’s Room was published on 27 October 1922 at 7s. 6d.26 in crown octavo size in a print run of 1,050 copies (rather than the 1,200 mentioned in Leonard Woolf’s autobiography; see Addendum below). In fact, this was not the first book printed by R. & R. Clark for the Hogarth Press, since S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf’s translation of F. M. Dostoevsky’s ‘Stavrogin’s Confession’ and ‘The Plan of the Life of a Great Sinner’ was published on 4 October.27 One thousand and fifty copies were printed of

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introduction the Dostoevsky, which ran to 170 pages (Jacob’s Room is 290 pages, followed by 14 pages of advertisements).28 Woolf kept an anxious eye on the sales figures for Jacob’s Room. On 17 October, she recorded an enthusiastic phone call from David Garnett confirming that he would take 36 copies for his bookshop in response to a public ‘clamour’,29 while also noting that Ralph Partridge’s visit to book- shops had resulted in the sale of fewer than 50 copies.30 She was more hopeful about the libraries as well as the wholesale booksellers such as Simpkin, Marshall (D2 209). This optimism was borne out, for on the following day a number of important wholesalers and distributors including Simpkin, Marshall took 100 copies (SxMs-13/4/14/2/1). The upward trend continued, and on 29 October Woolf estimated 650 copies had been sold and confirmed that a second edition had been ordered from R. & R. Clark (D2 209).31 This involved further financial outlay, a step the Woolfs undertook, despite the looming General Election that looked as if it might ‘kill all books’, in the hope of ‘sacrificing a certain profit for a greater’ (L2 580). Woolf gave the number of copies ordered for the second impression as 1,000 (L2 579), a figure similarly remembered by Leonard (L. Woolf 1967: 73) and confirmed by the R. & R. Clark Archive (see Addendum; cf. Kirkpatrick and Clarke 27). The move made Woolf ‘apprehensive’, for, as she wrote to Katharine Arnold-Forster, ‘Publishing one’s own books is very nervous work, and we don’t know how this is going’ (L2 580). The Woolfs’ concern about the General Election on 15 November resulted in a decision not to advertise Jacob’s Room in the week immediately preceding it, and sales suffered as a consequence (see D2 212). Fresh notices were placed in the Nation and the Athenæum (the two publications had merged in 1921)on18 November and in the TLS on 23 November.32 By 27 November, Woolf reported ‘Jacob has now sold 850 copies, & the second edition wont come much before it is needed I hope’ (D2 214).33 This time her optimism proved premature, for on 3 December Woolf was still listing 850 as the number of copies sold with ‘an ominous slackening of Simkin’s [sic] orders34 this last week, which shows, perhaps, that the rush is over’ (D2 216). Given Woolf’s estimate that a further 100 copies had been sent out for review and that existing sales were sufficient to finance a second printing, she nevertheless pronounced herself ‘satisfied’, since the Press would not lose money on the venture ‘even if we sell no more’ (D2 216). Further advertisements were put in the TLS and the Nation and the Athenæum as well as the London Mercury in December; despite this, Woolf recorded on 15

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INTRODUCTION December ‘Sales sluggish though. Not yet 1000’35 (D2 217). When in 1967 Leonard Woolf looked back on the Hogarth Press’s publication of Jacob’s Room, his recollection was that sales during the ﬁrst year of publication were reasonably ‘brisk’:

By the end of 1923 we had sold 1,413 copies; the cost of printing up to that date had been £318, 6s. 0d., so that our publisher’sprofitwas£42, 4s. 6d. We thought we had done extremely well. [. . .] we agreed that Virginia should not be paid a royalty,butshouldbepaidone-thirdoftheprofits. On the 1,413 copies sold she was paid £14, 1s. 6d. (L. Woolf 1967: 73–4) As the Addendum below reveals, while the first impression was bound in two batches by the end of October 1922, the second impression was bound progressively: in November 1922, November 1923, June 1926, June 1927, and the remaining 63 copies in October 1928. Jacob’s Room was included as one of the first four titles in the Hogarth Press’s Uniform Edition, published on 26 September 1929, together with The Voyage Out, The Common Reader and Mrs. Dalloway;36 3,200 copies of each were produced, and were sold at 5s. They were printed by Lowe & Brydone (Printers) Ltd, 101 & 104 Park St, Camden Town, London NW1, and were bound by the Ship Binding Works, 32–38 Great Saffron Hill, London EC1. The Uniform Edition was issued in the small crown octavo size, which was slightly smaller than the first editions (noticeably so in the case of The Common Reader). The 1935 reprint of 2,110 copies of Jacob’s Room was also printed by Lowe & Brydone, but they were bound by the Garden City Press in Letchworth, who also produced the peacock-blue dust jackets. The original dust jacket for Jacob’s Room was designed by Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell. Woolf wrote to her on 10 August 1922, complimenting her on the cover and making two suggestions: ‘We think your design lovely—Our only doubts are practical. L. thinks the lettering isn’t plain enough, and the effect is rather too dazzling. Could you make the r of Room into a Capital? And could the lettering be picked out in some colour which would make it bolder?’ (L2 543). It was the first of the Hogarth Press publications to have a dust jacket and – as Leonard Woolf later documented – it caused shock and even derision among booksellers for its ‘post-impressionist’ appearance:

It was the ﬁrst book for which we had a jacket designed by Vanessa. It is, I think, a very good jacket and today no bookseller would feel his hackles or his temperature rise at sight of it. But it did not represent a desirable female or even Jacob or his room, and it was what in 1923 [sic] many people would have called reproachfully

introduction post-impressionist. It was almost universally condemned by the booksellers, and several of the buyers laughed at it. (L. Woolf 1967: 76) The dust jacket is reproduced in black-and-white as the frontispiece to this edition, though the original is cream paper printed in cinnamon with black wording and black centres to the three ﬂowers clustered round a bowl standing on the corner of a table. J. H. Willis, Jr, in his study of the Hogarth Press offers the following description of the jacket:

Vanessa’s finished design suggests an interior glimpsed through a window framed by pulled-back drapes. A bowl with three widely spaced flowers seems to float above the merest hint of a table. The title, stylishly hand lettered in black with initial capitals, dominates the clear space above the bowl. Virginia’s name in similar lettering appears at the bottom of the design. Vanessa had made no attempt to provide a jacket illustrative of the novel. Her design for Jacob’s Room, impersonal and nearly abstract, a mere suggestion of a room without an occupant, nevertheless accords well with Virginia’s suggestive fictional portrait of Jacob Flanders. (Willis 381) George H. Doran Company in New York had published Woolf’s first two novels in the US in 1920, though they refused Monday or Tuesday (D2 106). Instead, the latter was taken by Harcourt, Brace and Company, also based in New York, and published on 23 November 1921. Harcourt, Brace there- after became Woolf’s American publisher, with Donald Brace (1881–1955), who founded the firm in 1919 with Alfred Harcourt (1881–1954), as the Woolfs’ main point of contact. Woolf wrote to Brace on 26 May 1922, apologising for the delay in sending him a typescript: ‘it is now being typed, and I could count upon letting you have the manuscript by the end of July’ (Bishop 2004: 43). She confirmed that it would be published in the UK in October, and estimated its length at 60,000 words (in fact, it is closer to 55,400 words). Woolf planned to send the typescript to Harcourt, Brace on 14 July (D2 178), but, as she was still ‘finishing Jacob’s Room’ on 17 July (D2 182), it was only posted on 31 July. On 3 August she imagined Jacob’s Room ‘crossing the Atlantic’ (D2 188); on 3 September she reported: ‘A polite note from Harcourt Brace informs me that my MS has not arrived—& they take great interest in my work’ (D2 198). Then on 4 October she recorded that the novel had been accepted, quoting from Brace’s letter: ‘We think Jacob’s Room an extraordinarily distinguished & beautiful work. You have, of course, your own method, & it is not easy to foretell how many readers it will have; surely it will have enthusiastic ones, & we delight in publishing

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INTRODUCTION it—or words to that effect’ (D2 205).37 Woolf returned the agreement to publish on 9 October (Bishop 2004: 44). On 31 August, Woolf had promised Brace that she would ‘send a corrected copy of the proofs at the earliest opportunity’ (Bishop 2004: 43). However, she must have arranged instead for six copies of the printed book to be sent (see Addendum), for on 4 October she wrote to Brace: ‘There are two slight misprints in the copies which the printer is sending you’ (Bishop 2004: 44). Jacob’s Room was published in the US on 8 February 1923. On the 23rd Woolf acknowledged receipt of her ﬁrst royalty cheque for £20, commenting: ‘The sales here have been much better than we expected’ (Bishop 2004: 44).38 Sales in the US were, as Brace had anticipated, relatively modest: 1,500 were printed and sold at $2; a second impression of 1,000 copies was produced in March 1923 and a third of 750 in November 1927 (Kirkpatrick and Clarke 28–9). Brace wrote to Woolf on 6 September 1923, informing her that ‘sales to June 30th were 1584, of which 100 copies were sold to Canada. During June and July, we have sold about 170 copies’ (SxMs-18/1/ E/2/2). Woolf replied on 18 September: ‘Of course the sales of Jacob’s Room are small, but a[t] the same time they are much better than I myself expected’ (JR Bishop: 45).

early critical reception

Private Criticism As Woolf wrote in her diary on 8 April 1921,reﬂecting on the thorny ‘question of praise & fame’ in relation to Monday or Tuesday, it would only be by weighing up ‘the real test’ of ‘private criticism’ that would enable her to decide whether she was ‘“interesting” or obsolete’ as an author (D2 106–7). The ﬁrst person to report on Jacob’s Room was, as always, Leonard Woolf, who read the typescript on Sunday, 23 July 1922. His reaction was on the whole positive:

He thinks it may be my best work. But his ﬁrst remark was that it was amazingly wellwritten.Wearguedaboutit.Hecallsitaworkofgenius;hethinksitunlike any other novel; he says that the people are ghosts; he says it is very strange: I have no philosophy of life he says; my people are puppets, moved hither & thither by fate.[...]hefounditveryinteresting,&beautiful,&withoutlapse(saveperhaps the party) & quite intelligible. [. . .] I am on the whole pleased. There’s no doubt

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introduction in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40)tosaysomethinginmy own voice. (D2 186) Advance copies were sent out by Woolf together with four copies by R. & R. Clark (see Addendum). Of all her friends, the writers Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forster were those whose opinions Woolf valued most. Strachey wrote a glowing letter on 9 October, praising the book despite reservations about its romanticism and what he perceived as its ‘George-Meredithian’ stylistic overtones: ‘A most wonderful achievement—more like poetry, it seems to me, than anything else, and as such I prophesy immortal. The technique of the narrative is astonishing—how you manage to leave out everything that’s dreary, and yet retain enough string for your pearls I can hardly understand’ (M&M 93–4; L. Strachey 2005: 523). In her reply, Woolf agreed that he had ‘put your infallible ﬁnger upon the spot—romanticism. [. . .] some of it, I think, comes from the effort of breaking with complete representation. One ﬂies into the air. Next time, I mean to stick closer to facts’ (L2 568–9). Strachey’s companion Dora Carrington also wrote, com- mending the book’s painterly aspects: ‘Your visions are so clear & well designed’ (D2 207 n.8) and went on to report that Lytton, Alix Strachey and Ralph Partridge were all enthusiastic (SxMs-18/1/D/29/1). The comments Woolf ‘liked best of all’ (D2 209), however, were from E. M. Forster, whose letter is dated 24 October. He was ‘sure it is good’, thought it ‘an amazing success, and [. . .] full of beauty’:

You have clean cut away the difﬁculties that so bother me and I feared in Night & Day were gaining on you—all those Blue Books of the interior and exterior life of the various characters—their spiritual development, income, social positions, etc. etc. The danger is that when cut away these detach with them something that ought to remain—at least according to my notion of a novel, namely the reader’s interest in at least one of the characters as a character—if that goes we merely swing about among blobs of amusement or pathos. You keep this interest in Jacob. This I ﬁnd a tremendous achievement—the greatest in the book and the making of the book. (Forster 1985b: 32)39 David ‘Bunny’ Garnett communicated his enthusiasm by telephone on 17 October: ‘Bunny rings up enthusiastic, saysitissuperb,farmybest,has great vitality & importance’ (D2209). He followed this with a letter of glowing endorsement on 19 October: ‘It seems to be more full of beauty than any piece of modern prose that I can remember’,andadmiredits‘perfectly balanced’ ending (SxMs-18/1/D/61/1). In her reply Woolf confessed her doubt as to

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INTRODUCTION whether Jacob’s Room came together ‘as a whole’, and wondered ‘how far can one convey character without realism? That is my problem—one of them at least. You’re quite right that I can’t do the realism, but I admire those who can’ (L2571). Another old friend, Violet Dickinson, wrote (almost illegibly) to say she thought it ‘exquisite’,adding‘How pleased Thoby would have been with Greece’ (SxMs-18/1/D/54/1). ‘Exquisite’ was a word also used by the essayist and critic Logan Pearsall Smith, who commented on 25 October that her novel was ‘shining & shimmering in the background of my mind. [. . .] The effect that you have got, of the youth, seen not in himself, but reflected in [a] slightly agitated pool, with trees about & sky above, & other figures appearing & disappearing—the effect seems to me both new & full of aesthetic interest of an exquisite & exciting kind’ (SxMs-18/1/D152/1). In her response the following day, Woolf once again stressed that the ‘effort of breaking with complete representation sends one flying into the air. Next time I shall stick like a leech to my hero, or heroine’ (L6501). Philip Morrell, whose gushy letter of ‘Wednesday’ (25? October) refers to seeing Woolf the day before, loved her book and ‘thought it delightful, beautiful, wonderful; simply full of lovely things’ (typed copy in SxMs-18/1/D/98/1; for Woolf’sreply,seeL2575–6).40 Other responses followed. On 17 October, Desmond MacCarthy wrote halfway through reading to say: ‘“You have never written so well . . . I marvel & am puzzled”—or words to that effect’ (D2 208–9).41 On 27 October, Ka Arnold-Forster confessed she was ‘too impressed to do anything but gape [. . .] isn’t it quite astoundingly good?’ (SxMs-18/1/D/39/1; for Woolf’s reply, see L2 576–7). C. P. Sanger’s reaction was one of puzzlement at Woolf’s admission that she lacked ‘a hard intellectual training in your youth—and now that I have read Jacob’s Room I am still more puzzled’ (SxMs-18/1/D/137/1). The following day, Woolf responded, pointing out the mistakes in Jacob’s Room which she feared ‘a trained mind’ would have spotted (L2 577–8): see EN 22:13,EN25:3,EN273:2, and especially TN 59:23. Philip Morrell’s wife, Lady Ottoline Morrell, wrote in her beautiful script and idiosyncratic style on 29 October full of admiration:42

We are so thrilled with delight & admiration at ‘Jacob’s Room’ . That I must write you one word . to tell so. [. . .] It is a wonderful . book . so achieved . so perfect an expression . of . all your . perceptions & imaginings & of your vision . of Life. – almost as if you sung them to us . For . The writing is so musical . & exquisite – thrilling with a magic quality that makes . Literature . a divine joy [. . .] I feel I have not one quarter expressed . What I feel about . yr book. It is most beautiful . most poignant . & again I say . so like music. I know of No Modern Prose

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introduction that touches it. It rears its lovely head above them all. but . that is what modern prose should endeavour to be. I loved many things in . Night & Day but this is more perfect . & more you . more unique (SxMs-18/1/D/97/1) Woolf replied to her on 1 November (L2579–8). On 6 November, Woolf went to dinner with Clive and Vanessa Bell, where Jacob’s Room was ‘acclaimed by Nessa “certainly a work of genius”’ (D2211). The following day Woolf wrote to Clive: ‘I assure you with my hand on my heart that the talk about J’s Room did nothing but intrigue and interest me’ (L2580). She mentioned Jacob’s Room to WillArnold-Forsterthesameday– advocating it as ‘just the book’ for his invalid state – and again on the 19th to her old friend and Greek teacher, Janet Case (L2581, 586–7). Her letter to R. C. Trevelyan on 23 November once again touched on the subject of representation, in response to his critique that – despite his enjoyment of Jacob’s Room – her ‘elliptical method’ made the reading experience at times ‘unnecessarily difficult’.43 Woolf agreed that ‘there is no excuse for needless difficulty’, but attributed any failure not to her ‘method’ but her own shortcomings: ‘Of course, the effort of breaking with strict representation is very unsettling, and many things were not as controlled as they should have been. It is true, I expect, that the characters remain shadowy for the most part; but the method was not so much at fault as my ignorance of how to use it psychologically’ (L2588). By 27 November, Woolf could confide to her diary that her friends appeared to agree ‘that it is my masterpiece, & the starting point for fresh adventures’ (D2 214). Roger Fry, with whom the Woolfs had dined the previous evening, praised Jacob’s Room ‘whole-heartedly’, which was, Woolf observed, unprecedented. She nevertheless concurred with his one reserva- tion: ‘that a bronze body might somehow solidify beneath the gleams & lights’ (D2 214). On 4 December, T. S. Eliot wrote to say that he had started reading it for the second time:

it is a book which [. . .] compels very careful reading because there is a great deal of excitement in reading it. I can only say so far it seems to me you have really accomplished what you set out to do in this book, and that you have freed yourself from any compromise between the traditional novel and your original gift. [. . .] you have made a remarkable success. (T. Eliot 2011: 798–9) Desmond MacCarthy, whom Woolf spoke to at a dinner on 14 December, where she met ‘the lovely gifted aristocratic Sackville West’, was similarly complimentary (D2 216). She reported their conversation, noting his

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INTRODUCTION comments ‘about the French admiring Jacob, & wishing to translate it’,44 before recording ‘I go on getting letters, & reap more praise than ever before’ (D2 216, 217).45 One of Woolf’s longest responses to commentary on Jacob’s Room was her letter to Gerald Brenan in Spain, written on Christmas Day:

This generation must break its neck in order that the next may have smooth going. For I agree with you that nothing is going to be achieved by us. Fragments— paragraphs—a page perhaps: but no more. Joyce to me seems strewn with disaster. [. . .] The human soul, it seems to me, orientates itself afresh every now and then. It is doing so now. No one can see it whole, therefore. The best of us catch a glimpse of a nose, a shoulder, something turning away, always in movement. (L2 596) Brenan had been sent a copy by Ralph Partridge, and his reply emphasises not only his ‘admiration’ for the many passages of ‘great beauty’, but also the book’s strikingly ‘original form’. Woolf had, he insisted, ‘attained [her] purpose as a writer’. He praised what he saw as the book’s insistence on ‘aesthetic value’ as opposed to ‘utility’,a‘philosophy’ he linked back to the Greeks, as well as to such contemporary ‘masters’ as Chekhov and more indirectly Hume and Nietzsche, before concluding:

You seem to have seen that the beauty of life is a surface beauty and that the profoundest vision is not one which interrogates and seeks causes but which accepts those changing almost meaningless surfaces for what they are and is content to contemplate them. Meaningless? no not meaningless, but full of a secret meaning which lies within them [. . .]. (SxMs-18/1/D/21/1) The proliﬁc and popular novelist Berta Ruck, whose name appears inscribed on a tombstone in Jacob’s Room, had originally threatened to sue Woolf (via her lawyer), but Woolf claimed she had not consciously used the name and the incident blew over (see EN 217:3). In Ruck’s letter to Woolf on 8 December, accepting Woolf’s apology, Ruck wrote that she had read ‘with delight and zest a novel which carries one away into a world of people most live and interesting’. She ended her letter by saying that she and her writer husband Oliver Onions had read the book to each other ‘with the keenest pleasure. My own chiefest admiration was for the artistry with which you give, without adjectives or direct comment, the physical perfection of that young man. Anybody must have loved him’ (SxMs-13/2/D/5/A/ 24). Hope Mirrlees, whose long, experimental poem Paris Woolf had published in 1920, as she was starting to conceive of Jacob’s Room (see

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introduction above), wrote on 12 December to say that, although initially bored by the opening on the beach, she had found the rest of the novel ‘astonishing’:

it is a book that must give complete satisfaction to writer & reader alike. [. . .] in it you solve the dilemma of modern literature, by colonising the New World imperially so that it falls into line with & forms an organic whole with the old world of tradition. It is astonishing how certain pages are exactly like Matisse—the same seductive virtuosity, the tip of pen or brush the antenna through which one feels the world— & then other pages are inﬁnitely greater than Matisse, as great writing must be. (Daugherty 2006: 27; for VW’s reply of [6 January 1923], see L33–4) Woolf received a few more private letters of appreciation during 1923.No doubt Leonard Woolf passed on the philosopher G. Lowes Dickinson’s comments in a letter he received in April: ‘I have been rereading “Jacob’s Room”.It’s full of good stuff, probably better stuff than I know, and beautifully written. But the disjointed effect still worries me, though I realise the point of it’ (quoted in Forster 1962: 182). On 21 May, Siegfried Sassoon wrote to Woolf: ‘Your novel (J’s R.) gave me an immense apprehension of your subtlety of intellect. But I was able to follow your meaning —instantly—every time, because you visualize everything you write’ (quoted in M&M 15; typed copy, SxMs-18/1/D/141/1).46 On 22 June, the writer and translator Richard Aldington called it ‘enchanting’, admiring Woolf’s ‘method [which] seems to me so vivid and interesting’ (SxMs-13/2/ D/5/A/1; for Woolf’s reply, see L348).

Public Criticism In the same diary entry of 26 July 1920 in which she recorded Leonard Woolf’s reaction to Jacob’s Room, Woolf admitted: ‘Neither of us knows what the public will think’ (D2 186). It is hard to ascertain what ordinary readers made of the novel, but Jacques-Émile Blanche’s recollections may be some indication of the puzzlement many experienced over what he termed an ‘unforgettable book’. Blanche recounted that while staying at the Belgrave Hotel in London in 1925:

I had left some of my papers and books in the reading-room when I was called away to answer a telephone call. [. . .] When I returned I found two women turning over the pages of a book that belonged to me. One of them was saying to the other: ‘Can you make anything of it? Have you heard of the writer? It really makes you think you’ve gone off your head! Was that boy Jacob killed in the War? And what’s all that about boots?[...]’ (Blanche 1938: 45–6)

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INTRODUCTION The first official response appeared on 26 October 1922, the day before the novel was published. This was the anonymous47 review in the TLS,which Woolf found ‘a little tepid’ (D2209). While the author appreciated the ‘quickened sense of the promise and pity in a single destiny’,itregrettedthat Jacob’s Room ‘does not create persons and characters as we secretly desire to know them’ (M&M 95–7). The following day, two short reviews were printed in dailies; they were both negative. The first, in the Pall Mall Gazette,borethe heading ‘An Impressionist’ (though it gave no explanation for a label that would become commonplace), and complained: ‘there is not only no story, but there is no perceptible development of any kind’ (M&M 99). It ‘passes me over as negligible’,Woolfreflected in her diary (D2209). The second, even briefer review by Lewis Bettany in the Daily News was titled ‘Middle Aged Sensualists’ and grouped Jacob’s Room with three other novels, including Arnold Bennett’s Lilian.ItcondemnedWoolf’sofferingas‘so tedious in its rediscoveries of the obvious, and so marred by its occasional lapses into indelicacy, that I found great difficulty in discovering what it was all about. [. . .] I thought most of the book very pretentious and very cheap; but some of the observations and impressions seemed to me quite happy’ (M&M 98). Sylvia Lynd, the wife of Robert Lynd, who was literary editor of the Daily News, wrote immediately to Woolf from St Ives to apologise: ‘Had my husband not been away you would have been treated as a serious artist— whether with hostility or admiration—certainly not like this’ (Daugherty 2006: 26).ShemadeamendsinTime and Tide on 24 November, highlighting the beauty of the writing and concluding ‘This is the best book Mrs. Woolf has written’ (Lynd 1137). Reviews came thick and fast during the month following publication. On 1 November, the Aberdeen Journal found Jacob’s Room pleasurable if forgettable:

the discriminating reader probes deeper, and although occasionally irritated by the half-fragments of the brain thrown out by this curious writer, ﬁnds in them certain passages of detached but highly descriptive beauty, a penetrating, sardonic humour, and a staccato strangeness of diction that, without being so vague and distrait as that of Dorothy Richardson, has for one a certain, vague, indeﬁnable charm. ([Anon.] 1922d: 3) On 3 November, in the Manchester Guardian, A. N. Monkhouse described the book as ‘remarkable’, while regretting the author’s lack of interest in ‘character except as it is manifested in the capacity to receive and record

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introduction impressions’. He went on to dismiss the book as ‘arrogant [. . .] unkindly, unsentimental, ungenial’, and offered the following reflection: ‘One would like to read another book of hers when she has returned to convention. Or, perhaps, even before’ (M[onkhouse] 9).48 On Saturday, 4 November, Rebecca West in the New Statesman was more complimentary: ‘Mrs Woolf [. . .] is at once a negligible novelist and a supremely important writer. [. . .] It is authentic poetry, cognisant of the soul’ (M&M 101, 102). On the same day, in the Nation and the Athenæum Forrest Reid expressed bafflement, but quoted from earlier reviews by his friend E. M. Forster: ‘Mrs Woolf’s art is of a very unusual type’ (M&M 69) and ‘her work “soars straight [. . .] into the intellectual day”’ (M&M 53). Like Monkhouse, Reid had advice for his readers. He urged them to ‘read the book for yourself. At worst it will be an experiment, a plunge into the unusual. At best? I find myself repeating the words of M. Bergeret: “Si pourtant c’était un chef- d’œuvre?”’ (Reid 204; i.e. ‘Suppose it were a masterpiece?’). The review in The Observer, which was also printed on 4 November, was altogether more positive: ‘How much more like life all that is than the careful, over-arranged work of novelists who learn their job; and how much more amusing to read is Jacob’s Room than the competent true-to-type novel!’ ([Anon.] 1922e: 4). The brief review in the Daily Chronicle, however, which appeared on 9 November, took up Woolf’s own defence of Jacob’s Room as an ‘experiment’ but turned it into a term of condemnation: ‘as it stands it appears to us merely an experiment, albeit a very interesting one’ ([Anon.] 1922f: 6). W. L. Courtney’s not unfavourable review in the Daily Telegraph on 10 November took up the charge of impressionism, offering an interpretation while simultaneously conflating the term with modernity: ‘Her theory of art ought, I suppose, to be called “impressionist”. [. . .] To be impressionist is often to be incoherent, inconsequent, lacking all design and construction. But if you want to know what a modern novel is like, you have only to read Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf. In its tense, syncopated movements, its staccato impulsiveness, do you not discern the influence of Jazz?’ (M&M 105).49 The Spectator was also enthusiastic: ‘there is no writer who can give the illusion of reality with more certainty and with so complete a conceal- ment of illusionist devices behind a perfection of style which is at once solid and ethereal’ (11 November; [Anon.] 1922g: 662). Louis J. McQuilland, writing in John O’London’s Weekly, was even more flattering: ‘“Jacob’s Room” [. . .] is the best thing she has done. It reads like an absolute transcript of life [. . .] There are marvellous descriptions in this magical

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INTRODUCTION volume of places and the moods for them’ (11 November; McQuilland 221).50 However, yet a third review appearing on 11 November, by Gerald Gould for the Saturday Review, was abusive: ‘Jacob [. . .] has some sordid sexual experiences of the transitory kind. He goes to Greece and falls in love with an unpleasant married woman. [. . .] It is at once irritating and encouraging to reflect how much better [the author] would do if her art were less self-conscious’ (M&M 106).51 No wonder Woolf wrote on 13 November: ‘Reviews are now favourable & utterly contradictory’ (D2 212)! She fully expected the Westminster Gazette to be ‘hostile’ (D2 209), and on 22 November it duly dismissed the novel: ‘Beauty, for Mrs. Woolf, is sometimes entirely external and fugitive, a matter of light and shadow, while for the great artists it has always been, in the event, a matter of mind or of spirit, a symbol of something which is eternal’ ([Anon.] 1922h: 12).52 On 15 November, W. J. Turner in the Daily Herald called Jacob’s Room ‘abrupt, pithy, allusive, elliptical, and extraordinarily stimulating. [. . .] It is a book full of flashes of lightning, and among the crowd of stuffy contemporary novels it is as refreshing as a thunderstorm.’ (T[urner] 7). On 18 November, H. C. Harwood in The Outlook referred to the medium of cinema to explain his disappointment: ‘The glittering surface of life is reflected here, and all the accidents which befell a liberated intelligence. But without the control of any permanent moral or intellectual interest the various scenes flicker and are forgotten’ (Harwood 427). The Yorkshire Post on 29 November took a similar but more positive line: ‘The method, briefly, is snapshot photography, with a highly sensitive, perfected camera handled by an artist. [. . .] Jacob’s Room has no narrative, no design, above all, no perspective [. . .] [but] she is [. . .] a genuine artist’ (M&M 107–8). The reviews for the remainder of 1922 were equally mixed. On 1 December, G. A. Sheldon in the Cambridge Review admitted that if the reader were to take ‘infinite pains’ Jacob’s Room could be made ‘a palace of beauty’, but wondered if it were fair of ‘Mrs. Woolf to demand so much from us when life is so short? [. . .] I cannot but think that as far as the novel is concerned, her way, for most people, must always be a blind alley’ (Sheldon 146).53 Edward Shanks in the London Mercury referred to impressionism, though his comments were equivocal: ‘It is a very remarkable example of the modern impressionist method, the method of fiction which attempts to give some emotional significance to life without the help of plot or connected actions’ (Shanks 1922a: 210). Writing again in The Queen on 2 December, he briefly concluded that the ‘places are more

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introduction interesting than the people; in short, Jacob’s room is preferable to his company’ (Shanks 1922b: 705). A review in the New Age on 21 December offered a back-handed compliment: ‘The little ﬂurries of prose poetry do make art of this rag-bag of impressions’ (M&M 108). G. Manning-Sanders, in New Witness the following day, ended the year on a more appreciative note: ‘Solitude moves through the pages of Mrs. Woolf’s book [. . .] Jacob is aloof, a piece of statuary around which thought resolves. [. . .] A good book, the mind goes back and back to it [. . .] wondering a little as to the meaning’ (Manning-Sanders 397). The Annual Register for 1922 summed up Jacob’s Room in one even-handed sentence: ‘Mrs. Virginia Woolf, following her peculiar genius, made of Jacob’s Room another of those brilliant novels of which the parts are delightful, but the whole unseizable’ ([Anon.] 1922j: 37). Jacob’s Room was published in the US on 8 February 1923. Overall, the American reviews were more consistently positive than those in the UK. On 25 February, the New York Tribune declared it ‘a magniﬁcent achievement’ (Rascoe 17), while on 4 March the New York Times acknowledged the novel’s ‘modernis[m]’ and praised its lyricism.54 On 10 March, an article entitled ‘An Oldster Enters a Protest’ appeared in response to these complimentary accounts:

If this book is a masterpiece, as its admirers say—if its incoherences, its incon- sequences, its innumerable obscurities, its many inexplicable appearances and disappearances of insignificant personages, make it commendable—then the once admitted beauties and merits of all the classics, old and older, are the delusions of ignorance, and writers should be lauded not for lucidity of phrasing, for getting their ideas clearly and fully down on paper, but for leaving their readers to dig and toil through a wild confusion of fuzzy sentences, few of which have any relationship to any other, to get at last, if any meaning at all, one that better authors of other days could and would have expressed in terms easily and swiftly understandable by any literate. ([Anon.] 1923c: 12) The protesting ‘Oldster’ objected to stylistic incoherence and obscure content, such as the incessant stream of innumerable ‘insignificant personages’, but when more temperate reviewers were inclined to be negative, they focused their discussion on Woolf’s style. On 4 March, Heywood Broun in the New York World wrote: ‘If style were the ultimate goal of the literary artist there would be nothing to do except to fall down and worship before “Jacob’s Room”. Virginia Woolf plays with words in a manner which amazes and entrances us. But we do not like this game well enough to remain engrossed until the final whistle. Sooner or later we must ask,

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INTRODUCTION “What’s it about[?]” And often “Jacob’s Room” provides no answer for our question’ (Broun 6e). In April, Hunter Stagg in The Reviewer agreed that style was the only aspect of a novel a reviewer could comment on with certainty, adding ‘we are reluctant to appear unequal to the experimental challenges of the more prominent rebels. Let one, however, confess defeat: I do not know what Jacob’s Room is about’ (Stagg 867). In the New York Nation on 28 March, Maxwell Bodenheim was even more dismissive of ‘the deftly garrulous, thinly sad descriptions and meditations of Jacob’s Room’. The book, he insisted, ‘is a rambling redundant affair [. . .] an endless parade of details that grow more and more uninteresting, proceeding in an impulsive fashion and darting here and there with indefatigable minuteness’ (M&M 110–11). Three favourable reviews followed. On 14 April, H. W. Bonton in the US Independent wrote: ‘She uses the eyes Heaven gave her, beholds a world both quaint and absorbing, and sets down what she sees quite without the self-consciousness of a person in a “movement,” or with a scunner’ (Bonton 262).55 The May Bookman summed up Jacob’s Room in one sentence: ‘Like a beautiful cinema, with constantly changing snatches of life, held together by the barest suggestion of plot’ ([Anon.] 1923d: 326), while Mary Graham Bonner in the Literary Digest International Book Review for May concluded: ‘A strangely beautiful book is “Jacob’s Room,” and the author, Virginia Woolf, has given us many a ﬂash of genius here’ (Bonner 57). Though the San Francisco Chronicle had run a summary of Jacob’s Room on 4 March, rather surprisingly labelling Woolf an English realist,56 this was followed by a longer article on 20 May which noted: ‘“Jacob’s Room” has sentences, paragraphs, pages where the unsubstantiated stuff of words is [brought?] to the durability of bronze’ ([Anon.] 1923e: D5). Bearing the title ‘Virginia Woolf Finds “World Full of a Number of Things”’, it advised: ‘“Jacob’s Room” Is Full of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax in Delightful but Bewildering Confusion’ ([Anon.] 1923e: D5). In July, the Booklist described the novel’s ‘brilliant and original technique’ of deploying ‘a series of detached and seemingly isolated impressions and scenes’ through which the reader ‘catches glimpses’ of Jacob’s life, before deciding that this ‘makes too great a demand upon the imagination of the reader to be of general appeal’ ([Anon.] 1923f: 322). In the same month, Woolf’s friend David Garnett, writing in the Dial, traced the development of her style from the ‘experiments’ she had conducted with her short ﬁction in Monday or

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introduction Tuesday, and favourably compared her achievements in Jacob’s Room to the notorious profanity of James Joyce’s Ulysses: the failure of Ulysses is that it is full of subjects of practically no aesthetic value, not that it is full of obscene words. This is all very relevant to Jacob’s Room, for Mrs Woolf is incapable of Mr Joyce’s offence. She is the kind of butterﬂy that stops only at the ﬂowers, Mr Joyce ‘a painted lady or peacock that feasts upon bloody entrails dropped by a hawk,’ or even on less interesting droppings. (D. Garnett 1923: 85) Garnett concluded by insisting that Woolf was now an author ‘free to do anything she likes’ (D. Garnett 1923: 86). Matthew Josephson’s response, which appeared in September in the New York Broom, was particularly perceptive, notably on the vexed question of Woolf’s style:

The extraordinary beauty of Mrs. Woolf’s prose serves to divert the reader, at first glance, from the perfection of the book as a whole. Jacob’s Room apparently marks a turning point in English prose. [. . .] Mrs. Virginia Woolf, equipped no less brilliantly than her most formidable contemporaries for observing what is occult and disturbing in familiar experience, arrives, however, with a ripe sense of formal organization. Mrs. Woolf’s method is to adjust isolated experiences in a subtle relationship, so that within a chapter or a part of her book the character of Jacob Flanders is completely encircled or segregated from all else in the universe. By the indirect method of defining Jacob’s environment the succeeding chapters serve to mark the progress of his personality through an objective and hostile world. At the end of the book the personality has been completely caught and moulded. Detail after detail of experience is hurled against him until his figure has been clearly sculpt or blocked out in a strong light. Incidents radiate logically about this central figure. [. . .] Her prose, musical and precise, moves with excellent change of pace and direction. So able a master of the sentence is she that it is quite delectable to witness the functioning of her rhetoric. At times, it is true, passages fall definitely into Miltonic blank verse, a practice which one may question importunately among the mighty. (Josephson 1923: 118–19) Josephson’s article was followed by Mary M. Colum’sappraisalon17 October in Freeman, which was mostly laudatory despite its damning conclusion that ‘With all its excellencies, one is conscious of certain disappointments in the work of Virginia Woolf. She has a little too muchofthesleeknessoftheminorartist,whoselearningandculture are a little more than his natural genius can assimilate’ (Colum 140).57 In contrast to the lukewarm entry in the British Annual Register quoted above, the summary of Jacob’s Room in the American Book

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INTRODUCTION Review Digest for 1923 was more admiring: ‘The brief career of Jacob Flanders, a silent, lovable English youth, from boyhood, thru Cambridge University, to London, and finally to his death in Flanders, is seen thru a series of impressions. There is no direct statement about him. He is shown as revealed by his room, by glimpses of him thru the eyes of his friends, by many character- revealing incidents, by a succession of thoughts and sensations. Jacob is but a reflection, mirrored with exquisite artistry’ ([Anon.] 1924: 572). Though Woolf had been aware that Clive Bell was working on an article on Jacob’s Room in July 1923, it only appeared in the December 1924 issue of the Dial,58 where it echoed the earlier verdict published there by David Garnett that with this novel Woolf had finally developed a form in ‘which to be completely herself’ (M&M 147). Insisting that her success demon- strated ‘that she possessed genius of a high order’, Bell returned to the issue of impressionism, perceiving a virtue in Woolf’s application of what he identified as her painterly understanding:

Her emotion comes from her sense of the scene, and ours from reacting to that sense. This pure, this almost painterlike vision is Virginia Woolf’s peculiarity: it is what distinguishes her from all her contemporaries. [. . .] what she now needed was a form to match that series of visions, glimpses and glances, stunning crashes and faint echoes, fainter perfumes and pungent stinks,whichwe,Godforgiveus,arepleasedtocalllife.[...]Hersolution is charming and ingenious. The hero is gradually to be built up out of other people’s reactions to him: other people’s reactions and, I must be allowed to add the reactions—if reactions are what they have—of places. [. . .] Here is impressionism with a vengeance: if the technique consisted in ‘little touches’, the composition is a matter of ‘frank oppositions’ and the whole will dawn on us only when the last harmony is established. (M&M 138, 144, 146, 147) Meanwhile, back in the UK, there were two attacks on Jacob’s Room, both from reviewers Woolf knew well. On 10 March 1923, John Middleton Murry complained in the Nation and the Athenæum that ‘the most original minds among those of the younger generation who have chosen prose- ﬁction for their medium have seemed to care less and less for plot. Not even a desultory story attracts them. Character, atmosphere, an attitude to life, a quality of perception—these things have interested a D. H. Lawrence, a Katherine Mansﬁeld, a Virginia Woolf; but the old mechanism of story not at all’ (M&M 109). As a consequence, he reasoned, ‘the novel has reached a kind of impasse. The artists have, to a very large extent, outrun their

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introduction audience’ (M&M 109).59 His attack became even blunter in 1926 with the insistence that Jacob’s Room – together with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – were ‘failures’: both, he declared, ‘are over-intellectualized; they lack spon- taneity; they are overladen with calculated subtleties [. . .] and they fail to produce any unity of impression. The works offend against the most elementary canon of good writing: that the immediate effect should be unambiguous’ (Murry 589, 591–2; see L3 238).60 Murry’s critique of over-intellectualising was also the theme of Arnold Bennett’s assault published under the heading ‘Is the Novel Decaying?’ in Cassell’s Weekly on 28 March 1923. Bennett began positively enough: ‘I have seldom read a cleverer book than Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, a novel which has made a great stir in a small world. It is packed and bursting with originality, and it is exquisitely written. But the characters do not vitally survive in the mind because the author has been obsessed by details of originality and cleverness’ (M&M 113).61 This dismissal of her characterisation clearly touched a nerve, since in the diary entries accompanying the gestation of her next novel Mrs. Dalloway it was Bennett’s criticism Woolf returned to: ‘People, like Arnold Bennett, say I cant create, or didn’tinJ’sR, characters that survive’, she observed on 19 June 1923 (D2 248).62 More interestingly, it is after referring in passing to Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale two months after this that Woolf acknowledges her famous ‘discovery’ of how to ‘connect’ her characters so as to give them ‘humanity, humour, depth’ in Mrs. Dalloway (D2 263). Bennett’s final dismissal appeared in ‘Another Criticism of the New School’ in the Evening Standard on 2 December 1926, where he declared he could not find ‘much trace of construction, or ordered movement towards a climax, in either Jacob’s Room or Mrs Dalloway’. He felt both books ‘seriously lacked vitality’ (M&M 190). Generally, in the ensuing years, Jacob’s Room was mentioned only in passing, as in July 1924 when ‘Feiron Morris’ (Vivienne, T. S. Eliot’s wife) observed in the Criterion that in ‘Jacob’s Room one sees a very positive endeavour to discover a new form, and, in spite of its inequality, it is certainly the nearest approach to a new form of the novel which has been made since Ulysses’ (F. M. 483). In 1925, the then-anonymous critic in the TLS reviewing another Hogarth Press book – C. H. B. Kitchin’s Streamers Waving – referred to that ‘curious lyrical power which so generously redeemed “Jacob’sRoom,” for example, from aridity’ (Bullett 1925: 298). Similarly, Orlo Williams, writing on To the Lighthouse in the July 1927 Monthly Criterion,citedJacob’s Room, identifying it as a first excursion into a new fragmentary style: ‘nothing

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INTRODUCTION more than a picture of a young man’s life: Cambridge, London, Paris, Greece, ﬂashes from numberless facets, gay, serious, ﬂeshly, trivial, now the inconsequent mind, now the body, now one vision, now another; and it puts the riddle in another way. If such a life is ended by a shell—what does it mean? Where is, was, its reality?’ (M&M 202). Of the general essays on Woolf that appeared during her lifetime, the most important is the one by E. M. Forster published in the New Criterion in April 1926. Here, Forster offered an eloquent defence of Woolf’s form, which he argued not only achieved its purpose, but was more remarkable in its coherence even than Woolf’s impressive style:

Jacob’s Room (1922) comes as a tremendous surprise. The impossible has occurred. The style closely resembles that of ‘Kew Gardens’. The blobs of colour continue to drift past; but in their midst, interrupting their course like a closely sealed jar, rises the solid ﬁgure of a young man. In what sense Jacob is alive—in what sense any of Virginia Woolf’s characters live—we have yet to determine. But that he exists, that he stands as does a monument is certain, and wherever he stands we recognise him for the same and are touched by his outline. The coherence of the book is even more amazing than its beauty. In the stream of glittering similes, unﬁnished sentences, hectic catalogues, unanchored proper names, we seem to be going nowhere. Yet the goal comes, the method and the matter prove to have been one, and looking back from the pathos of the closing scene we see for a moment the airy drifting atoms piled into a colonnade. (M&M 174)63 Edwin Muir’s essay on Virginia Woolf, the fourth in his series on ‘Contemporary Writers’ for the Nation and the Athenæum, also appeared in April 1926. Like Forster, Muir too approved Woolf’s plan of allowing Jacob to emerge from ‘memories and associations’ that gave ‘a living quality’, and he admired ‘several beautiful scenes’, but he felt the novel suffered from ‘sentimentality’ and that in her desire to experiment Woolf had failed ‘to distinguish what is essential from what appears so’.64 Later, in 1928, Muir argued that the ‘chronicle is the ruling convention of the novel at present: the most consistently practised, the most highly thought of’, and mentioned Jacob’s Room (together with D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)as‘perhaps the best chronicles that have appeared in recent years’ (Muir 1928: 115). Finally, in December 1931 in the New York Bookman, he concluded: ‘In Jacob’s Room Mrs. Woolf recreated a character through memories and associations, and gathered the limbs of Osiris imbedded in various strata of time and space. The separate limbs are exquisitely articulated, but one has the impression

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introduction that some have not been retrieved, and that others have been assembled somewhat haphazardly. The book is fragmentary’ (M&M 290). Dudley Carew’s 1926 survey for the London Mercury applied the precepts Woolf had set out for the modern novelist in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924; E3 420–38) to her own ﬁction, deciding – in a back-handed compliment – that she had ‘been so unfair to herself, for she has made her great gift, that of imaginative description, play second ﬁddle to an inferior one, that of creating character’. He likened Jacob’s Room to ‘a kind of mental aeroplane from which her passengers can look down on to life spread out underneath them. Everything is quite orderly and clear, but no one part of the landscape has any kind of connection with any other part. It is too arid, too remote, even too unreal to shelter Mrs. Brown.’ Then, turning to the last chapter, ‘which is extremely effective in its reticence’, he outlined his problem with the character of her protagonist:

Her Jacob has suddenly become nothing. She has destroyed him by her over- persistent stress on shoes, on threepenny ’bus tickets, on the sight of Mudie’s van at the corner of the street until they become to us more enduring, more truly real than the spirit of Jacob himself, so swayed by ’bus tickets, so much a prey to the shifting of moods. She has denied him an existence independent of these, and so made him of as perishable and inconsequent a stuff as a ’bus ticket thrown into the gutter. (Carew 43, 41–2, 47) Carl H. Grabo, in his The Technique of the Novel published in 1928, returned to the idea of Jacob’s Room as impressionistic, quoting the depiction of the ‘opal-shelled crab’ in Chapter I vainly attempting to escape as ‘wholly pictorial [. . .] unless the crab has some recondite significance’. The only justification for a novelist including a scene, he declared, ‘lies in the response of his characters to it’; otherwise it is merely ‘a decorative adjunct’. This, he concluded, was the problem with Jacob’s Room, where ‘Too much of the description [. . .] is extraneous. It is vivid description but the reader forever questions its relevancy’ (Grabo iii.193). R. Ellis Roberts, writing in the London Bookman in 1928, disagreed. He found a ‘fear in almost all the criticism [. . .] of Mrs. Woolf—nervously appreciating or frankly hostile’, and rejected the frequently repeated claim ‘of Mrs. Woolf’s “difficulty”’.In her novels, he contended, ‘the only difficulty is [. . .] that Mrs. Woolf will not blind herself, or allow us to be blind, to the fact that for many people living is hard, and thinking almost impossible’ (R. Roberts 220). The issue of ‘difficulty’ was the theme taken up by Gerald Bullett in the Illinois

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INTRODUCTION English Journal in 1928, where he argued that what Woolf offered her readers was an opportunity to construct her textual world for themselves:

She is difficult in that she makes heavy demands upon us; our attention must be unflagging, our wits alert; for our task is no less than that of constructing for ourselves the peculiar world of which the author gives scattered and suggestive hints. The people of this world pass to and fro on the screen, clear in outline, extraordinarily vivid and true, but quite without substance. All good writers com- municate in their work something of their creative zest; but there are a few—Mrs. Woolf is one of them—who seem to share with us not merely the zest but the very act of creation. [. . .] even at its most obscure her work is interesting, and at its best it is more exciting than a good detective story. (Bullett 1928: 793–4)65 TheappearanceofJacob’s Room as one of four volumes in the Hogarth Press Uniform Edition in 1929 instigated fresh assessments, in which the war featured prominently. The anonymous reviewer in the Glasgow Herald emphasised the novel’s fragmentary style: ‘In a series of short incidents each lyrical and complete, [VW] created the richest and most sensitive novel about the pre-war young man that is ever likely to be written. The pageant could not be more marvellous nor, with the war suddenly crushing it, could its vanity be more utter’ ([Anon.] 1929: 4).66 Dorothy Brewster and Angus Burrell, writing in 1930,similarly stressed the importance of reading the novel as ‘asuccessionofrev- eries,focusedonJacob.Itisasifsomeonesaid—Jacob Flanders? Oh yes, that young man who was killed at the beginning of the War’ (Brewster and Burrell 1930: 102).67 Harcourt, Brace released its own Uniform Edition in January 1931, leading Matthew Josephson (who had written perceptively on its first publication in the US in 1923)to proclaim in the New Republic that the novel was ‘averitable masterpiece’.68 Ben Ray Redman in the New York Herald Tribune acknowledged Woolf’s ‘protean display’,andcommentedonthe‘con- tinually surprising [. . .] unexpectedness of her perceptions and [. . .] ability to translate those perceptions into communicative language. She works with stuff of which literature, previously, has not been made; and we marvel at her power to bind down, fasten, and interweave threads of pure gossamer’ (Redman 1). Jacob’s Room continued to attract critical notice during the course of the 1930s. In May 1932 came the first of the attacks in Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review, the literary periodical founded by L. C. Knights and F. R. Leavis, both English dons at Cambridge. M. C. Bradbrook (who would later

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introduction become a professor of English at Cambridge) put forward the damning verdict in her article for that periodical that: ‘Mrs Woolf’s difﬁculties have always been structural. In Jacob’s Room she hardly attempted a solution [. . .] Mrs Woolf’s books seem to be built up in a mosaic from the “moments”: scenes, descriptions, odd names recur from time to time’ (M&M 311). In the ﬁrst English-language book on Woolf’s work, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir (1932), Winifred Holtby offered an opposing view in a chapter on Jacob’s Room titled ‘Cinematograph’:

It is her war book. [. . .] It is a picture-maker’s novel. [. . .] As an accomplishment, it was something of a tour de force. It took literary England by storm. [. . .] It was, indeed, a triumphant experiment in a new technique. [. . .] As for her sense of life, it shines vividly through every page, varied, exquisite, but not insipid. [. . .] The world, with all its beauty and adventure, its richness and variety, is darkened by cruelty. Death, if it ends the loveliness, the adventure, ends also that. Death balances the picture. It completes the pattern. (Holtby 116, 117, 135, 136)69 Pelham Edgar, writing a year later in 1933, also regarded Jacob’s Room as a cinematic novel,70 as did N. Elizabeth Monroe in an article for College English in December 1940.71 Noting that in Jacob’s Room Woolf is engaged in experimenting with time and character, Monroe drew attention to the way ‘Time is deciphered on the tablets of Jacob’s mind, and place is restricted to an extension of his personality into various environments’. The result, Monroe felt, was that ‘Jacob never emerges as a complete personality’. She had reservations, too, about the use of Jacob’s room as an ‘integrating principle’, though she praised the way the prose ‘touches a hundred springs in the imagination and the subtlety and complexity of its varied effects’ (Monroe 219–20, 230). Of the commentaries that appeared in France during the early 1930s, those of Jean-Jacques Mayoux – with his intriguing appellation ‘space-moments’ to describe Woolf’s vision of life72 – and Floris Delattre’s book Le Roman psychologique de Virginia Woolf (The Psychological Novel of Virginia Woolf), published some months before Holtby’sin1932, are particularly noteworthy.73 Joseph Warren Beach included Jacob’s Room in his 1932 study The Twentieth Century Novel, and was interested in what he delineated as the novel’s quest for its protagonist. Though unsure about Woolf’s method of searching for Jacob through others – a strategy he believed suited only to the ‘philosophic mind’–he concluded that she had nevertheless succeeded in giving a ‘distinct and rather charming impression [. . .] of him in his world ’

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INTRODUCTION (Beach 1932: 472–3). Returning to the novel in 1937 alongside more of Woolf’s fiction, Beach identified Jacob’s Room as a turning point,74 a view which Robert Peel, writing in the Criterion in October 1933, shared, though he considered that this rendered Jacob’s Room the ‘least interesting’ of Woolf’s books.75 John Hawley Roberts, in the Virginia Quarterly Review in October 1934, agreed that Jacob’s Room was the novel in which Woolf ‘threw away plot and episode and direct narration and began to portray people—in this case, Jacob primarily—from the inside rather than the out, sometimes within their own “stream of consciousness,” sometimes in the minds of others’. Inevitably, he felt, the newness of the approach caused difficulties for both author and reader, but also offered ‘fascinating possi- bilities’. For Roberts, this hinged not so much on the question of how to express an individual character, but the larger and more abstract question of how to convey ‘the below-surface force to which the individual merely responds [. . .] the inner design of life’. In consequence, he insisted, ‘it is wrong to think of any person in Mrs. Woolf’s work after ‘Jacob’s Room’ down through ‘The Waves’ as an individual. She wants to portray the great sum-total of livingness that lies beneath the individual and is common to all people’ (J. Roberts 587–9, 591). Ruth Gruber (1911–2016), a Jewish American scholar who completed her doctoral thesis on Virginia Woolf in Germany in 1932,earned global acclaim as the youngest person in the world to be awarded a PhD. She published her influential and groundbreaking dissertation in book form as Virginia Woolf: A Study (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1935), and met the Woolfs in London the same year. Gruber identified in Jacob’s Room a ‘contrapuntal techni[q]ue’ whereby ‘sketches of the characters are given as they move in synchronic time’ (Gruber 99). She focuses on ‘music as a vital medium in creating as a woman’, describing the novel as ‘a music book [. . .] built upon little paragraphs, units in themselves’ (Gruber 99–100). She understands ‘music to be the technical foundation for the short impressionistic life of a poetic romanti- cist, Jacob Flanders’ and finds Woolf to have orchestrated the lives of his mother and ‘Clara, Sandra, Florinda, all the women he has loved’ by ‘blending them into harmony’ in ‘fragmentary talk’ and ‘experimental dialogue’ (Gruber 99). Woolf, she concludes, ‘sees not one law, not one great unified order, but small details, exquisite morceaux, which build in their correlation a unity of a different order: a feminine unity, a feminine aspect of life’ (Gruber 100).

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introduction In a brief survey of Woolf’s novels in 1936, the novelist E. B. C. Jones emphasised the ‘discontinuity of narrative’ in Jacob’s Room, which she considered rendered it ‘revolutionary’ in comparison to Night and Day, particularly in terms of what she termed the ‘guide-traveller’ relationship between author and reader: ‘the author is no longer a calm observer commenting, explaining, bridging gaps. [. . .] To piece these fragments together the reader must be on the alert’ (E. B. Jones 263; see also EN 14:28– 15:2). F. B. Millett in the Cornhill Magazine in February 1937 regarded Woolf as ‘certainly the most brilliant woman novelist of the post-War period’, but felt that in Jacob’s Room ‘the principle of unity, the personality of Jacob, seemed inadequate to bind together the disparate impressions of him seen subjectively and objectively’ (M&M 359–60). B. G. Brooks, in an article in the Nineteenth Century which appeared shortly after Woolf’s death, disagreed, admiring the ‘strange unifying device’ Woolf had created ‘of allowing one person, say in England, to echo the words of another, say in Athens. The words then form a bridge across which, in this early work, they swing backwards and forwards, at times with a bewildering gymnastic which was not to be re-created later. [. . .] The great discovery of Jacob’s Room was that the novelist could in fact completely efface herself, and simply present her material through the sensations and reactions of her characters’ (M&M 455–6). Perhaps the review Woolf would have treasured most of all was the one by her friend Hugh Walpole, who on 25 March 1941 reminisced in the New Statesman and Nation about his ﬁrst reading of Jacob’s Room: ‘I had found one of the books of my life. [. . .] No other of Virginia Woolf’s works are in this personal collection of mine, although I think Mrs Dalloway her best novel, and The Waves her most beautiful poem. [. . .] I thought it marvellous that Jacob, who scarcely speaks from the ﬁrst to the last, should be so intimate to me, and so endearing’ (M&M 433).

editing jacob’s room

The Text The general policy of this Cambridge edition is to adopt as copy text the first British publication of Woolf’sworkunlessthereisacompel- ling reason to do otherwise. In this instance this is unquestionably the best course. The manuscript draft has survived, as have a few pages of typescript, but they are too remote to influence the choice of the final

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INTRODUCTION text. There are no proofs in existence. As noted above, Woolf sent a typescript to Donald Brace, her American publisher, but this, too, has disappeared. It would seem Woolf played no part in the production of the first American edition (A1)beyondaskingR.&R.Clark,about the beginning of October 1922, to send six copies of the first British edition (B1) to Harcourt, Brace for them to reset. She also wrote to point out ‘two slight misprints’ (see TN 14:16). Therefore, the changes that Harcourt, Brace made to Jacob’s Room have no authority, except for the correction of the two misprints. These two changes have accordingly been carried across to this edition, as have a few more that are obvious mistakes or appear to have Woolf’s authority (see the table at the end of this section). All are listed in the Textual Apparatus and discussed in the Textual Notes: there are no silent emendations. Changes to formatting that would seem to have no significance are referred to in the former. The innovative, mosaic-like structure of Jacob’s Room, whereby Woolf divided her narrative into short blocks of text separated by blank spaces for her Hogarth Press edition, are preserved here in the Cambridge edition, although they are largely omitted by Harcourt, Brace. These occur in every chapter with the exception of Chapter XIV, and are of varying sizes (though few blocks of text are longer than two to three pages). Edward Bishop has persuasively suggested that these gaps ‘do not merely pace the reader, they allow his or her mind to move into the silence’ they create (Bishop 2004: 32). He discusses ‘six pivotal moments in Jacob’s Room’, arguing that ‘the absence of a space break, or even a variation in the size of the space break, can affect our response to the text’ (Bishop 2004: 35). His final example is the ending of Chapter III:

the line, ‘Jacob Flanders, therefore, went up to Cambridge in October, 1906,’ which marks the beginning of the process that will lead Jacob to war, is set off by a four-line gap in the English edition, giving it a portentousness it does not haveintheAmericanvolume.Theeditionsthatregularizethesizeofthegaps mute these effects, even if they do not obliterate them completely; they direct and foreclose the reader’s response rather than engage it. Jacob’s Room is a novelfullofﬁssures, ruptures, gaps, and chasms, and the intent of the novel is notjusttotellthestoryofJacobbuttomakeusawareofthesespaces.(Bishop 2004: 41)76 The table below shows changes (underlined) that have been made to the text of B1; they are all discussed in the Textual Notes. Four amendments

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introduction have been transferred from the second impression of the ﬁrst British edition (B2) and two from the Uniform Edition (BU1; the second impression of the Uniform Edition (BU2) is identical with BU1). It seems clear from the table that BU1 was mistakenly offset from B1 rather than from B2, and that yet one more change was made independently in B2 and again in BU1; this also has been adopted, and thus brings these amendments to seven. For the eighth, see TN 105:14–15.

PAGE:LINE B1 B2 BU1 14:15–16 vitality of colour vitality of nature vitality of colour 59:23 white, and the white, and the white, and the fountains pavement fountains 112:3 It was first time It was first time It was the first time 138:18 “And which of them “And which of them “And which of them ...? ...? ...?” 142:7 ‘Dining somewhere, “Dining somewhere, I “Dining somewhere, I I suppose.” suppose.” suppose.” 190:22–3 said Dick five said Nick five minutes said Dick five minutes minutes later later later 263:12–13 Still, he went with (Still, he went with Still, he went with them to them to them to Constantinople. Constantinople.) Constantinople.

Annotating Jacob’s Room In addition to the particular challenges of preparing the text and mapping its variants, editing Jacob’s Room also presents challenges with regard to annotation. It was this aspect of editorial work that the late David Bradshaw relished, and his pioneering achievements in the writing of explanatory and textual notes to Woolf’s texts remains an inspiration to all our Cambridge editors, including ourselves. He understood this novel as a kind of detective story –‘a reader of Jacob’s Room who is not asking questions from the beginning of the novel is not really reading Jacob’s Room’ (Bradshaw 2003: 7) – and set out to research often multiple and competing possible answers to such questions in the material, historical and cultural fabric of the novel’s contexts. This edition of Jacob’s Room,in keeping with the Cambridge Woolf ethos towards annotation of extensive scope and thorough research of even apparently minor and passing

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INTRODUCTION referents, has as a result brought to light many important aspects of the novel with precision and insight. The Cambridge edition does not normally collate drafts, whether in manuscript or typescript, and since Bishop’s published transcription of the holograph draft serves readers of Jacob’s Room well, we alert readers to its significant points of interest with frequent cross-reference in our notes.77 Detailed reference to the manuscript version of this novel, furthermore, offers ample justification – were further needed – for the Cambridge edition’s policy of annotating every proper name selected by Woolf. Jacob’s Room is teeming with seemingly minor characters whose names, when investigated, suggest we need to pay them serious attention. Only appearing in one scene in the novel and mentioned twice more, the Countess of Rocksbier, for example, appears to have been treated by some previous editions as of insufficient interest to merit annotation. Bishop identifies five variations to the name that Woolf tried out before settling on Rocksbier, but goes on to suggest that the ‘change seems insignificant, though the final designation captures the sense of solidity, as well as a hint of the moribund and the rapacious, appropriate to this aged rider to hounds’ (JRHD x–xi). However, we have identified no fewer than nine alternatives to Rocksbier in the draft (see TN 162:1), making clear the full extent of the care Woolf took in selecting proper names, and consequently, pace Bishop, insist on its significance (see EN 162:1–4). The version Woolf finally chose includes an allusion to death absent from the other options considered, indicating that Rocksbier forms part of a pattern of proper names with similar resonances, including Wargrave (EN 146:17), Boxall (EN 163:5) and, of course, Flanders (EN 7:1). This subtle yet insistent seeding of references to mortality throughout the novel, including through the names of characters deemed minor, adds depth and richness to its status as a war elegy and lament for a generation of lost young men. As well as its sheer volume of character and place names, Jacob’s Room also presents editors with complex contextual challenges in its myriad cultural and political references, whether on the beaches of Cornwall, the cricket fields of Scarborough, the colleges of Cambridge or the classical ruins of Greece. We have annotated such references with as much pertinent detail as possible, particularly where previous editions have not done so. There is a lengthy and cross-referenced Explanatory Note, for example, on the novel’s pointed allusions to Jews, Jewishness and anti-Semitism, which owes much to Bradshaw’s sensitive and informative scholarship (see EN 126:12), and gives a thoroughgoing account of Woolf’s recorded utterances,

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introduction published and personal, on Jewishness: a significant factor in her own life as well as in Jacob’s Room. In places the discoveries of textual genetics may be seen alongside the fruits of thoroughly researched annotation, which will prompt Woolf’s attentive and questioning readers to some stimulating new insights – insights further enhanced by our directions to a nexus of resources that evidence the complicated processes of Woolf’scomposi- tion across a web of interrelated texts. The classical allusions in Jacob’s Room, for example, are traced in the annotations to this Cambridge edition much more fully than in any previous edition, not least (and here drawing primarily on Bradshaw’s research) Woolf’sdebtto Virgil’s Georgics and its use of apian imagery to represent human society; see EN 64:25–65:1.Wehaveobservedinthisexplanatory note how Woolf’s weaving of allusions to the Georgics through the section of the novel depicting Jacob’s time as a student at Cambridge fuels her satire on slothful male undergraduates and their pompous male tutors. But attention to the novel’s avant-textes takesusyet further. At the point in the manuscript draft immediately following the ‘buzzing and barging’ young men (71:6), there comes a four-page passage describing a young woman student in her room at Newnham, Cambridge’swomen’scollege.Itismissingfromthefinal version of Jacob’s Room, but was published four years later as ‘AWoman’s College from Outside’, Woolf’s contribution to the collection Atalanta’s Garland: Being the Book of the Edinburgh University Women’s Union (1926). This text is also understood as a major incubator for Woolf’s later feminist manifesto, ARoomofOne’sOwn, and resurfaces in fragmentary allusions in other places in Woolf’s oeuvre, such as ‘Time Passes’ in To the Lighthouse.78 A transcript of Woolf’s holograph draft is given in Appendix II, alongside detailed information about its genesis, publication history and critical reception. Annotations also demonstrate how this passage is not entirely excised but elusively returns in elliptical and fragmentary allusions in the published version of Jacob’s Room (EN 65:9–14,EN230:14–18,EN271:20). If Jacob’s Room is an attempt to write the unwritten novel of the short story ‘An Unwritten Novel’, then ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’ is, we might conclude, a significant story that the novel Jacob’s Room itself in turn un-writes. This excised passage, which went into print four years after the novel that ejected it was published, nevertheless commands

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INTRODUCTION attention in the apparatus of the present edition of the novel, precisely because it still haunts the published text, just as Jacob’s Room, in draft and in print, haunts ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’. Hence our textual note on the revisions and elisions of a missing passage of text, foregrounding processes in the record of Woolf’s composition that – in this omission from Jacob’s Room of Angela’s room – speak back to and further illuminate the novel’s sometimes allusive, but always present, concern with both economic and sexual inequality and injustice. This excised passage is just one of the many gaps in Jacob’s Room that its editors and its readers must mind.

addendum: from the r. & r. clark archive The R. & R. Clark Archive (Dep. 229) is held by the National Library of Scotland. The dates should be understood as those of invoices rather than when jobs were carried out. The ﬁrst entry concerning Jacob’s Room records that the paper label that was to be afﬁxed to the head of the spine was reprinted.

Invoice Journal 51 Folio 325 4 October 1922 Jacob’s Room Back label 1050 copies reprinted 17 October 1922 Jacob’s Room Jacket. Lithography 1050 copies per estimate 25/8/22 £6.19. 6 Additional for backing in 2 colours [cream jacket printed in cinnamon and black] 12. 6 330 18 October 1922 Jacob’s Room crown 8vo Typesetting 52.18. 2 Extra for small type, etc. 4. 5. 0 Alterations and proofs 10.11. 6 1050 copies 9 sheets [= 288 pp.] @ 40/- 18. 0. 0 16 pp. 1.10. 0 Paper 14.12. 6 Binding 803 copies in plain yellow with label on spine 27.16. 8 Paid post 4 advance copies 2/- & 6 copies to New York 3/95. 9 £129.19. 7 332 26 October 1922 Jacob’s Room Binding 249 copies in plain yellow with label on spine 8.12. 6

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introduction 340 25 November 1922 Jacob’s Room (second impression) crown 8vo 1000 copies 9 sheets @ 40/- 18. 0. 0 16 pp. 1.10. 0 Paper 9½ reams 14.12. 6 Binding 500 copies with printed label 17. 4. 0 500 labels additional (1500 printed) 0. 3. 6 Lithoed jacket 1000 copies per estimate 5.14. 6 £66.14. 0 Invoice Journal 52 Folio 91 15 November 1923 Jacob’s Room Binding 246 copies as before £8. 7. 6 Invoice Journal 53 Folio 289 26 June 1926 Jacob’s Room Binding 100 copies cloth cased, blocked ink @ 8¾[d. each] £3.12.11 521 11 June 1927 Jacob’s Room Binding 100 copies cloth cased, blocked ink @ 8¾£3.12.11 Invoice Journal 54 Folio 346 1 October 1928 Jacob’s Room Binding 63 copies cloth cased, blocked ink @ 8¾£2. 5.11

notes 1 Philip Morrell’s long letter of 31 January and his reply of 6 February 1938 to VW are in SxMs-18/1/D/98/1. 2 ‘Modern Novels’ was revised and renamed ‘Modern Fiction’ for inclusion in The Common Reader in 1925 (E4 157–65). 3 See ‘Editing Jacob’s Room’ below for more detailed information on spacing in the novel. 4 VW had three opportunities for reading parts of Ulysses prior to its publication on 2 February 1922: (1) Harriet Weaver (1876–1961)lent‘the MS’ (presumably part of the still-incom- pletets)totheWoolfson14 April 1918, in the hope that the Hogarth Press might publish it. VW wrote to her on 17 May, referring to it as ‘abookof300 pages’ and regretting that they were unable to do so: ‘We have read the chapters [. . .] with great interest [. . .] I have told my servants to send the MS back’ (L2242–3). (2) Episodes of the novel appeared in the American journal the Little Review from 1918 to 1920.About26 February 1919, VW borrowed from Mary Hutchinson

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INTRODUCTION copies of seven issues of the Little Review from 1918. The passages therein correspond approximately to Joyce 1967: 1–189.VWmadenotesonUlysses, using these copies (see ‘Modern Novels (Joyce)’), returning them on about 16 May (L6496). The notes were made in preparation for her essay ‘Modern Novels’,publishedon10 April. (3) Episodes of the novel also appeared in the London literary journal The Egoist in 1919. It is not known whether VW read them there. The passages correspond approximately to Joyce 1967: 28–64, 107–47 and 280–94. 5 See M. North and Rabaté 2015. 6 See ‘Composition History’ below. 7 In 1940, VW commented on the poets of the 1930s: ‘The influence of the films explains the lack of transitions in their work and the violently opposed contrasts’ (‘The Leaning Tower’, E6 271). 8 See ‘Composition History’ for more detail on VW’s discussions with Mansfield and her responses to her writing. 9 See ‘Early Critical Reception: Public Criticism’ below. 10 The gender of the narrator remains unsettled. See Chapter VIII, where the narrator wonders ‘[w]hether we know what is in [Jacob’s]mind[...] Granted ten years’ seniority and a difference of sex, fear of him comes first’, which may or may not mean ‘we’ is a woman who resembles VW. See EN 153:13–15. 11 See A. King. 12 Zwerdling argues that at the time JR was published, the name ‘Flanders’ would have reverberated as a synonym for death, not least as a result of John McCrae’s popular war poem (Zwerdling 1981: 896). Flanders and France were in any case interchangeable in common parlance as the main locus of the Great War. 13 John Maynard Keynes was exempted because of his work for the Treasury, but in equivocation over this role he nevertheless made, but did not follow up on, an application to the tribunal for exemption on grounds of conscientious objection, resigning himself to working ‘for a government I despise for ends I think criminal’ (ODNB), as he told Duncan Grant, who spent the war doing farm- work at Charleston. Lytton Strachey, on the other hand, considered himself ‘a conscientious objector but not a pacifist’,andwas‘finally declared unfitfor service on medical rather than moral grounds’ (ODNB). Clive Bell, author of the pamphlet Peace at Once (1915), which was seized, prosecuted and burnt by the authorities, was an unwavering pacifist who laboured as a farm-worker for most of the Great War at Garsington. Desmond MacCarthy, in contrast, served with the Red Cross before joining Naval Intelligence. VW also knew John Rodker (1894–1955), who was imprisoned for his militant pacifist stance and wrote an experimental pacifist novel, Memoirs of Other Fronts,published anonymously in 1932.SeeVW’sletterof26 April [1917] to Vanessa Bell: ‘Lytton has had his exemption taken away by the Tribunal, and is going to appeal.

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introduction Rodkerhasbeenarrested,anddeclaredinsane[...]Sofar,nothinghasbeen done to us’ (L2149–50). 14 See D. Clarke. 15 The centenary of the Great War has been marked by renewed scholarly inves- tigation of Woolf’s and Bloomsbury’s pacifism, which was the theme of the 2018 Annual International Woolf Conference at the University of Kent. See Cole, Foster, Goldman 2018b, Maggio, and I. Patterson. 16 See EN 122:7–8 and EN 237:22–3, and see also ‘Composition History’ below. 17 See below and also ‘Editing Jacob’s Room’. 18 All of VW’s articles and reviews mentioned in the Introduction will be found in E3. 19 Lower case is used for the ms chapter numbers to distinguish them from the published chapter numbers. 20 She wrote to Roger Fry of the latter: ‘I feel a profound distrust of the Gallic genius in literature; so light, so slight, so pointed, and the point always snapping at the least pressure; but oh how delicious’ (L2 490). 21 In a letter to Roger Fry written six months later, on 6 May 1922, VW noted: ‘Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures—theres something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession’ (L2 525). 22 The letter is addressed to Harriet Weaver, James Joyce’s patron. 23 In her diary for 16 February, VW wrote: ‘My book is an eyesore, & I wake in the night twitching with horror at the thought of it’ (D292). 24 R. & R. Clark Ltd. had been founded in 1864 by Robert Clark, son of a Montrose solicitor, and was well known for the quality of its printed books. Its authors included Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, Hugh Walpole, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, W. B. Yeats and Edith Sitwell. It was based in Brandon Street. See B. Thompson. 25 For information about Maxwell, see [Anon.] n.d. 26 An advertisement in 1932 seeking a first edition offered £1 ([Anon.] 1932: 1). 27 The section titled ‘The Plan of the Novel The Life of a Great Sinner’ (Dostoevsky 1922b: 87–114) would not have been straightforward for the typesetter, and R. & R. Clark’s satisfactory performance may well have given the Woolfs even more confidence in their new printers. It is highly likely that R. & R. Clark’s typesetting was used as a basis for the printing of the ‘Plan of the Novel’ in T. S. Eliot’s Criterion (Dostoevsky 1922a: 16–33). 28 These include extracts from favourable and unfavourable reviews of The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Monday or Tuesday: see Appendix I below. 29 For details of Garnett’s bookshop see EN 198:21. 30 According to the Hogarth Press records (SxMs-13/4/14/2/1), the booksellers took 47 on 17 October: Bumpus 20, Hatchards 12, Bickers & Son 6, James Bain 6 and Jones & Evans 3.

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INTRODUCTION 31 J. H. Willis, Jr, throws doubt on this and other figures, but they tally with the account book ‘January 1922–January 1926’ (SxMs-13/4/14/2/1). For example, by 31 October, 635 copies had been sold; 876 by the end of November (cf. Willis 61). At this early stage of the Hogarth Press’s development, however, LW’s tiny, crabbed writing in what are little more than exercise books renders research difficult. It should be noted that when VW talks of a second ‘edition’ she is referring to a second ‘impression’: see Addendum below. 32 The ‘From the Publishers’ Table’ column in the Nation and the Athenæum, 31:26 (23 September 1922), opened with: ‘The Hogarth Press intend to publish in October “Jacob’s Room,” a novel by Mrs. Virginia Woolf’ (831). ‘The Week’s Books’ column in the Nation and the Athenæum, 32:3 (21 October 1922), listed JR with an asterisk (138): ‘Asterisks are used to indicate those books which are considered to be most interesting to the general reader’ (136). The following advertisements have been discovered (not including those for the Uniform Edition): London Mercury, 7:38 (December 1922), xvii. Nation and the Athenæum, 32:07 (18 November 1922), 293; 32:09 (2 December 1922), 361; 34:24 (15 March 1924), 859; 42:12 (24 December 1927), 469; 42:26 (31 March 1928), 975. Observer (25 March 1928), 7;(2 December 1928), 9. The Times (27 March 1928), 22; (11 December 1928), 22. TLS (2 November 1922), 705;(23 November 1922), 756;(30 November 1922), 780;(7 December 1922), 818;(1 February 1923), 70. 33 The Hogarth Press records show that JR had sold 850 as of Friday, 24 November (SxMs-13/4/14/2/1). 34 Simpkin, Marshall first took 50 on 8 November, then another 50 on each of 17 and 23 November, and then another 50 on 13 December. With this order, bringing the total sales to 926,the1st impression of the 1st edition was exhausted. From then on, Simpkin, Marshall took only small numbers of the 2nd impression at a time, with a total of 140 by the end of 1925.Someof these were copies of the ‘Colonial Edition’ or ‘Colonial Cloth’,but,inview of the small print run, it is likely that these words would simply have been individually rubber-stamped onto copies of the standard 2nd impression. (Details taken from SxMs-13/4/14/2/1.) 35 JR had sold 955 (including some of the 2nd impression) as of 13 November (SxMs-13/4/14/2/1). 36 Advertisements stated that ‘Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway have been out of print for some time’ (Jaillant 126, quoting an advertisement of 4 October 1929). ‘Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway [. . .] enjoyed a renewal of interest following their inclusion in the Uniform Edition. [. . .] By 1937, the Uniform Edition of Jacob’s Room had made a total profitof£137—twice the amount earned by the 7s. 6d. edition’ (Jaillant 132). 37 The letter from Donald Brace was dated 20 September 1922, and was slightly paraphrased by VW (D2 205 n.1). 38 See Bishop 2004: 45 for mention of another royalty cheque for $89.51 in February 1924. The exchange rate was about $4 to £1 at this time. 39 Forster’s favourite passage was the Sopwith section, 63:6–64:16.

introduction 40 In his letter, Philip Morrell also refers to the letter Betty Flanders probably wished to write (146:13–15). He mentions this again (as well as the letter she actually wrote) in his letter to VW of 6 February 1938, where he also refers to ‘that lovely passage on letter writing’ (149:16–151:21) (SxMs-18/1/D/98/1). 41 He actually wrote: ‘You are a marvel and a puzzle, as a writer’ (D2 209 n.10; typed copy in SxMs-18/1/D/86/1). 42 Though she seems not to have suspected that she might have contributed to the portrait of Sandra Wentworth Williams (see EN 230:14–18). 43 R. C. Trevelyan’s comments merit quoting at length: ‘I have been [reading] Jacob’s Room, and have enjoyed it immensely—Bessie [his wife] too. We both think it your best book, though we liked the others too in many ways. Everyone seems to have theories about Jacob’s Room, but I dont think I have any. I see that the method you have invented for yourself suits the sort of thing you like to write about better than any other method could do. I dont suppose it would suit anyone else, not exactly, though it suggests all sorts of things that other people might do. You have managed to get rid of a lot of transitions and scaffolding that other people find necessary. Possibly sometimes you get rid of a little too much. But any one who has discovered a good new method, is likely to be a little too pleased with it. Besides, I may be wrong, and I am merely not quite used to it. I have lent my copy, so cant refer to anything. I shall read it again certainly. I feel somehow that if you had written it ten or fifteen years ago, I should have thought it possible and worth while for me to write a novel too: I mean that you show how one can avoid all sorts of things that make one not want to write novels, and how one can bring in endless things one would like to but daren’t. There is a great deal of beauty, not only in the writing but in the things you choose to write about, or at least in the way you think about them. Some people seem to think the characters too shadowy. I did not myself. After all a good draughtsman can give the feeling of solidity by mere contour lines, without shading etc. Anyhow Jacob was clear enough, though done from the outside. Possibly a fuller and more intimate way of presenting character is necessary in order to move one deeply. But to make up for what you dont give, the beauty of what you do give is often very moving, at least to me. No one else now does that, not even the poets, who always ought to be doing it. My only real regret is that you are sometimes unnecessarily difficult. I dont see why one should have to puzzle over what you say, yet one often has to. No doubt this is partially owing to your elliptical method, which is in itself good and essential to your material. But it sometimes seems purposeless and unfunc- tional, and so rather annoying. I know that other people are much worse than you in this. But then no one can really take the trouble to read them, whereas your book is so good that one must read it, obscure or no. Besides, I must not exaggerate. A great deal is straightforward enough. It must be a great pleasure feeling you have written so fine a book, and that there is no reason why you should not write any number more even finer, and probably quite different.’ (SxMs-18/1/D/178/1) 44 Cf. L39, 139, 144.In1926–7 Claude Dravaine and Marie Kieffer translated

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INTRODUCTION extracts (‘fragments’, Chapter VIII and Chapter I) from JR, and published them in journals (see Kirkpatrick and Clarke 330,D45), and then in 1930 the first few pages of Chapter V appeared in the Revue europeénne, 905–15, together with the announcement that JR was ‘à paraître à la Librairie Stock’ (‘La Chambre de Jacob’; and see M&M 251). However, JR did not appear in book form in France until 1942, in a translation by Jean Talva, published by Stock (see Kirkpatrick and Clarke 321,D29). In 1927, JR was the first of VW’s books to be translated into Swedish (see Kirkpatrick and Clarke 395,D191); this was the only foreign translation of JR to appear in VW’s lifetime. 45 Jacques Raverat also wrote praising JR from France, which prompted VW to respond: ‘I’m glad you like Jacob better than the other novels; one always wishes the last to be the best’ (L2 591–2). 46 In her reply, written the following day, VW added in a postscript ‘I am very glad you liked Jacob’s Room’ (‘A Letter to Siegfried Sassoon’). 47 M&M 95, the TLS Centenary Archive, and John Gross’s collection of articles from the TLS (Gross 114–15) give the author as A. S. McDowall, but the review is also reprinted in Edgell Rickword’s collection of essays (Rickword 60–3). 48 Reprinted in the Guardian at least twice: 23 October 1999, 1920–29 section (‘The Guardian Century’, Part three: the 1920s): 11; 20 July 2002, Books section: 3. 49 Cf. the extracts from Clive Bell’s article ‘Plus de Jazz’ in Since Ce´zanne (1922): see n. 53 and p. 751 in the Appendix below. 50 In the same issue there was a sketch of VW by F. H. Warren: ‘Drawn from the life for “J. o’ L.”’ (197). VW had noted on Saturday, 14 October 1922: ‘I must sit for my portrait to John o’ London’s on Monday’ (D2 207). 51 However, by 1924 he had modified his view: ‘I recognise that her genius is of an order to render its own blemishes comparatively unimportant [. . .] what endures in memory are the passages of sheer lyrical beauty. [. . .] Whereas so many writers who are “different” seem to be merely straining away from the conventional in their originality, Mrs. Woolf transcends it easily: she has a running lyric strain that lifts the heart’ (Gould 183–4). 52 Reprinted in the Weekly Westminster Gazette on 25 November ([Anon.] 1922i: 24). 53 In his review, Sheldon quoted Clive Bell’s from Since Ce´zanne: ‘Certainly she “leaves out” with the boldest of them: here is syncopation if you like it. I’m not sure that I do.’ Bell continues: ‘At least, I doubt whether the concentration gained by her new style for An Unwritten Novel and Monday or Tuesday makes up for the loss of those exquisite but old-fashioned qualities which make The Mark on the Wall a masterpiece of English prose’ (C. Bell 1922: 224). However, according to VW, Bell considered JR ‘a masterpiece’ (D2 210). 54 ‘No plainer manifestation of the modernist trend in contemporary English fiction may be found than in Virginia Woolf’s “Jacob’s Room.” [. . .] The incidents do not so much matter. [. . .] It is the manner in which these things are revealed that makes the book of importance, at least as an example of what the younger rebels are doing in England. [. . .] At first one is uneasily aware of Miss Woolf’s bizarre qualities as a writer of prose, but after one has progressed a way in

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introduction the book this consciousness rather vanishes. [. . .] If any pithy description of “Jacob’s Room” is desired it may be dubbed a lyrical novel’ ([Anon.] 1923b: 11). In its ‘Latest Books’ list, the paper described JR as ‘By a young English novelist’ (26). 55 ‘Scunner’ is a word of Scottish derivation meaning ‘loathing disgust; now frequently in a milder sense: a grudge, repugnance, dislike’ (OED). 56 ‘Human destiny against a background of chance and nature, as seen by one of the most quiet and subtle of the English realists’ ([Anon.] 1923a: D5). 57 The remainder of the review is, as stated, more flattering: ‘Virginia Woolf [. . .] shows herself to be possessed of one of the most entertaining minds among contemporary writers—witty, subtle and ironic. [. . .] She has come to grips with the modern method, and moulded it to suit her own temperament. [. . .] It [the last chapter] seems somehow to represent the end of all young men who died in the war’ (Colum 140). 58 ‘Is not Clive writing an article on me? Has not Bunny praised me in the Dial?’ (D2 259). 59 In May 1924, VW referred to this criticism in a letter to T. S. Eliot (L3 106–7); for his reply, see T. Eliot 2009: 411–12. 60 Murry also expressed his criticisms in La Revue de Gene`ve, which were summed up in 1969 by Jean-Pierre Meylan: ‘La chronique de mars 1925 [334–41] est un essai sur l’enchaînement des générations littéraires dans la littérature anglaise, et celle de mars 1926 [356–68], la dernière, un pamphlet passioné contre le «néoclassicisme» de T. S. Eliot et de V. Woolf dont le ton désagréable tranche sur les chroniques précédents. Murry eut l’imprudence de prophétiser que dans cinquante ans on ne lirait plus ni Jacob’s Room de V. Woolf ni The Waste Land de T. S. Eliot, qui est pourtant le chef-d’œuvre poétique de la littérature anglaise de l’après-guerre. Il est possible que la condemnation péremptoire ait indisposé les directeurs de la Revue de Gene`ve. Nous ignorons toutefois les circonstances dans lesquelles Murry quitta notre revue ou en fut éloigné’ (Meylan 364; i.e. ‘The March 1925 column [334–41] is an essay on the links between the literary genera- tions in English literature, and that of March 1926 [356–69], his last, a passionate tract against the “neo-classicism” of T. S. Eliot and of V. Woolf where the unpleasant tone breaks with previous newsletters. Murry had the stupidity to prophesy that in fifty years no one would read V. Woolf’s Jacob’s Room or T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land—still the poetic masterpiece of post-war English literature. It is possible that his peremptory condemnation antagonised those in charge of the Revue de Gene`ve (Geneva Review). However, we do not know the circumstances in which Murry left our review or was dropped from it’). 61 This review prompted the famous controversy between VW and Bennett: for a detailed analysis, see Daugherty 1983. See also EN 174:4–5.VW’s friend Desmond MacCarthy, writing as ‘Affable Hawk’, responded to Bennett on 31 March in his ‘Books in General’ column in the New Statesman, where he defended VW’s approach: ‘Mr. Bennett in his article mentions Mrs. Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. [. . .] Now, the significant thing about that book was that it was an attempt to find a form which would afford the same opportunities as the novel for

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INTRODUCTION the suggestion of reality and comment upon life, without employing the novelist’s usual methods. Instead of unrolling a story, or of presenting a character, Mrs. Woolf gave us, as it were, not the train itself, but the draught a life makes as it flies by us [. . .] Such a book is a symptom of discontent with the novel itself on the part of a writer who has written two good ones’ (D. MacCarthy 1923: 751; the whole paragraph is reprinted with a few changes in D. MacCarthy 1932: 172–3). 62 VW had anticipated such comments. See her diary entry for 23 June 1922: ‘If they say, You can’t make us care a damn for any of your figures—I shall say, read my criticism then’ (D2 178–9). Bennett’s objections also echoed LW’s view that the characters in Jacob’s Room were ‘ghosts’ and ‘puppets’ (D2 186). 63 In his Rede Lecture in Cambridge in 1941, after VW’s death, Forster repeated his claim that ‘when Jacob’s Room appeared in 1922 we were tremendously surprised’, although he now termed it ‘an uneven little book’ (Forster 1972b: 242). 64 His comment in full is as follows: ‘Jacob’s Room was a great advance; its plan was admirable; the recreation of a figure through memories and associations was a suggestive and perfectly valid device. The book contains several beautiful scenes, but it is not sure, like Mrs. Woolf’s earlier and like her later work; it has a good deal of the sentimentality which so often comes out of the mind along with a first attempt to express something in it which has not been expressed before. When the artist tries to liberate his essential emotion toward[s] experience, at first he is likely to liberate a great deal more along with it, until in this new kind of expression he learns to distinguish what is essential from what appears so. Jacob’s Room has a more living quality than Mrs. Woolf’s earlier work, but it is less critical’ (M&M 181–2; reprinted in Muir 1926: 75). 65 Raymond Mortimer in the New York Bookman in 1929 also saw JR as a type of detective story: ‘With Monday or Tuesday she emerged definitely with the liveliest imagination and most delicate style of her time. But these were only sketches. Jacob’s Room was the first full-size canvas. It is the life of a man told by the effect he has on persons and objects with which he comes into contact—a sort of detective story in which the particularities of the protagonist are deduced from the tracks he has left in the snow. There is no plot’ (Mortimer 627). 66 The subtitle of the review, ‘Mrs Virginia Woolf: Perfection in a Woman’s Work’, is a quotation from Mary Oxlie’s(fl. 1616) poem, ‘To William Drummond of Hawthornden’, which opens: Perfection in a Woman’s Work is rare; From an untroubled mind should verses flow; My discontents make mine too muddy show; And hoarse encumbrances of household care, Where these remain, the Muses ne’r repair. (quoted in Squire 283) 67 The essay was revised as ‘Virginia Woolf’ in Modern Fiction (1934), 218–47, quotation on 235–6. Although the revised essay had more to say about JR (for instance, it wondered if VW had used Jacob ‘to convey her sense of the queerness and the fascination of life’ (236)), it remained descriptive. VW wrote to Brewster

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introduction on 15 January 1935: ‘may I take this opportunity of thanking you for the very sympathetic article [in Modern Fiction] which I find you have written on my own work? Many thanks’ (L5 364). 68 In his review, Josephson returned to the notion of Woolf’s impressionism: ‘Since the novels of Mrs. Woolf, long conceded to be infinitely talented, sensitive and of a brilliant technique, are now accorded a permanent place in modern literature [. . .] one is prompted to review her career a little [. . .] she became in her prose what we had best call, for the sake of definiteness, an “impressionist.” [...]“Jacob’sRoom” seems, to a retrospective view, a veritable masterpiece, to be set up permanently beside certain larger and smaller ones of modern literature’ (Josephson 1931: 239–40). 69 Also writing in 1932, William Troy – like Edwin Muir (see above) – saw Jacob’s Room as a chronicle, ‘the simplest form known to story-telling’, though the rest of his review was less sympathetic: ‘It happens that there is enough progression of outward events to give the book about as much movement as any other biograph- ical (or autobiographical) chronicle. But one cannot point to any similar movement, any principle of progressive unity in the revelation of all that implicit life of the hero which makes up the substance of the book. [. . .] Instead of acting, he responds, and when death puts an end to his response, the book also comes to an end’ (Troy 61–2). 70 Edgar termed Jacob’s Room ‘the first’ of VW’s ‘deviations’, which, he suggested, ‘failed to prove that her abandonment of tradition was justified. [. . .] The book itself is a series of dissolving views, where character takes its chance with the rest. The solidest impression we have of Jacob is the now famous pair of boots which persist when he has departed’ (Edgar 332; and see 334). 71 ‘In Jacob’s Room [. . .] she employs a cinematograph technique to portray Jacob’ (Monroe 219). 72 The section of the article from which this label is taken is as follows: ‘it is in Jacob’s Room that Virginia Woolf for the first time creates space using her own methods. [. . .] the great emotions are brought into play much less than the emotion of living itself—than “Life” which is Virginia Woolf’s true subject. And life, in her vision of it, is essentially formed of groups of complex units which one might call space-moments’ (M&M 247–8; translator not specified). 73 Delattre’s discussion of Jacob’s Room includes the following: ‘It is the soul of Jacob, and the thousand vague and mysterious feelings that go to make it up, which above all interests Virginia Woolf. [. . .] Jacob Flanders is less a hero than a collection of multiple impressions’ (Delattre 48–9). 74 Beach wrote: ‘One felt that she was right in the deliberation with which she chose her less formal methods, beginning with Jacob’s Room. Deliberation was evident in her very informality, in her very surrender to the seemingly freakish association of ideas. We felt that her intentions were special. Where we could not altogether follow, we took them for granted; and it was part of the game to test our own agility, catching at the tail of some precious and elusive apprehension. Often enough we were successful; we saw the pertinences of her technical devices’ (Beach 1994:i.223–4).

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INTRODUCTION 75 Peel’s full comment is that Jacob’s Room ‘marks an important stage in Mrs. Woolf’s development, but intrinsically it is the least interesting of any of them. It is tempting to believe that the author had been reading Mr. Joyce and had decided that her technique needed bringing up to date. [. . .] the reader feels the content pretty thin stuff. [. . .] Mrs. Woolf’s intellect, subtle, freakish and fascinating, arranges the curious riches of her imagination in deftly conceived patterns, but they remain separate items, not fused by the heat of passion into a signiﬁcant whole’ (Peel 85–6). 76 JR Bishop: 179–81 and Bishop 2004: 46–8 list the gaps lost in the American edition. 77 See also Bishop 1986 on the differences between the holograph draft and the published versions. 78 See forthcoming Cambridge editions of Collected Short Fiction, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.

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Chronology of the Composition of Jacob’s Room

Chapter numbers refer to the chapters in the published editions.

1920

9 January ‘Pictures and Portraits’ published in Athenæum. 26 January Has ‘arrived at some idea of 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? [...] conceive mark on the wall, K[ew]. G[ardens].&unwrittennoveltakinghands&dancinginunity. What the unity shall be I have yet to discover’ (D213–14). 29 January ‘An American Poet’ published in TLS. 30 January ‘English Prose’ published in Athenæum. 5 February ‘Cleverness and Youth’ published in TLS. 4 March ‘Mr. Norris’s Method’ published in TLS. 6 March ‘A Talk about Memoirs’ published in New Statesman. 12 March ‘Money and Love’ published in Athenæum. 18 March ‘Men and Women’ published in TLS. 25 March ‘Freudian Fiction’ published in TLS. 8 April Review of The Letters of Henry James edited by Percy Lubbock published in TLS. 10 April ‘planning to begin Jacob’s Room next week’ (D228). 15 April ‘Reﬂections upon beginning [...] Jacob’s Room’ (Berg M18 1.1; JRHD 1). 16 April Begins draft (Berg M18 1.3; JRHD 2). 17 April ‘The Higher Court’ published in New Statesman.

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CHRONOLOGY OF THE COMPOSITION OF JACOB’S ROOM 26 April ‘it was Monday, the 26th of April’ (Berg M18 1.25; JRHD 15 has ‘25th’). 6 May ‘An Imperfect Lady’ published in TLS. 11 May The ‘sense of an impending shape’ keeps her writing JR (D235). 20 May ‘get[ting] on with Jacob—the most amusing novel writing’ she’s done (D240). The Voyage Out published in US. 26 May ‘A Good Daughter’ published in Daily Herald. 27 May ‘An Old Novel’ published in TLS. 28 May ‘11,000 [words] in six weeks’ (Berg M18 1.56; JRHD 34). ‘The Wrong Way of Reading’ published in Athenæum. 5 June ‘Body and Brain’ published in New Statesman. 17 June Review of The Mills of the Gods by Elizabeth Robins published in TLS. July ‘An Unwritten Novel’ published in London Mercury. 1 July ‘A Disillusioned Romantic’ published in TLS. 8 July ‘The Pursuit of Beauty’ published in TLS. 13 July ‘Three weeks I think have passed without a word added to Jacob’ (D253). 15 July ‘Pure English’ published in TLS. 16 July ‘Mr. Kipling’s Notebook’ published in Athenæum. 19 July Begins Mrs Pascoe scene, Chapter IV (Berg M18 1.93; JRHD 54). 23 July ‘The Plumage Bill’ published in Woman’s Leader. 24 July ‘The Cherry Orchard’ published in New Statesman. 28 July At Rodmell, resumes Mrs Pascoe scene (Berg M18 1.95; JRHD 55). 29 July ‘A Born Writer’ published in TLS. 5 August At Rodmell, writing JR every morning (D256). 6 August ‘The Plumage Bill’ (letter) published in Woman’s Leader. 7 August ‘Gorky on Tolstoi’ published in New Statesman. 13 August ‘A Character Sketch’ published in Athenæum. 15 August Begins Chapter V, Jacob in London (Berg M18 1.125; JRHD 71). 17 August Unable to settle to JR (D257). 25 August Forging ahead with JR and hopes to ﬁnish by Christmas (D262). 10 September End of Chapter VI, Jacob and Florinda in Soho (Berg M18 1.177; JRHD 98).

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chronology of the composition of jacob’s room 17 September Reaches Mrs Durrant’s party in Chapter VII (D267). 26 September Halts mid-party, perhaps by T. S. Eliot ‘coming on the heel of a long stretch of writing fiction (perhaps 2 months without a break)’ (D268). 29 September Night and Day published in US. 1 October Not written since 27 September: ‘a threatening headache’, not Eliot, has stopped her (D270). 9 October ‘The Intellectual Status of Women’ (letter) published in New Statesman. 16 October ‘The Intellectual Status of Women’ (second letter) published in New Statesman. 22 October ‘Solid Objects’ published in Athenæum. 25 October ‘an hour’s writing is enough’, feels life tragic ‘like a strip of pavement over an abyss’, but writing JR ‘again will revive [her] fibres’ (D272–3). 28 October ‘John Evelyn’ and ‘Jane Austen and the Geese’ published in TLS. 10 November ‘writing to finish [Monday or Tuesday]; & not a word set to Jacob yet’ (D273). 11 November ‘John Evelyn’ (letter) published in TLS. 23 November Bags the phrase ‘strip of pavement’ for JR, but had written it twice in the draft on 10 September and deleted it (D275; Berg M18 1.177, 179; JRHD 98–9). 24 November Begins Chapter VIII, Jacob leaving the house (Berg M18 1.211; JRHD 118). 26 November Begins notebook II, continuing with Mrs Flanders’s letter (Berg M18 2.1, 3; JRHD 121–2). 2 December ‘Postscript or Prelude?’ published in TLS. 16 December ‘Pleasant Stories’ published in TLS. 23 December ‘A Flying Lesson’ published in TLS.

1921

3 January Begins Chapter IX, Jacob at Lady Rocksbier’s (Berg M18 2.33; JRHD 138). 21 January Chapter IX, Jacob walking home from Hammersmith (Berg M18 2.65; JRHD 154). 25 January ‘at a crisis with Jacob: want[s] to ﬁnish in 20,000 words, written straight off in a frenzy’ (D286).

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CHRONOLOGY OF THE COMPOSITION OF JACOB’S ROOM 27 January Review of Revolution by J. D. Beresford published in TLS. 5 February ‘beginning the last lap; & it is a sprint towards the end, difficult to keep up’ (D289). 10 February ‘Mr. Norris’s Standard’ published in TLS. 18 February Review of Vision and Design by Roger Fry published in Woman’s Leader. 24 February ‘Henley’s Criticism’ published in TLS. 1 March ‘cant settle [...] to think of Mrs Flanders in the orchard’ (D294; see Berg M18 2.111, 113; JRHD 181–2). 3 March ‘A Prince of Prose’ published in TLS. 9 March ‘George Eliot (1819–1880)’ published in Daily Herald. 13 March Too busy to ‘start Jacob’s travels to the East’ (D2 100). 16–17 March In Manchester (D2 101). 23 March ‘Wednesday February March the 23rd. of March’ (Berg M18 2.109; JRHD 180). 23–31 March At ‘Ponion’ [i.e. Poniou], near Zennor (D2 105). 2 April ‘Congreve’ published in New Statesman. 5 April Chapter XI, Jacob at Versailles (Berg M18 2.139; JRHD 199). 7 or 8 April Monday or Tuesday published in UK. 8 April Depressed by reviews of Monday or Tuesday and ‘can’t get on with Jacob’ (D2 106). 17 April Chapter XII, Italian trains (Berg M18 2.149; JRHD 205). 23 April ‘Ethel Smyth’ published in New Statesman. 28 April ‘Scott’s Character’ published in TLS. 3 May ‘A full stop in Jacob, owing partly to depression. But [she] must pull together & finish it off’ (D2 116). 5 May ‘Gothic Romance’ published in TLS. 6 May Chapter XII, Jacob in Athens (Berg M18 2.189; JRHD 226). 26 May ‘Patmore’s Criticism’ published in TLS (for the draft, preceding JR Chapter XIII, see Berg D17-1922 and D1 322, Diary XI). 4 June ‘Trousers’ published in New Statesman. 11 June–8 August Ill, no writing (D2 125). 7 October Begins Chapter XIII (Berg D17-1922; JRHD13 7). 12 October Continues Chapter XIII (Berg D17-1922; JRHD13 11). 17 October ‘add[ing] page upon page’ to JR (L2 485). 2 November Hopes to finish JR within four days (D2 141).

chronology of the composition of jacob’s room 4 November Finishes (the draft of) JR (D2 141). 23 November Monday or Tuesday published in US. 8 December ‘A Glance at Turgenev’ published in TLS. 15 December ‘Fantasy’ published in TLS. 22 December ‘Henry James’ Ghost Stories’ published in TLS.

1922

5 January–18 February Influenza (D2 169). 12 January ‘Dostoevsky the Father’ published in TLS. 14 February Concerned that by the time JR appears in October ‘it will appear to [her] sterile acrobatics’ (D2 161). 6 March Begins work on JR again, after two months’ break (D2 170), mainly caused by influenza. 12 March Notebook III, addition to Chapter IV, from ‘Abide with me’ (Berg M18 3.1, 9; JRHD 270–1). 2 April Margaret (Minna) Green (LW’s former secretary: D2 144 and n16) collecting ‘the entire manuscript’ of JR (L2 517). early May Ill and in bed for some days (D2 176). 5 May ‘A Letter to a Lady in Paraguay’ published in Woman’s Leader. May A ‘new novel’ by VW to be published, probably in the autumn (Hogarth Press flier, SxMs-13/1/Q/3/A). June Draft of Chapter XIV (Berg M18 3.61–5; JHRD 274– 6). 11 June Should be ‘copying out a page or two of Jacob for Miss Green’ (D2 176). 23 June JR being copied out and typed; to be sent to Harcourt, Brace on 14 July (D2 177–8). 15 July ‘Jane Austen Practising’ published in New Statesman. 17 July ‘finishing Jacob’s Room’ (D2 182). 20 July ‘On Re-Reading Novels’ published in TLS. 23 July LW reads JR: ‘a work of genius’ (D2 186). 3 August JR ‘is crossing the Atlantic’ (D2 188). 10 August Asks Vanessa Bell to alter her dust jacket for JR (L2 543). 3 September MS of JR has not arrived in the US (D2 198). 6 September Correcting proofs of JR (D2 199).

CHRONOLOGY OF THE COMPOSITION OF JACOB’S ROOM 14 September Mrs Woolf’s new novel JR ‘will be ready in October’ (TLS 573). 23 September ‘The Hogarth Press intend to publish in October’ JR (‘From the Publishers’ Table’, Nation and the Athenæum 831). October Translation of ‘Plan of the Novel, “The Life of a Great Sinner”’ by F. M. Dostoevsky published in Criterion. 3 October Harcourt, Brace accepts JR (D2 205). 4 October Translation of Stavrogin’s Confession by F. M. Dostoevsky published in UK. 27 October Jacob’s Room published in UK. 29 October Records reactions; ‘We have sold 650, I think: & have ordered a second edition’ (D2 209). 30 November ‘Modern Essays’ published in TLS. 14 December ‘Eliza and Sterne’ published in TLS.

1923

4 January ‘Tribute to Marcel Proust’ (jointly signed letter) published in TLS. 8 February Jacob’s Room published in US.

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Maps Stuart N. Clarke and Bryony Randall

MAPS

0 20 40 60 80 100 km

0 20 40 60 miles

Great Britain

Aberdeen

North Sea (previously, German Ocean) Glasgow SCOTLAND

D Scarborough N YORKSHIRE

A Harrogate

L Leeds

E Dublin Manchester R Sheffield

ENGLAND

Rugby WALES Cambridge

ESSEX Oxford Chelmsford

Cardiff London Margate

ATLANTIC Andover KENT Uckfield OCEAN Brighton DEVON

Godrevy CORNWALL Lighthouse St Ives Falmouth Scilly Land’s English Channel Isles End Figure 1 Map of Great Britain and Ireland c. 1910 adapted from an original version by Michael H. Whitworth

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maps

Tottenham

Highgate

Hampstead Haverstock Hill Kentish Town

Regent’s Park Holborn City of Marble London Arch Soho Shepherd’s Bush Hyde Park

Hammersmith Walworth Chelsea LONDON

Putney Clapham Richmond Twickenham Richmond Park

Wimbledon

Surbiton

Figure 2 Map of Greater London c. 1910

MAPS

Regent’s Park

Madame Tussaud’s

British Museum

Mudie’s Corner

Greek Street treet C S h e a u ord r n f i e O x n v g A R B C e on ry r g bu o Marble s e s ng te s o d n f L Arch a h R t S Gerrard

Grosvenor o Stree Street Square S a

t d r e t e Leicester Piccadilly Square t Circus y l l i Trafalgar Hyde Park d Square a c

c W i The P Admiralty h i

Statue of t

Achilles e

The h

Serpentine a

Sloan Street

Figure 3 Map of Central London c. 1910

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maps

Foundling Hospital

Clerkenwell

Lamb’s Conduit

Street

Southampton

Row

Gray’s Inn

Lincoln’s Inn

Bank of England Ludg re ate c d Hi A Royal ll St Paul’s Cathedral Opera House n a r t

S River Th ames Waterloo Bridge

s e

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MAPS

BULGARIA Black Sea A SERBIA

L TURKEY B Constantinople

N Sea of Marmara I Salonika A Gallipoli

Mt Troy Olympus A Dardanelles e g e GREECE a n I TURKEY o Skyros n Delphi Smyrna Euboea i S

a Patras e n a Corinth Athens

S Olympia Mycenae e

Rhodes

Crete Mediterranean 0 100 200 300 400 km Sea 0 50 100 150 200 250 miles Figure 4 Map of Greece in 1914

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maps

0 100 200 300 400 km

015000150 200 miles

Scarborough

Cambridge

London

Ypres (1914–18) Messines Waterloo (1815) (1917) Mons Arras (1914) (1915–1917) Cambrai Somme (1917) (1916)

Verdun Versailles Paris (1916)

Neufchâteau (1914)

Figure 5 Map of Flanders

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